Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mike Chapelle.

Compliance doesn’t need to slow down cloud adoption, but it should remain a high priority in cloud-enabled IT environments. Federal and state laws that protect information security and data privacy differ widely and are becoming increasingly complex. The global picture is even more difficult to unravel.

As enterprises around the world adopt cloud computing strategies, regulated data — such as personally identifiable information, health records and credit card numbers — increasingly passes through the control of a wide range of service providers. Multinational corporations must take time to understand the data security ramifications of cloud computing decisions and move forward in a manner that maintains compliance with applicable security and privacy regulations…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, has made significant upgrades to its cloud-based storage system to include a new range of computing services designed to support science-based researchers, especially those with large data requirements that preclude commercial cloud use, or who require collaboration with cloud engineers for building cloud-based services.

The upgrades to SDSC Cloud, which debuted in late 2011 as one of the first large-scale academic deployments of cloud storage in the world, offers a unique storage service to educational and industry partners. The object-based storage system provides a highly scalable solution with flexible access methods and enhanced durability, while providing exceptional performance using high-speed 10 gigabit (Gb) connectivity at a fraction of the costs of other service providers…

Grazed from FedScoop. Author: Rutrell Yasin.

Creating a hybrid cloud computing environment – one that relies on a mix of on-premises and public cloud services – holds out the promise of greater flexibility for federal agencies on where to run diverse workloads and applications. It also promises greater computing economies. But enforcing policies and security controls between and among multiple clouds can be tricky business.

Agency managers can encounter a myriad of challenges as they use multiple cloud providers in conjunction with their own internal private cloud infrastructure. Issues surrounding compliance, data flow and protection, security, and visibility of information can complicate even the most basic expansion moves, including how to divide up data workloads…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Kristin Knapp.

While public cloud adoption continues to grow in the enterprise, some markets — such as life sciences, academia and HPC — crave a different kind of cloud. And that’s exactly what Orran Krieger, research professor and director of the cloud computing initiative at Boston University’s Hariri Institute, wants to create.

Alongside other members of the academic community and the state of Massachusetts, Krieger is launching the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), a new flavor of public cloud based on an open and customizable model Krieger says contrasts sharply with the leading public cloud platforms today…

Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft Corp joined Amazon.com Inc and Intel Corp in tweaking the way it reports results, a move that will help the software giant show off its growing cloud and mobile businesses.  Since taking over as chief in early 2014, Satya Nadella has led Microsoft’s efforts to focus on software and cloud services as demand for its Windows operating system slows.

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Tom Nolle.

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Katherine Noyes.

For all the talk about cloud computing, it’s a rare enterprise that doesn’t still use at least some on-premises software. With that reality in mind, Oracle on Monday rolled out two new services designed to help companies integrate the diverse pieces of those mixed environments.

Oracle SOA Cloud Service and Oracle API Manager Cloud Service are both new additions to Oracle Cloud Platform for Integration, the database giant’s suite of services aimed at helping users integrate on-premises and cloud applications. Built on Oracle’s SOA Suite, which taps the concepts of service-oriented architecture, Oracle SOA Cloud Service provides easy provisioning, simplified management, automated upgrades and the ability to easily scale out, Oracle said…

Grazed from CBR. Author: James Nunns.

Ubuntu has been selected by Microsoft as its first Linux-based Azure offering. Microsoft’s cloud offering will run its Hadoop-based Big Data service offering, HDInsight, on Ubuntu and Hortonworks. Microsoft’s decision is backed by 20% of virtual machines on Azure being Linux, and VM Depot has more than 1,000 Linux images, most of these being Ubuntu.

The goal for the companies is to help enable hybrid cloud computing, it aims to achieve this by increasing the choice of on-premise or on-cloud computing for customers. T.K. Ranga Rengarajan,corporate vp, Data Platforms, Microsoft, said: "The general availability of Azure HDInsight on Ubuntu Linux, which includes a service level agreement guarantee of 99.9% uptime and full technical support for the entire stack with the choice of running Hadoop workloads on Hortonworks Data Platform in Azure HDInsight using Ubuntu or Windows." HDInsight on Ubuntu helps to make it easier to move on-premise Hadoop deployments to the cloud, while it also aims to bring together customers running the Hortonworks Data Platform on premise, in their data centres.

Grazed from CIO. Author: Mary Branscombe.

Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, the comprehensive hacking of Sony, and on-going legal battles over whether email stored in the cloud belongs to the people sending it or the service hosting it, more and more cloud services have moved to encrypt data. Some are going even further, offering Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) options, where the user holds the encryption keys for their own cloud data.

Google Compute Engine started offering a preview service for encrypting both data and compute with your own keys this summer, and Amazon offers both soft key management and the much pricier (and slower to set up) Cloud HSM service for EC2 and S3 instances, where your keys live in dedicated Hardware Security Modules in Amazon’s cloud. Adobe Creative Cloud now supports customer-managed data encryption keys to protect content synced to Creative Cloud accounts…