Grazed from CIO. Author: Charles Cooper.

The desire to reduce costs clearly contributed to the first wave of cloud computing. To be sure, the cloud has helped companies get a better handle on IT costs. And that’s understandable given that many IT organizations remain stuck in a mindset of proving the business case for IT investment through cost savings.

But as we reach the midpoint of 2015, it’s increasingly clear that the promise of the cloud has more to do with the role it is fated to play in accelerating the enterprise’s rate of innovation. IT managers describe the cloud as the most important technology initiative they have on their agendas for this year. They also say the cloud is causing fundamental changes in their businesses by helping them to improve service and generate new revenue streams…

Grazed from Computing. Author: Graeme Burton.

The Council of the European Union has agreed to new EU Data Protection Regulations that will co-ordinate the law across the 28-member-state bloc for the first time. The agreement after three years of sometimes fractious negotiations was reached at a meeting of justice and home affairs ministers in Luxembourg today.

EU officials claim that making pan-EU data protection laws in the form of a regulation, rather than a looser directive, will provide a foundation for the so-called "digital single market" and instigate growth in the EU’s somewhat moribund technology and internet industries – an area in which Europe lags behind both America and Asia…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: John S. Webster.

Not long ago, the prospect of outsourcing mission-critical applications to a cloud service provider made IT managers cringe. Despite promises of agility, scalability, and the elimination of infrastructure management headaches, there were serious concerns about security and regulatory compliance.

But these fears have largely proven unfounded. In fact, Gartner recently went so far as to call the unsuitability of the cloud for mission-critical apps one of the Top 10 myths in the world of technology. According to Gartner, "Many organizations have progressed beyond early use cases and experimentation and are utilizing the cloud for mission-critical workloads…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ingrid Lunden.

Are we headed for yet more price wars in the world of cloud computing? Amazon and Google have made huge inroads into the market on the back of deep discounts and generous storage allowances, and as a measure of their competitive threat, today one of the bigger and older incumbents out of Europe announced a partnership that it hopes will help it fight back.

Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, parent of T-Mobile, today announced that it would tie up closer with China’s Huawei to sell enterprise cloud services, specifically, as it notes, “to pit itself more strongly against the Internet corporations Google and Amazon in future.” The news today also signals a shift in how DT approaches its place in the cloud services market…

Grazed from Business2Technology.  Author: Matthew Eager.

OK, so you’ve got data spread across a number of cloud applications and you have decided to bring that data together to understand your business better. Great. But you have customer information over here and order information over there, invoices in this system, and inventory in that one. When it comes to lining up the data, how does that work, really?

In part one of this article, I will describe how to go about matching data across cloud apps. Be sure to read part two on data schema challenges related to getting the data you need from a particular app…

Grazed from New Zealand Herald.  Author: Adam Gifford.

Chief information officers who have spent years filling up their data centres are now clearing out space so they can do new things.  That’s the picture Jim Thompson, chief engineer and vice-president for engineering and supply chain at technology vendor Unisys, brought to last week’s ninth annual CIO Summit.

He talked on the rise of the digital business and how that is transforming the data centre.  Data centres, which are like fridges full of computers, have been changing physically anyway under the effect of Moore’s Law, which describes the steady rate at which silicon chips become smaller, more powerful and cheaper…

Grazed from TheWindowsClub.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft Research’s Project Premonition seeks to detect pathogens in animals before these pathogens make people sick. Project Premonition sounds nothing less than a blockbuster movie. It involves mosquitoes caught in the robotic traps, drones, the cutting-edge molecular biology and the advanced cloud-based data analysis.

Catching mosquitoes and training drones

Microsoft Research and Saint George’s University of Grenada have partnered to catch mosquitoes using drones and then analyzes their body contents for pathogens. By analyzing mosquitoes, early signs that can spread potentially harmful diseases can be detected…

Grazed from Nasdaq.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle’s third-quarter fiscal 2015 results gained significantly from the cloud business. The company’s earnings surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate, while revenues came in line. We believe that the rapid adoption of engineered systems and cloud suites will drive the top line in 2015.

Oracle commands a dominant position in the enterprise software and database management system (DBMS) software market. According to market research firm Gartner, global spending on IT infrastructure is estimated to grow 2.4% to $3.8 trillion in 2015. Among infrastructure, DBMS is expected to gain significantly driven by Big Data and digitalization initiatives. We believe Oracle is positioned well in the DBMS software market to gain from this trend…

Grazed from StockRants.  Author: Editorial Staff.

E-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. AMZN announced the launch of M4, the latest generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) General Purpose instances.  Customers can use M4 instances by means of the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, and third-party libraries.

M4 instances are available in North Virginia, Oregon, and Northern California in the U.S.; Ireland, Germany, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney.  The M4 instances are based on custom 2.4 GHz Intel INTC Xeon E5-2676 v3 Haswell processors that are optimized specifically for EC2. This will enable it to deliver considerable processing power. Using the custom Intel Haswell processor, M4 instances offer new capabilities to the General Purpose and come in larger sizes…

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Nick Black.

As more wearable devices continue to enter into the market and into our lives, questions are being raised as to how vulnerable this may be making us when it comes to potential security and privacy risks.  Smartphones already have the capacity to hold a large quantity of data about us as individuals and wearable technology is likely to work in a similar way – with fitness trackers able to store information about our health, for example, or the routes taken during exercise sessions.

There have been many pieces of research that have looked into the connection between possible privacy risks and wearable technology. Rackspace Hosting, a cloud computing company, surveyed 4,000 people in the UK and US and found that 51 per cent of those who took part believed privacy was an issue when it came to the adoption of wearable technology, and 62 per cent said wearables should be regulated in some way…