Grazed from BusinessFinanceNews. Author: Jason Graul.

Netflix, Inc. is planning to close down its remaining data centers by the end of this summer, becoming the first big corporation to completely run its information technology through the public cloud, according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Netflix told WSJ’s CIO Journal through an email: “For our streaming business, we have been 100% cloud-based for customer facing systems for some time now, and are planning to completely retire our data centers later this summer.”

Although corporate utilization of the public cloud is increasing, many companies still use sensitive software in their private cloud or data centers. While public clouds allow users to share a service provider’s resources, privates ones only dedicate cloud resource within their own premises or from a third-party. Majority of companies use all of these assets together under a hybrid arrangement…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Matt Asay.

In one of the most colossal understatements ever, Cloudera co-founder Mike Olson declared, "It’s pretty hard to build a successful, stand-­alone open source company." Having spent 15 years trying to do exactly that, I would go one step further: It’s impossible. Yes, we have Red Hat.

But that’s all we have. Investor (and former open source executive) Peter Levine insists that "we will never have another Red Hat," and he’s right. But this may be because the Amazons of the world are increasingly eating the Red Hats of the world — one SaaS business at a time…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

With cloud computing maturing, the competitive advantages provided by cloud adoption are declining, but not being in the cloud is turning into a serious disadvantage, according to a new report by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. "The benefits are starting to flatten out," says Abbie Lundberg, contributing editor at HBR.

But that’s because CIOs and their peers are no longer debating the benefits of cloud as they once did. With ‘everyone’ now leveraging cloud, you have to use cloud in imaginative ways to get a leg up on the competition. But as one respondent told HBR, cloud computing may no longer give you the competitive advantage it once did, but not using cloud can put you at a significant disadvantage…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Jef Cozza.

As headlines about corporate hacks and data leaks have continued to dominate technology news sites, companies have moved to offer more security features to worried users and enterprise clients. Today, Dropbox announced that it is introducing support for open standard FIDO Universal Second Factor verification (U2F) to provide better account security to its users.

The cloud storage service has already been offering two-step verification for years, requiring users to provide both their usual usernames and passwords, plus additional security codes sent to their phones. The use of a second factor helps protect users from a variety of methods hackers can use to access passwords…

Grazed from TheGlobalDispatch. Author: Editorial Staff.

Have you been thinking about moving your business’s computing needs to the cloud? With an increased range of applications and capabilities, cloud computing helps make the latest technology affordable, even for smaller businesses. Rather than buying servers or hiring a dedicated IT team, you can simply pay by the month for cloud computing services or architecture. But before you make the move, it’s a good idea to take a look at the pros and cons of the telco cloud.

Pros of Cloud Computing

Cost is one of the primary reasons why businesses are moving to cloud services offered by carriers like Nokia Networks at the moment. The cost is scalable, meaning that it can be adjusted to meet your needs as your business grows. In most cases, cloud computing is billed monthly, rather than the lump sum that you would need to pay for servers…

Grazed from LearnBonds. Author: Victor Alagbe.

Microsoft Corporation is no longer a relic of an era long gone as the takes giant strides to challenge Apple and Google Inc. One of those strides is the rapid growth being recorded in its cloud computing space– Microsoft Azure. In a recent interview, Mark Russinovich, Microsoft’s CTO of Azure cloud talks about Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud, which is a distant third.

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud business that provides practically endless computing power to clients who may not want to set up their own servers. The cloud war has been mainly between Amazon and Microsoft despite all the noise that Google makes about its Google Cloud Platform Network…

Grazed from FT.com. Author: Richard Waters.

For Silicon Valley, more transparency may not be such a bad thing after all. That has been one of the main conclusions from Google’s characteristically odd decision this week to jettison a perfectly good corporate name in favour of its bland new moniker: Alphabet. Wall Street was delighted with the promise of greater disclosure about the performance of different parts of Google’s business.

After years of nagging, the company will finally provide at least some insight into the financial impact of its many and varied diversifications. But Google is far from alone. Selectively deciding when and how much to disclose has become an art form for some of the biggest tech companies, as they move into new markets and try to deal with the disruption sweeping their own industry…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Michael Krems.

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, a growing collection of integrated services – analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage, and web. In the 12 months since Build 2014, Microsoft has delivered over 500 new Azure services and features, and greatly expanded the footprint and capabilities of what Azure delivers. Here’s a snapshot of Azure Allure, articulated by Microsoft exec Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise, at the Microsoft Build 2015 conference in San Francisco:

• 19 unique Azure regions up and running worldwide, with over 90,000 new Azure customer subscriptions per month
• 1.4 million SQL databases being used by applications hosted inside Asure
• About 160,000 SQL databases created or dropped each day in Azure
• Over 50 trillion objects stored in Azure Storage
• 425 million users in the Azure Active Directory system
• 3 million developers registered with Visual Studio Online services…

Grazed from PublicTechnology. Author: Simon Hansford.

These days, cloud is one of the most over used terms in the computing industry. Many products and services that have existed for years have been renamed or refreshed to incorporate the word cloud to benefit from the cache, or the increased stock market value, that the term brings.

Most IT professionals will recognise the National Institute of Standards Technology (NIST) Definition of cloud computing with three services models (Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service), four deployment models and five essential characteristics…

Grazed from Information-Age. Author: Ben Rossi.

There are a great variety of startups that are benefitting from the scalability of cloud computing and growing their business and customer offerings as a result. Below are five tips for startups either in the early stages or considering cloud technology for the first time, based on the experiences at Purplebricks.com since launching in April 2014. Kavanagh’s verdict? While it poses certain challenges at first, it is well worth the investment in the long run.

1. Message queuing – essential but fiddly

A message typically represents a task created by someone (the “producer”) that has to be processed by someone else (the “consumer”). Each message has a body and some attributes – the main architectural benefit is loose coupling. A message queueing service aims to remove the traditional overhead associated with operating in-house messaging infrastructures…