Grazed from DarkReading. Author: Tim Wilson.

In past years, the job of the enterprise chief information security officer (CISO) was to establish and maintain a security perimeter around corporate data and a strategy for defending it. But today’s CISO is faced with a wide variety of new challenges that the security department has never seen before.

While cloud computing, open source, distributed and outsourced software development, bring-your-own-device policies, and other initiatives create “shadow IT” environments that often take control out of the CISO’s hands, the steady barrage of high-volume, high-publicity security breaches in the headlines are putting unprecedented pressures on the CISO’s office. The reality is that today’s CISO is under more scrutiny than ever – including from the board – and yet, he/she has less control over the IT environment than ever before…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: Rich Tehrani.

It’s exciting to see that cloud is being embraced by so many. From small businesses to the largest, cloud computing solutions are eagerly being rolled out for CRM, telephony, UC, accounting, storage and anything else you can think of. While the benefits of the tech are clear, what we need to worry about now is management of these cloud solutions.

In fact, we should be aware of the trend we see in cloud as it follows similar ones in telecom. There was a time when companies lost track of their telecom expenses. They had many users, many lines and typically overpaid for services because they didn’t know how much of a discount they could achieve. Moreover, they paid for many lines which were never in use…

Grazed from SmallBusinessComputing. Author: Aleksandr Peterson.

According to a recent estimate by research firm Markets and Markets, the global cloud computing industry will be worth more than $121 billion in 2015, reflecting a 26.2 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Everywhere you turn, people are talking about cloud software, cloud platforms, cloud infrastructure, and cloud storage, but it’s far more than a cultural fad.

Cloud technology has veritably transformed the way people manage their lives and businesses, whether they’re storing files in a Google Drive or purchasing a cloud-hosted business productivity suite. Gartner has gone so far as to predict the demise of traditional IT sourcing and a complete transition to cloud office systems before the end of the year…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: John Webster.

The Software Defined Storage (SDS) model in its early days was often compared to Software Defined Networking (SDN). Both used virtualization as a foundational technology and replaced hardware constructs with software loaded onto general purpose, open, commodity platforms. The early vendors of SDS such as EMC also applied SDN’s data plane/control plane abstraction model to SDS although that reference has died down considerably. Since then, SDS has gone its own separate way.

However, the comparison remains worth exploring even now. SDN has become a fundamental cloud construct—as fundamental as server virtualization—and as such has achieved far more success to date than SDS. The question is why? SDN vendors point to how they have been able to greatly simplify the management of large networks making the attributes of cloud computing possible…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Maribel Lopez.

According to CTIA, 1.3 billion smartphones were sold in the U.S. in 2014. Several years ago, companies would call Lopez Research to ask questions about bring your own device (BYOD) programs and what mobile operating systems a company should use to build its apps. At that time, many businesses were skeptical that purchasing tablets would deliver any business value.

Today, no one calls about these concerns. Smartphones and tablets are widely used across all types of organizations. Most organizations are building apps to support more than one mobile operating system and BYOD programs are also in full force. A Lopez Research survey revealed 65 percent of U.S. firms have BYOD programs…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: Corey Eng.

It’s certainly no secret that cloud solutions have become an important and increasingly necessary part of how companies do business today. For enterprises, implementing cloud-based services can help boost productivity, enhance efficiency and reduce costs. Private cloud solutions take the cloud concept one step further. A private cloud configuration looks and acts like the public cloud, giving enterprises the same levels of speed, agility and cost savings — but in a far more secure environment in which dedicated bandwidth and security are guaranteed.

Private cloud configurations are becoming increasingly important to enterprises. In a recent study, Forrester Research found that more than 31 percent of the midsize enterprises have a private cloud in place already. Another 17 percent said they were going to implement one sometime in the next year…

Grazed from DataScienceCentral. Author: Naagesh Padmanaban.

From all indications, 2015 is well on its way to becoming the year of cloud computing. The feverish pitch of activities at key players on one hand and the data as well as observations of industry pundits affirm this. There are apparently a handful of reason to keep the IT industry leaders awake at night.

For starters, per , 2014 revenues for cloud services grew by 60 percent. The global cloud computing market, per Forrester, is expected to grow to over $191 billion by 2020. IDC also foresees a robust market for cloud computing services. The cloud computing stacks – Infrastructure as a service (Iaas), Platform as a service (Paas) and Software as a service (Saas) – are all driving the healthy cloud computing market growth…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: Peter Bernstein.

Did you know that 90 percent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years? Do you realize that 80 percent of it is unstructured? Why is this important? After Gigaom Research and North Bridge Venture Partners released their fourth 2014 Future of Cloud Computing survey, I had a chance to pick the brain of Michael Skok at Gigaom’s Structure event. Skok is founder of the Future of Cloud program and General Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners. He believes that, within three years, more data will live in the cloud than anywhere else.

Skok noted that, “With four years of data, we’re now really beginning to see some interesting trends, such as the five-fold increase in SaaS adoption to 74 percent, and the nearly six-fold increase in PaaS adoption to 41 percent.” Mike Schutz, GM, Cloud Platform Marketing at Microsoft commented that: What comes across to me loud and clear is that even more businesses are no longer asking, ‘why cloud?’ but will focus on figuring out how to execute a long-term cloud strategy.” Here are some additional thoughts from that survey that help explain not only current trends, but the future of cloud computing…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Nanocomputers implanted in our brains that connect to the cloud will usher in a new era of critical thinking and human advancement, Google’s Director of Engineering predicts in a TED Talk. Ray Kurzweil says that by the 2030s, nanobots embedded through the bloodstream into our brains will create hybrid-minds that combine the current power of our brain with the almost limitless processing capacity of cloud-based computers.

These micro-computers will help us get quick answers to complex problems and will provide the extra juice needed to come up with creative new ideas. This new cloud-based capacity we can unlock for our brains will not be the first time we’ve had a vast expansion of the processing ability of our minds…

Grazed from SDTimes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. today announced the availability of Piston CloudOS 4.0, an operating system for the modern data center that transforms clusters of commodity servers into a single unified environment. Used to deploy OpenStack in minutes, CloudOS 4.0 now allows customers and partners to also deploy Hadoop and Spark on bare metal, with forthcoming support for container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm.

The technology behind CloudOS 4.0 has been deployed at scale and in production by hundreds of companies since 2011, including Swisscom, USDA, Zulily, and King Digital Entertainment. This announcement represents Piston’s first expansion into a broader market beyond OpenStack…