Grazed from AFR. Author: Stewart Oldfield.

Larry Ellison’s Oracle is trying to transition from a mature data management software vendor into the world’s biggest play on cloud computing, a sector which could triple its revenues over the next five years. Off a relatively small base, Oracle’s cloud computing revenues are growing at 30 per cent a year, while the traditional on-premises software licence business on which the company was built is going backwards.

Given Oracle has a market capitalisation of US$190 billion ($233 billion) and a forward price-to-earnings multiple of more than 15, the market appears to be backing Ellison’s vision of becoming the global leader in cloud computing. To his credit Ellison, 70, was one of the first to see the threat/opportunity posed by the internet and cloud computing to big enterprises’ IT demands…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Ikoula and UShareSoft today announced Ikoula’s new Hybrid Cloud Toolbox, powered by UShareSoft’s UForge AppCenter, cloud application templating and migration services. The Toolbox enables Ikoula customers to easily onboard and migrate applications to Ikoula’s Public Cloud as well as to other public or private clouds. Drawing on UForge’s native hybrid cloud functionality, Ikoula’s Toolbox offers customers a fast, flexible way to take advantage of public cloud benefits with full reversibility and governance. Unlike many other public clouds, Ikoula customers will benefit from:

• Application Factory: the easy-to-use application templating and VM builder enable customers to quickly onboard new cloud-native applications to Ikoula’s cloud, as well as reusing application templates from the global catalog.

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

Does anybody even make hardware any more? You’d be forgiven for asking the question, even if it does sound slightly ridiculous. But thinking about it… apart from the device you’re reading this on and the hardware in the server racks in the cloud datacenter serving this website, is anyone even making that much hardware?

The ‘trouble’ is, the whole world has gone software-defined and that means some of what we used to do with hardware, we now do with software. F5 Networks CTO Karl Triebes says that 90 percent of his firm’s innovation and development time is devoted to software, with the remaining 10 percent still focused on the hardware products that his firm is perhaps better known for…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Richard Davies.

Modern IT infrastructure needs to be highly flexible as the strain on servers, sites and databases grows and shrinks throughout the day. Cloud infrastructure is meant to make scaling simple by effectively outsourcing and commoditising your computing capacity so that, in theory, you can turn it on and off like a tap.

However, most approaches to provisioning cloud servers are still based around the idea that you have fixed-size server “instances”, offering you infrastructure in large blocks that must each be provisioned and then configured to work together. This means your infrastructure scaling is less like having a handy tap and more like working out how many bottles of water you’ll need…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Is cloud making a difference in Big Data efforts? Can it deliver the agility and scalability required to handle petabytes and exabytes’ worth of data coming out of enterprises and the Internet of Things? The answer to both questions is “yes, but,” according to highly engaging panel that was part of last week’s Data Summit, held in New York. I had the opportunity to moderate the panel, joined by David Mariani, CEO of AtScale, Wendy Gradek, senior manager with EMC, and Andy Schroepfer, chief strategy officer at Hosting.

Interestingly, the appeal of cloud is not about the cost at all — it’s about the change in the way enterprises view technology solutions. “People are fine with paying as you go,”said Mariani. “And they’ll probably pay more at the end of the day than they would if they paid up front.” Scalability is a huge factor in the appeal of cloud, said Gradek….

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Hamish Barwick.

Cloud computing has become ubiquitous for many companies but keeping it secure can be a challenge. Cloud Security Alliance Asia Pacific executive council chairman Ken Low shared the alliance’s top nine threats to the cloud at a Trend Micro event in Sydney.

9: Shared technology vulnerabilities

“In 2014, we have seen some of the most critical vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed which affected OpenSSL. That allowed people access to encrypted data,” said Low. There was also the discovery of the Shellshock vulnerability which affected the Bash shell. “Cloud service providers can scale their services by sharing infrastructure default to applications but the lack of strong isolation properties in monitored environments make them vulnerable,” said Low. He said that virtual patching can stop shared technology vulnerabilities…

Read more from the source @ http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/575299/top-9-cloud-computing-threats/

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Extending its "lockbox" approach to securing data on the cloud, Microsoft’s research arm today announced a new technology dubbed Verifiable Confidential Cloud Computing, or VC3. Last year, the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant announced a new process for safeguarding cloud data called a lockbox.

Encompassing a set of technologies, along with strict policies and IT practices at the company’s cloud data centers, the approach essentially places customers in complete control of their data and requires that they issue their approval before even Microsoft’s own administrators can access protected information…

This latest virtualization exploit is being widely reported to affect virtual machines running on hypervisor platforms such as Xen, KVM and native QEMU. 

A security researcher, CrowdStrike, discovered and reported the new vulnerability, claiming it could allow a hacker to infiltrate potentially every machine on a datacenter’s network, leaving millions of virtual machines vulnerable to attack.

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Serdar Yegulalp.

The race to the bottom in cloud computing continues apace, and Google’s doing its best to plummet the fastest. The latest Google Cloud Platform revisions have cut prices between 5 and 30 percent for various virtual machine configuration types. Plus, there’s a new VM type, called Preemptible VMs, that seems specifically designed to put pressure on Amazon.

According to the official Google Cloud Platform blog, the current round of price reductions cuts the cost of a U.S.-based Standard instance by 20 percent, and a Micro instance by 30 percent, with similar price reductions set for Europe and Asia. Google’s pushing the whole package of cost reductions — including automatic discounts and per-minute billing — as a 40 percent cost reduction for common workloads over the competition…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jason Perlow.

My ZDNet colleagues Ed Bott and David Gewirtz are both fed up with Microsoft over software licensing issues, albeit for different reasons. Ed is annoyed with Microsoft over its poor communication of its Windows editions and David just wants to line up Microsoft’s legal department in front of a firing squad.

Let’s be absolutely clear — figuring out software licensing, regardless of which vendor you are dealing with, is never fun. I never enjoyed it when I was an IT consultant in the financial sector, I hated it when I worked as a systems architect at IBM, and I certainly don’t enjoy it today in my role at Microsoft…