Grazed from Fool. Author: Jeremy Bowman.

International Business Machines Corp. suffered another setback on Monday after the tech titan registered its 12th straight quarterly sales decline as investors continue to wait for the company turnaround strategy to bear fruit. Shares traded down just 1% the day after the earnings release as the report was not all bad news. Management said adjusted operating profits rose 4%, and currency-neutral revenues in strategic imperatives rose 30%.

As IBM transforms itself from a hardware manufacturer to a 21st century tech-services provider, the company has staked its future on core offerings that it believes will eventually drive sales and profits consistently higher. Those are cloud computing, business analytics, growth markets, and smarter planet, according to its 2011 Road Map to the Future…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Serdar Yegulalp.

Operating systems like CoreOS and Joyent’s SmartOS/Triton have worked to redefine, in radically different ways, what an OS needs to be to run applications at scale in the cloud. Now another OS is set to join the ranks of those trying to do the cloud-OS thing in a maverick way: OSv, an open source, hypervisor-optimized OS “designed to run an application stack without getting in the way.”

OSv runs existing Linux applications, but is not itself Linux; it’s an entirely new OS written from the ground up in C/C++. It can run on a slew of hypervisors and virtual-machine systems, or in cloud environments like Amazon EC2 or Google Compute Engine. The company claims significant performance gains for apps running on OSv, saying the boost comes from various design choices that rely on the hypervisor, rather than separate user and kernel address spaces, for keeping things isolated…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/2913783/cloud-computing/no-linux-no-docker-no-cloud-os-think-again.html

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud computing has many variations and nuances, and everyone is doing something different with it. However, there appear to be four distinct phases to the cloud evolution (or revolution?). We’re still early in the process (working our way through the second phase), but ultimately, it will bring organizations to the point in which decision-making is pushed down through the ranks, and traditional business models are cast aside in favor of more entrepreneurial ventures — even within large corporations.

That’s the word from Don Rippert, IBM general manager of cloud strategy, who discussed where the world is at in the progression in a recently released video. Speaking at the company’s InterConnect event, Rippert started off by reminding attendees that the purpose of cloud wasn’t to make things simpler, but rather, “magnify and amplify” the talents of employees…

Grazed from MIT News.  Author: Larry Hardesty.

In the last 10 years, computer security researchers have shown that malicious hackers don’t need to see your data in order to steal your data. From the pattern in which your computer accesses its memory banks, adversaries can infer a shocking amount about what’s stored there.

The risk of such attacks is particularly acute in the cloud, where you have no control over whose applications are sharing server space with yours. An antagonist could load up multiple cloud servers with small programs that do nothing but spy on other people’s data…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Dave Olivier.

Here’s a safe prediction for 2015: by the end of summer you will have finally said goodbye to that reliable workhorse of your IT infrastructure,Windows Server 2003. In July, Microsoft will stop releasing critical patches and other support for this once-groundbreaking product. In fact, you’ve got much less time than that remaining. If you haven’t yet begun your migration to Windows Server 2012 R2, you need to start planning for it now.

There’s really no rationale for waiting (or, worse, for sticking with the status quo), and all IT professionals understand what’s at stake. After support ends, new security vulnerabilities will place sensitive data at risk of theft, unauthorized access and other attacks—no more patches from Microsoft. How will that impact your business? Let’s examine:…

Superior security  

Businesses looking to ratchet their security up a level can use the Cloud Backup service to back up a copy of their data in the cloud. The new solution from Aruba Cloud delivers a backup service where backups are performed, encrypted and stored independently of the server, virtual machine or computer in question. As such, a backup copy will always be available to the user.

Grazed from Datamation.  Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

When it comes to the cloud, transparency and control are the keys to security. That’s the message coming from Scott Charney, Corporate Vice-President of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing, during a keynote at the RSA security conference here.  "As people move to the cloud, how much transparency do they get into what is going on?" Charney remarked during his keynote.

Charney said that in 2004 Microsoft started to implement its security software development lifecycle. The basic ideas was to have security in design, security by default and security in deployment. Charney said that Microsoft changed the way it updated systems and went to a regular patching cycle that aimed to help improve things…

Grazed from BaselineMag.  Author: Samuel Greengard.

Over the last few years, cloud computing has moved into the mainstream of the enterprise,  emerging as a valuable tool for managing IT systems, software and data. Yet, while the technology solves many security problems, it also introduces new challenges. A recently released "Cloud Security Spotlight Report" from Cloud Research Partners sheds light on emerging issues and how enterprise business and IT leaders are coping with them.

The survey of 1,000 cyber-security professionals identifies a number of key drivers and risk factors related to cloud adoption, including unauthorized access, hijacking of accounts and dealing with malicious insiders. Overall, nearly 90 percent of respondents expressed concern about security and data risk. "Cloud security is top of mind for cyber-security professionals," noted Holger Schulze, founder of the Information Security Community on LinkedIn, which partnered on the report…

Grazed from TodayOnline.  Author: Editorial Staff.
 

Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei Technologies said yesterday that it would launch its public cloud computing services for corporate customers in July, becoming the latest player to enter the fast-growing market in Asia’s largest economy.

At Huawei’s Global Analyst Summit in Shenzhen, the company’s rotating chief executive Eric Xu said: “We hope that once it is launched, we can bring some surprises to all our enterprise customers.”…

In fact, storage is the new Wild West of the technology landscape, with a flood of new vendors and technology vying for companies’ IT dollars. From virtual storage to all flash drives to auto-tiering across storage drive types to hyperconverged systems, storage innovation is all the rage. I recently attended a couple VMUG events, including those in Austin and Silicon Valley, and my unscientific poll indicated that at least one-third of the vendors in the expo areas were pitching something to do with storage (I’m including the hyperconvergence vendors).