Grazed from TheWhir. Author: Chris Burton.

Financial services firms are aggressively using encryption and tokenization to maintain data security while adopting cloud computing, according to a new report from CipherCloud. The report shows that financial companies are employ a rapidly maturing approach to cloud, with almost every one storing personally identifiable information (PII) in the cloud.

CipherCloud surveyed employees of over 50 global banking and financial services firms from North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America, asking them about strategies used to protect personally identifiable information in the cloud. The results inform the company’s Q2 2015 Global Cloud Data Security Report…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: John Furrier.

For many years now, IT conferences around the world have had keynote speakers asking why Enterprise IT organizations didn’t operate more like Google GOOGL +0.58%. The line of questioning was based on the premise that Google moves quickly and creates services that end-users love, so why wouldn’t an Enterprise CIO want to emulate those characteristics for their business? It’s a valid question to ask, given the approval rating of many CIOs is near 40% and their leadership believes IT moves too slowly for the business.

But until last week, it was nearly impossible for Enterprise IT organizations to get the core technologies from Google into their own data centers. They could easily use services such as Gmail or Google Apps, but it rarely ran their most critical or differentiated applications. That all changed last week, as Google announced the formation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the release of their Kubernetes software as open-source for the open community…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

When HP announced July 28 that it was acquiring ActiveState’s PaaS business, senior vice president Bill Hilf said it was doing so in part to bridge the gap between traditional IT and "cloud-native applications." The term "cloud-native applications" is not only finding its way more frequently into announcements, it’s also gaining currency as a phrase that sums up where a lot of enterprise developers and operations staff think they are headed.

"Cloud native" is not merely a buzzword; it’s also enshrined in its own foundation — the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, launched July 21. For those unsure of what the term means, here’s a primer on why it’s the term du jour and why it’s often used to sum up a set of goals and priorities that used to be the province of a Google or Facebook…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/cloud-native-what-it-means-why-it-matters/d/d-id/1321539

Grazed from Houston Business Journal. Author: Heinan Landa.

It’s marketed as the cloud. People say it’s the cloud. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, well, it must be a duck, right? Think again. Since 2011, Microsoft has been putting considerable time and effort into promoting its Office 365 package. This is presented as an all-in-one, low-cost cloud solution for businesses large or small, and it has been gaining some serious ground in the marketplace. But is it a cloud computing solution? Yes and no.

All about definition

If you define cloud computing as access to your email and files from anywhere you have an Internet connection, then, yes, it is a form of cloud computing. It lets you do that and it lets you work from anywhere. Office 365 also stores your data an off-site data center, which means you benefit from increased reliability, redundancy, and business continuity…

Grazed from TechTimes. Author: Alexandra Burlacu.

China’s Alibaba is planning to invest a massive $1 billion into its Aliyun cloud computing business in the next three years. With this notable investment, Alibaba’s Aliyun is gunning for Amazon and its Web Services division, heating up the competition between the two e-commerce companies.

Analysts estimate the global cloud computing market is worth roughly $20 billion, and Alibaba wants a bigger piece of the pie. The company announced that its investment will help set up new data centers for Aliyun in various regions across the globe, including Singapore, the Middle East, Europe and Japan. Moreover, the company also intends to sign business deals with enterprise technology and telecom providers in those markets…

Grazed from Channelnomics.  Author: Scharon Harding.

Channel partners must do more than resell cloud offerings in order to have a "sustainable" place in the market, according to Anurag Agrawal, CEO and analyst at TechAisle.  n a Sunday blog post, Agrawal said partners should offer more than solutions such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in order to capitalize on cloud.  "Simply reselling cloud solutions … is not a long-term and sustainable strategy," he wrote. "They must be the trusted cloud advisor for the SMB end-customer."

Agrawal pointed to data from Techaisle’s SMB cloud computing adoption survey, which found that 94 percent of SMBs are using some type of cloud solution. He said the market is in different "stages" of cloud adoption. For example, 30 percent of participants said they are reviewing cloud suppliers, while 24 percent are currently getting more details about cloud, according to Agrawal…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Big Data and analytics are the most common cloud tasks for nearly eight in 10 developers, according to research by market intelligence group Evans Data Corporation.

Its report revealed that 79 per cent of 578 developers spend 42 per cent of their time on the tasks, as well as discovering that those who associate cloud computing with the Internet of Things (IoT) are three times as likely to use the cloud as the basis of their development…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Eric Knorr.

We can all agree that there are three IaaS leaders in the cloud: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Right?  It depends on how you look at it. Without question, Amazon maintains a very long lead — and it’s the only playertransparent enough to break out its cloud revenue in detail, with AWS Q2 sales up 81 percent year over year. Microsoft throws in Office 365 revenue, which is not strictly cloud money, but it’s clearly the No. 2 player and now sees the cloud as the most important part of its business going forward.

Yet where the heck is Google? The company doesn’t break out its cloud revenue at all. Microsoft and IBM aren’t terribly transparent on this score, either, but according to last week’s Q2 estimate from Synergy Research Group, each make more money from cloud infrastructure services than Google. After all, they have the leverage to push big existing enterprise customers to their clouds…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Louis Columbus.

 79% of Internet of Things (IoT) app developers spend at least 25% of their time with analytics or databases,  and 42% work on Big Data or advanced analytics projects.  55% of IoT developers primarily connect devices through the Cloud, with 32% connecting through a hub or middle tier.

Grazed from ITProPortal.