Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Nokia Networks officials are continuing their efforts to better compete with larger rivals like Ericsson and Huawei Technologies in the rapidly evolving telecommunications space. Nokia in April announced plans to buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6 billion, a move that will give it greater scale against larger vendors and expand its capabilities in network-functions virtualization (NFV), a key technology being pushed and embraced by telecom operators.

Now the company an infrastructure platform designed to help mobile network operators more easily adopt NFV and cloud computing. The Finnish vendor’s AirFrame Data Center Solution that includes pre-integrated racks of ultra-dense servers powered by Intel Xeon processors, network switches and software-defined storage capabilities…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

Google’s new account hub, for users of its Web services and Android smartphones, gives IT organizations a new tool to improve employee awareness of security and privacy. Following its developer conference last week, on Monday Google enhanced its security and privacy offerings with a unified security page and a Web resource for those with privacy questions.

For IT organizations that have to deal with the intricacies of employee devices in the workplace and shadow IT, Google’s effort to educate users about security and privacy provide a potential opportunity to raise awareness of issues that confront every company. In a blog post, Google product manager Guemmy Kim said the company wants to change the perception that people are unable to control their personal information…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-applications/google-centralizes-security-privacy-for-web-android-users/d/d-id/1320652

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Frank Konkel.

When you think about the hallmarks of cloud computing — on-demand service, resource pooling, elasticity, scalability and the like — it’s easy to overlook how you pay for those cloud services. Federal agencies often still use a fixed pricing model, where an agency purchases an allotment of cloud services and pays for them, whether they are fully used or not.

However, in the spirit of true cloud computing, it appears cloud vendors are coming around to offering government customers the same pay-as-you-go approach popular among commercial customers. Verizon Enterprise Solutions, buoyed by demand from existing federal customers, announced last week it is offering a new consumption model for federal customers who use its Enterprise Cloud platform…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Sharon Gaudin.

Google may not have caught up to Amazon in the cloud market, but that’s OK, according to a Google executive. The company is heading in a slightly different direction with cloud computing that involves helping customers analyze their data. "It’s not about catching up to [Amazon]," said Brian Stevens, vice president of cloud platform at Google.

"It’s not just about lifting and shifting servers and such. It’s not about doing exactly the same thing you’ve been doing. It’s about doing things in a new cloud way." That could change the way companies do business. It also could help Google become a cloud powerhouse. Stevens, who spoke with Computerworld during Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference, said he wants the company’s cloud offering to do more than simply enable enterprises to stop buying their own servers…

Grazed from GovernmentTechnology. Author: Liz Farmer.

Two years ago, Massachusetts took a bold step. The legislature passed a bill to tax the cloud. But they didn’t stop there. Lawmakers also levied taxes on other tech activities. While the cloud may be where the fastest growth is taking place, technology overall is an increasingly large part of a state’s economy. Massachusetts didn’t want to lose out on a chance to include it in its revenue base. Legislative analysts projected that the taxes would bring in $160 million a year.

But just two months after passing the “tech tax,” as it had become known, Massachusetts repealed it. Opposition from the state’s business forces rained down pressure on lawmakers. The new law, they claimed, was putting them out of business. “It got very bruising,” says Andrew Bagley, research and public affairs director of the antitax Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation…

Grazed from CNet. Author: Ben Fox Rubin.

Intel has agreed to buy fellow chipmaker Altera for about $16.7 billion — Intel’s largest acquisition ever — a move that could provide a boost in its data-server and Internet of Things businesses. Intel said Monday that it will pay $54 in cash per Altera share and that it expects to close the deal in six to nine months.

Altera’s stock has surged more than 40 percent since late March, when news of the companies’ negotiations first surfaced. Reports that talks fell apart came out about a month ago, though the New York Post on Thursday said a revived deal would be announced as soon as this week. Altera shares were up an additional 6 percent Monday, while Intel’s share fell 1.3 percent…

Grazed from FinancialNews. Author: Gulli Arnason.

Canadian cloud computing provider AURO said it has announced the support of two key OpenStack initiatives that extend the capabilities of its Canadian public cloud built on OpenStack to deliver greater flexibility and consistency for end-users. The most recent OpenStack Summit that includes the Design Summit for planning the next bi-annual release was just completed in Vancouver, Canada.

During the Summit, OpenStack´s executive director Jonathan Bryce announced two new projects, including a service that supports federated cloud identities. AURO´s Cloud Computing platform is one of first vendors and public cloud computing services that supports this feature. The first initiative is a certification program for interoperability testing requirements…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ewan Spence.

As cloud computing and online storage approaches the ‘free’ price point, and as the utility of having ‘everything’ available online becomes more pervasive and more integrated with operating systems on the desktop and on smartphones, I find myself pushing back and relying more and more on my own backup and storage options at home.

In a world where online storage is everywhere, it is becoming more important to take responsibility and store my own data at home, free of outside influences. I’ve looked at the options in the cloud, and none of them quite matches what I’m looking for. One of the driving forces behind the race to zero for cloud storage and services (as summarized by Julie Bort on Business Insider this weekend) is the rapidly dropping cost of physical storage medium…

Grazed from Entrepreneur. Author: John Mason.

Today, technologies like cloud computing, mobility, social, and big data and analytics are enabling small- and midsized businesses (SMBs) to do more with less, reach new markets and focus on creativity and invention instead of IT. But with all this new opportunity comes responsibility. Whether an SMB is moving to the cloud or implementing a bring your own device (BYOD) mobile program, security should be part of the plan.

Each year, cyber crime costs the economy about $445 billion, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and SMBs can be attractive targets for hackers tapping into this profitable black market. SMBs tend to have weaker online security, use cloud services void of strong encryption technology and lack the robust IT and internal policies needed to protect against increasingly sophisticated cyber-crime rings, which operate with an enviable efficiency and effectiveness…

Read more from the source @ http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246473

Grazed from NetworkAsia. Author: Kenb Wong.

Many CIOs still have concerns when it comes to a move to the Cloud according to a report from Red Hat. The open source software developer recently released its 2015 Red Hat A/NZ Cloud Adoption Index that states many CIOs are not fully prepared to get the most from a move to Cloud.

According to the report, this is a result of three main concerns about Cloud deployments, namingly security, compatibility and inconsistent or nonexistent planning. Red Hat A/NZ regional vice-president and general manager, Max McLaren, said many business leaders are still reluctant to let go of the traditional model of capital expenditure, hardware budgets and datacentres…