Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Richard Thelwell.

The term “cloud computing” may be commonly uttered in businesses all over the world, but its complex history is less well known. This interactive timeline from Matillion charts the history of the Cloud, and its future!

1940s/50s – The Birth of Modern Computing

In 1947, researchers at the University of Manchester developed the “Manchester Baby”, the world’s first stored program computer. With its limited functionality and its vast size (over 17 feet in length) the Manchester Baby is almost unrecognisable from the computers we know today, yet it played a pivotal role in their development…

Read more from the source @ http://www.business2community.com/infographics/interactive-history-cloud-computing-01304429

Grazed from BCN. Author: Editorial Staff.

An influential group of senior business executives is being disillusioned by experiences with cloud hosted applications, according to new research. The proportions, though relatively low, are growing as cloud disenchantment threatens to set in. The revelations come from research by cloud service provider Stratogen.

Its main finding was that the expense, the lack of both applications and support and the downtime involved are all disappointing the company decision makers who backed cloud computing in their companies. If news of the disenchantment spreads among the business community, the bad feedback could nip cloud growth in the bud, according to Karl Robinson, chief commercial officer at StratoGen…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Caroline Donnelly.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has selected IT services firm CSC to oversee its plans to downsize its datacentres and migrate its systems to the hybrid cloud. The $108m deal is set to last 10 years and will see CSC contracted to help the FAA consolidate its datacentre estate, migrate its data and systems off-premise and provide it with access to a range of cloud services from the likes of Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The FAA is the US body responsible for safe-guarding America’s aerospace and running its air traffic control operations. The FAA said in a statement that downsizing its datacentre footprint and moving more of its IT to the cloud will help the organisation save money and become more flexible…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

VMware VP of Cloud Services Mathew Lodge acknowledges that the virtualization vendor “got started later than other folks” in the IaaS public cloud market, but he flatly denies that the company is slowing investment in this area. VMware’s position is that while it has catching up to do with cloud market leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, it also has strengths that can make it stand out.

VMware used its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco this week to show off some of those differentiators, and teased more advances to come. The company’s cloud strategy centers around VMware’s Unified Hybrid Cloud platform, as CEO Pat Gelsinger stressed in a pre-VMworld interview with Network World…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: David Needle.

Can hospitals and other medical providers tap cloud computing to get a better picture of patient’s needs? That’s the promise of Salesforce Health Cloud, a new service that’s been developed with the help of several leading care provides including Centura Health, DJO Global, Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

With Health Cloud, patients will also be able to access their medical community via mobile and desktop devices via the Salesforce Community Cloud that works on iOS and Android devices. Bringing cloud services to healthcare providers is a natural progression for Salesforce.com, which pioneered cloud-based Customer Relationship Management, says Joshua Newman, a physician who heads the Health Cloud product as chief medical officer and general manager of Salesforce Health Care and Life Sciences…

Read more from the source @ http://www.eweek.com/cloud/salesforce-health-cloud-aims-to-make-patient-data-more-accessible.html

Grazed from CIO. Author: Rich Murr.

Is the cloud everything it’s cracked up to be? Any new technology goes through a hype curve, but generally speaking, I believe cloud-based solutions have done a pretty good job of matching some very lofty expectations. The growth numbers continue to prove this out, as companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and others experience extraordinary growth on what are already multibillion-dollar cloud businesses. By solving very real problems for their customers, they’re being amply rewarded.

That’s not to say there aren’t significant areas for improvement, however. One of the biggest challenges facing cloud adopters is integrating applications and data, something that has also been challenging for traditional IT departments ever since they moved beyond the mainframe. Not sure what integrations are? Trust me, you’ve been impacted by them – at least when they haven’t been implemented well. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio.com/article/2977606/cloud-computing/how-the-cloud-makes-data-integrations-easier.html

Grazed from Lexology. Author: Davis Wright Tremaine.

In a move that highlights the changing winds of federal cybersecurity policy, the Department of Defense (“DoD”) has issued an interim Rule (“Rule”) that imposes new security and reporting requirements on federal contractors, and new requirements for DoD cloud computing contracts.

The Rule requires federal contractors to report cyber incidents that result in an actual or potentially “adverse affect” on covered defense information (CDI), a covered contractor information system (a federal contractor’s information system that handles CDI), or on a contractor’s ability to provide operationally critical support. CDI includes “controlled technical information, export controlled information, critical information, and other information requiring protection by law, regulation or Government-wide,” but does not include classified information which is governed by a separate rule. The Rule also imposes restrictions on cloud computing contracts, including that data covered by the contracts be maintained within the 50 states…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

On Monday, VMware showed off technology that it says will move working computing jobs between private and public clouds provided all the clouds involved run VMware VMW 0.11% software. An analogy would be if a car company could move an automotive assembly line between one plant and another without shutting it down. You can see the difficulty.

The crowd at VMworld 2015 applauded the demo of cross-cloud live migration but details on availability were scant. A blog post about the “Project Skyscraper” preview said the goal is to let customers “extend their data center to the public cloud and vice-a-versa by seamlessly operating across boundaries while providing enterprise-level security and business continuity.” No timeframe was given…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

EMC is slowly, but surely pulling together the elements of its federated ecosystem to create a hybrid cloud computing platform. Under the auspices of The EMC Federation today at the VMworld 2015 conference previewed components that will be added to a Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud platform that combines elements of products and services from EMC and its VMware and Pivotal sister companies.

Berna Devrim, director of EMC cloud solutions marketing, said the goal is to make it a lot simpler to set up, deploy and manage hybrid cloud computing environments than it is today. At the core of the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Platform will be new application lifecycle automation tools that will enable IT organizations to deploy applications on topo of both VMware vSphere and OpenStack environments as well as instances of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings based on the Virtustream platform that EMC acquired in May…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/hybrid-cloud-computing/emc-advances-case-hybrid-cloud-computing

Grazed from Zentera. Author: PR Announcement.

Zentera Systems is demonstrating its CoIP (Cloud over IP) CoNET network security fabric at Booth 1637 in VMworld 2015, August 30-September 3, San Francisco, CA. The CoNET platform allows companies to define, configure, provision, secure and manage extensive overlay networks over existing network infrastructure.

CoNET can connect company datacenters to public and private clouds, set up partner-to-partner networks, enable remote access networks and support rapid datacenter network migration. The platform leaves the existing network and security infrastructure unchanged while supporting virtual IP-based routing, security logs, 3rd party advanced threat detection, data encryption, whitelisting and cloud firewalls…