Grazed from Albawaba.   Author: Editorial Staff.

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Red Hat Academy, an open source education program that provides hands-on curriculum, labs, performance-based testing, and educator training and support, is available to universities with the required technology and support environments in the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) region.

 Grazed from SeattleTimes.  Author: Jay Greene.

Retailers have long feared Amazon.com and the ease with which it has undermined the business of shopping on Main Street. Publishers have grown increasingly concerned about the online retail giant’s growing power in the book business, where it has become the largest purveyor of digital and print titles.

In the past decade, Amazon has come to dominate yet another business: cloud computing. And now, as Amazon Web Services solidifies its grip on the business of selling computing services to companies over the Internet, it’s having to answer the sort of questions that dogged Microsoft when it ruled desktop computing:…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dina Gerdeman.

As cloud spending grows, providers are easing up on the ‘my way or the highway’ approach. Here’s how to negotiate a cloud contract with terms and conditions that work for your enterprise. CIO Cynthia Nustad remembers the early days of the cloud, when IT didn’t have much wiggle room in negotiating cloud contracts.

Seven years ago or so, the vast majority of cloud service providers offered a standard cookie-cutter contract to businesses, said Nustad, CIO at HMS, a healthcare management services company. Many providers balked at accepting any real liability, and they certainly shied away from signing what is known in the healthcare industry as a business associate agreement, which has the provider assuming some shared risk in the event of a data breach…

Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Ben Sullivan.

The producers behind the Hollywood adaptation of Andy Weir’s ‘The Martian’ made no secret of product placing the technology that would save stranded astronaut Mark Watney from potential doom on Mars. GoPro cameras on Watney’s space suit made multiple appearances, and Cisco-powered live video feeds from NASA to Mars also helped Watney grasp on to the thinning straws of hope.

But in real life, another underlying technology used by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) would have been vital to saving Watney’s life: Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing division of Amazon.com. Speaking to TechWeekEurope at AWS’ annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Tom Soderstrom, JPL’s chief technology officer, said that cloud computing would have been instrumental in bringing Mark Watney home…

Read more from the source @ http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/cloud/cloud-management/nasa-aws-the-martian-movie-178582#RqhAUDA0KAmUXwvJ.99

Grazed from The Economist. Author: Editorial Staff.

EVEN before the European Court of Justice (ECJ) struck down the “safe-harbour” privacy pact between the European Union and America on October 6th, data-protection lawyers were in high demand. American clients asked if their firms’ data-flows across the Atlantic would become illegal—and if so, how to cope? The fears were justified. Though the ruling does not “break the internet”, as doom-mongers have it, businesses may have to find awkward and costly workarounds for data transfers, or shift to European data centres. More broadly, it marks a worrying escalation of a transatlantic row over privacy and data protection.

The safe-harbour pact, signed in 2000, was an attempt to bridge cultural and political differences regarding online privacy. The EU sees protection of personal data as a human right; America considers it mainly in terms of consumer protection, which leaves room for trade-offs. The pact allows firms to transfer data from the EU to America if they provide safeguards equivalent to those required by the EU’s data-protection directive (hence “safe harbour”)…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Upon returning from my fourth AWS re:Invent, another jam-packed cloud computing conference in Las Vegas, I’m left thinking about what really stood out. Here are my three big takeaways.

The cloud is still in its early days

Over two days of keynotes, executives from the following companies were among those who made presentations discussing their use of Amazon Web Services’ cloud: General Electric, Capital One, John Deere, BMW and Major League Baseball. If people were wondering before the conference if enterprises are really using this platform, AWS re:Invent 2015 proved that they are…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Cloud computing is about 10 years old. We’re not talking the technology — that’s decades old — but the term "cloud computing" itself. When it got a name, the cloud became a real phenomenon, and after all this time, it’s gone from being the enfant terrible of enterprise computing to the assumed platform for new enterprise computing. That change was clear at this week’s AWS Re:Invent cloud show.

Although computing as a service — what we call the cloud — remains an evolving notion, it is now fundamental to pretty much everything. Whether you’re thinking Internet of things, big data, mobile computing, or gaming, they are all affected by the use of public and private cloud services. In fact, cloud computing as a concept is systemic to most of what we do in the world of computing these days…

Grazed from BackupTechnology. Author: Editorial Staff.

The term “bandwidth” has been used in Electrical Engineering for years to mean “the difference between the upper and lower frequencies in a continuous set of frequencies, measured in hertz”. In the early 1990’s Telcos started to use the term “bandwidth” to describe the volume of data handled and defined it as “the transmission rate of data across a network”. Bandwidth in data transmission is measured in bits per second and it represents the capacity of network connection. Increase in the capacity means improved performance, considering other factors like latency. We will further discuss the effects of utilisation of bandwidth to the challenges associated with cloud computing.

Cloud computing providers usually calculate required bandwidth of customers just by considering the available quantity of bandwidth as well as the mean bandwidth utilisation needed by variety of applications. In addition, cloud computing providers consider latencies in transmission to calculate the required time to upload both the initial backup and all subsequent backups. For that reason, Internet based cloud backup service providers work hard to enhance the overall Internet bandwidth. They also do everything within their power to reduce the amount of data that flows through their pipes…

Grazed from DigitalJournal. Author: Editorial Staff.

AliCloud, Alibaba Group’s cloud computing arm, today announced that it has launched its second data center based in Silicon Valley in the United States, addressing increasing demand for affordable and secure, mission-critical cloud computing while creating an infrastructure for high availability and effective disaster recovery. Cloud customers can apply for the center’s services starting Monday (October 12).

The new facility is AliCloud’s ninth globally and the fourth data center announced in 2015, after its first U.S. data center in March 2015, a Singapore data center announced in August, and an environmentally-friendly lakewater-cooled data center at Qiandao Lake, China in early September. AliCloud also maintains data centers in Beijing, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Shanghai in China, and plans more facilities in other international locations in the Middle East, Asia and Europe in the future…

Read more from the source @ http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/2702166#ixzz3o57QGcYt

Grazed from FedScoop. Author: Greg Otto.

Some of the biggest proponents of cloud computing in the federal government know their data centers are not going to be shut down overnight. So, agencies must figure out how to take advantage of the agility of the cloud while they’re still dependent on legacy data storage systems. That’s easier said than done, said two executives from early cloud adopters within the federal government.

“Hybrid cloud is really difficult,” Chris Webber, the chief cloud architect for the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Lab, told FedScoop at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference this week. “The controls that have to be put in place to manage the transport of data, it’s really tough to pull that off.”…