Grazed from Datanami.  Author:  George Leopold.

The British government and partner IBM are investing £300 million (more than $456 million) to promote big data and cognitive computing research aimed at helping U.K. businesses engage with customers and suppliers.

Among IBM’s contributions to the big data project announced this week is a package of technology and “onsite expertise” valued at £200 million, including access to its Watson cognitive computing platform and at least 24 IBM researchers. They will work with U.K. big data scientists…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

The number one risk to system availability remains human error, according to the latest disaster recovery industry report from CloudEndure.  The research examines the various protocols businesses have in place for downtime if – or when – it occurs. On a scale of one to 10, human errors – including application bugs – hit 8.1, compared to network failures (7.2), cloud provider downtime (6.9) and external threats (6.7).

Even though the majority (83%) of organisations have a SLA goal of 99.9% or better, this doesn’t often translate into actual results. 44% of firms said they had at least one outage in the past three months, with 27% admitting their systems had gone down within the past month. 9% of respondents said their systems had never gone down…

Grazed from WSJ.  Author: Jack Marshall.

Amazon.com’s cloud computing service has become a popular conduit for fraudsters looking to create “bot” traffic and disseminate it over the Web, according to new research from advertising fraud detection firm Fraudlogix.

Fraudsters use computer generated bots to mimic the actions of real consumers and trick marketers into paying for ads displayed on Web pages. A number of techniques are used to generate artificial traffic, such as infecting consumers’ personal computers with software that loads Web pages without their knowledge, or installing similar software on cloud computing services such as Amazon’s to simulate real users…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Trevor Jones.

OpenStack distribution options continue to shrink as two more small vendors have been gobbled up by bigger players looking to stake their claims in cloud.  Market consolidation around the open source cloud technology has been a familiar theme over the past year, and that continued this week as IBM and Cisco each said they plan to acquire OpenStack providers.

The former plans to buy hosted private cloud provider Blue Box and the latter is set to buy private cloud platform and support services provider Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., though terms of the two separate deals were not disclosed…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Dropbox has announced new features in administration, security and integration in a bid to change the way the cloud storage provider works for business. The company is introducing tighter account security through two-step verification, tiered administrative controls, as well as an extension to the Dropbox for Business API, with new capabilities for shared folders.

CloudLock, Netskope and SkySync are among the data migration providers who are already beginning to build integrations, alongside Israeli firm Adallom, which recently announced it was looking after the security for Dropbox for Business. “This is a major milestone for Dropbox for Business,” said UK country manager Mark van der Linden…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

Amazon Web Services customers have sent a letter to the cloud services provider requesting that it disclose more information about its sustainability practices. The 19 companies, including Tumblr, Change.org and the Huffington Post, said they want to convey the information to their users, customers, employees and other stakeholders.

While lauding Amazon’s commitment to get its entire cloud operation running on renewable energy, the companies wrote to AWS chief Andy Jassy last week that they want to see Amazon disclose more about its current carbon and energy footprint, its progress towards renewable energy goals, and its strategy for increasing its use of renewable energy…

Grazed from FirstPost. Author: Editorial Staff.

To help customers maintain control and compliance in this hyper-connected, hyper-distributed IT environment, Cisco and its partners are building the Intercloud—a globally connected network of clouds. In a step towards realizing that vision, Cisco has announced their intent to acquire Piston Cloud Computing, which will help accelerate the product, delivery, and operational capabilities of Cisco Intercloud Services.

Paired with their recent acquisition of Metacloud, Piston’s distributed systems engineering and OpenStack talent will further enhance their capabilities around cloud automation, availability, and scale. The acquisition of Piston will complement the Intercloud strategy by bringing additional operational experience on the underlying infrastructure that powers Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Paul Miller.

Europe’s particle physics lab, CERN, generated its share of cloudy headlines at the recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, as a multi-year collaboration between CERN’s openlab Project and managed cloud provider Rackspace reached prime-time as the underpinnings of OpenStack Kilo’s federated identity capability. Other organizations also contributed code and ideas as this project rolled into OpenStack, but CERN continues to explore other cloud technologies and perhaps even other ways of solving very similar problems.

As Frederic Lardinois reported for TechCrunch at the time, OpenStack Executive Director Jonathan Bryce used the opening keynote at last month’s Summit in Vancouver to announce a number of advances within the project. One of those was support for ‘federated identity,’ or the ability to log in to a remote OpenStack cloud using credentials associated with your own OpenStack cloud…

Grazed from Nature.com. Author: Nadia Drake.

In February, computer scientist Mark Howison was preparing to analyse RNA extracted from two dozen siphonophores — marine animals closely related to jellyfish and coral. But the local high-performance computer at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was not back up to full reliability after maintenance. So Howison fired up Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and bid on a few ‘spot instances’ — vacant computing capacity that Amazon offers to bidders at a discounted price. After about two hours of fiddling, he had configured a virtual machine to run his software, and had uploaded the siphonophore sequences. Fourteen hours and US$61 later, the analysis was done.

Researchers such as Howison are increasingly renting computing resources over the Internet from commercial providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft — and not just for emergency backup. As noted in a 2013 report sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia, the cloud provides labs with access to computing capabilities that they might not otherwise have (see go.nature.com/mxh4xy)…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Shane Schick.

Here’s the mayor of Toronto, not an IT professional, but John Tory has no problem articulating why he sees potential in cloud computing. “I’m of the age where I still ask my children for advice about these things, but even I knew an 18-year-old email system was not something to be admired,” Tory told a press conference where Microsoft announced it is building two new Canadian data centres to support its cloud-based software products.

Since City Hall moved from Groupwise to Microsoft outlook, Tory added, “We’re now in a situation where we can respond properly.” Tory’s example is just one of the ways that Microsoft is hoping to encourage more businesses to make the leap from running legacy technology on their on premises to a cloud or software-as-a-service model…