Grazed from BusinessInsider.  Author: Julie Bort.

Grazed from TechInvestingDaily. Author: Alex Koyfman.

It seems like just a little while ago that the world was introduced to the mysterious, abstract, and often confusing term “cloud computing.” Evocative of a fresh, clean, airy, futurist utopia, cloud computing took the world by storm, gaining millions of users — even though a good proportion of them weren’t even sure what it was they were using.

What cloud computing actually is may perhaps be a bit of a letdown to those imagining super-smart microprocessors floating in the sky. In reality, cloud computing is nothing more than shared data storage on a mass scale, operated by large companies offering countless terabytes at miniscule prices to anybody with Internet access…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Dan Kusnetzky.

Recently SUSE announced that it has fully embraced Docker as a component of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12. After having spoken to representatives of Red Hat, VMware and a number of other interested suppliers, I thought it would be good to speak with the SUSE team.

SUSE points out that its current Docker offering supports x86- and x64-based servers. It’s planning to introduce support for this technology on other hardware platforms in the future. The company also has plans to integrate Docker into its SUSE Manager for lifecycle management tool…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Ultimately, decisions around cloud application or platform development and adoption are driven by the business. But the people bringing cloud in and enlightening their enterprises are the "developer visionaries" who understand the implications it brings to businesses, as well as keeping the whole thing from becoming a tangled, hairy and expensive mess.

That’s one of the takeaways from a new report issued by Technology Business Research (TBR), which states that as cloud becomes a greater part of business technology infrastructures, business-side managers are increasingly getting involved in development decisions. In the process, the role of developers is being elevated, from a "coder" persona to that of consultant to business management…

Grazed from WNCY.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

The cloud has been around a long time, but recently there has been an increase in business’s urgency to move to the cloud and create a computing environment that is accessible from anywhere. Most businesses looking to create a cloud environment can greatly benefit from partnering with a cloud service provider – from choosing the best way to implement cloud services to establishing effective ongoing support. We’ve found the following provider services are essential to successfully utilizing the cloud…

1. Find the Best Approach

Many cloud conversations begin with misunderstood concepts about the cloud environment they require. For example, a common request from clients is to have their hardware moved off-site. This solution, typically referred to as co-location (or co-lo for short), will be perfect in some scenarios, but is not actually a cloud solution and likely does not address the technical or business case that is the true reason for migrating to the cloud…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

Genomics is perhaps the perfect use case for the public cloud. Genomics workloads tend to have massive, yet irregular, processing needs. Researchers often need to run massive analytics workloads in order to crunch genomics data. Often, however, those workloads are needed for finite periods of time. In the old days, powering these workloads required investment in supercomputing resources – massively expensive hardware that might only be used for a short period of time.

With the advent of the public cloud, however, researchers can spin up almost unlimited amounts of computing power, but only use that power as and when they need it. It is hard to overstate just how revolutionary this is and the cloud has meant much research that wouldn’t have been viable previously, can now be performed…

Grazed from GovTech. Author: Larry Karisny.

A massive cyberattack at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) exposed the personal information of as many as 4 million federal employees. Though this type of news is not unusual, this particular case is different given that a multi-billion-dollar federal civilian cyberdefense systems was hacked.

The cyberdefense systems supposedly protecting the OPM are Department of Homeland Security programs known as Einstein and Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) — and were hailed as the cornerstone of repelling cyberthreats in real time. Unfortunately this is not actually the case, as it took five months to discover the intrusion — hackers hit the OPM in December, and the agency did not detect the intrusion until April. How bad the attack really was is still being analyzed…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

IDC’s ranking of cloud infrastructure providers is in: HP has hit the top of the charts, with Dell and Cisco making up the top three. The findings, which arrive in the analyst house’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker report, cover storage, server and Ethernet switch and show HP’s revenue growing 37.4% between 1Q14 and 1Q15, and market share at 15.7% for total 1Q15 revenues of $985 million. Dell, in second, has first quarter revenues of $745m, a market share of 11.9% and year over year revenue growth of 34.2%. Cisco, in third place, has first quarter revenues of $582m, an overall market share of 9.3% but revenue growth year over year of 30.1%.

The two companies positioned in fifth place, NetApp and Lenovo, had contrasting fortunes. NetApp’s revenue went up year on year by 1.5% to capture a 4.4% market share in 2015, down from 5.4% in 2014, while Lenovo’s revenue growth between 2014 and 2015 skyrocketed at 770.3%, moving from 0.5% market share in Q114 to 3.6% in Q115 – not especially surprising given IBM sold the majority of its x86 server business to the company last year…

Grazed from CloudComputingToday. Author: Arnal Dayaratna.

The following infographic, courtesy of Equinix, illustrates the historical transformation in the way in which objects are interconnected. The infographic does well to show the proliferation of objects that have variously become digitized and participate in a larger networked grid marked by increased connectivity and bi-directional data and information flow.

To read more and to view the infographic, visit http://cloud-computing-today.com/2015/07/03/1073320/

Grazed from InsideBitCoins. Author: Editorial Staff.

A pair of Bitcoin entrepreneurs and the MIT Media Lab has revealed a prototype for a system called Enigma, a decentralized cloud platform with guaranteed privacy. Enigma allows users to store, share, and analyze personal data without it being fully revealed to any party. Powered by the blockchain, Enigma aims to be a secure, multi-party computation. The team at MIT has already developed a prototype for Enigma, which is based on a highly optimized version of secure multi-party computation, guaranteed by a verifiable secret-sharing scheme. MIT Media Labs’ whitepaper says:

“For storage, we use a modified distributed hashtable for holding secret-shared data. An external blockchain is utilized as the controller of the network, manages access control, identities and serves as a tamper-proof log of events. Security deposits and fees incentivize operation, correctness and fairness of the system…