Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Lucian Constantin.

Google forgot to renew one of its TLS certificates, leading to service disruption Saturday for people using Gmail through third-party email clients. The problem was fixed in a matter of hours, but should serve as a reminder to online service operators that keeping track of digital certificate expiration dates is important and should be planned for in advance.

Some users reported Saturday on Twitter and other sites that email clients like Microsoft Outlook and OS X Mail were displaying certificate errors when trying to send email messages through smtp.gmail.com. It seems that it wasn’t the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server’s certificate that expired, but one higher up in the chain that corresponded to Google Internet Certificate Authority G2—an intermediate certificate authority operated by Google…

Read more from the source @ http://www.pcworld.com/article/2906216/expired-google-certificate-temporarily-disrupts-gmail-service.html

Grazed from SysCon. Author: Roger Strukhoff.

The PC revolution has redefined the notion of a computer over the past four decades. Now it might be time to redefine the notion of a collection of computers, that is, to redefine the notion of a datacenter. Datacenters are thought of as big places. Some of the more recent plants used by mega-users like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook have acres of land under roof, with many tens of thousands of individual systems and power requirements that would support a small city.

Even your friendly local, on-site enterprise datacenter is likely to be a big room with a big budget commitment and a lot of people hired to manage it. But what if a datacenter could fit in the corner of a room, or under a desk, or in the palm of your hand? This seems to be the direction we’re headed, as data loads simultaneously grow exponentially and become ever more distributed…

Grazed from DigitalNewsAsia.  Author: Martin Bishop.

IN an effort to capitalise on the benefits of cloud computing, early adopters turned to multiple cloud vendors to satisfy their various infrastructure needs. For instance, you may have been working with a customer relationship manager (CRM) specialist for hosting your customer insights, and a private cloud expert for financial data.
 
This approach delivered initial gains as IT leaders found their way in the cloud, but it is not conducive to long-term success.  Working with a variety of vendors can create complex environments that are hard to control, manage and integrate, while it can also lead to organisational silos, preventing collaboration and the easy transfer of data, limiting performance and the services delivered…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Louis Columbus.

 47% of marketing departments will have 60% or more of their applications on a cloud platform in two years.  When asked which Value-Added Reseller (VAR) is most likely to win their enterprises’ business for a significant hosting project, the majority said IBM IBM +0.8% (18%) followed by Microsoft MSFT -1.02% (11%), Amazon (8%) and Dell (7%).

Database (57%), e-mail (54%) and business applications (ERP, CRM & industry-specific apps) (49%) are the three leading application hosting investments enterprises will be making in the next two years…

Grazed from AppDeveloperMag.  Author: Stuart Parkerson.

AURO recently launched their cloud application marketplace that includes a library of more than 50 leading open-source packages, in addition to most OS distributions ( including Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, CoreOS and Windows) for developers to deploy on its Canadian Cloud Computing service. Each of these OS distributions can be deployed on AURO’s Cloud Computing Platform which is AWS and GCE compatible with full API controls.

AURO delivers a portfolio of services that include IT Infrastructure and Cloud Hosting, while giving users the benefits of Canada’s unique regulatory environment and data security, all within a 100% Canadian platform…

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Christian Lanng.

The last few decades have seen a huge amount of effort and resources poured in to sustainability and corporate responsibility initiatives.  Despite the valuable intentions, many have struggled to make a real difference, or at least on the required scale. This is no-one’s fault in particular, but because production has outstripped planetary boundaries and the environment is contending with mass-scale pollution.

But why is this? Succinctly put: “Companies can’t be sustainable in an unsustainable society.”  The idea of a sharing economy was borne out of a need to rectify this situation. It is a system built around the sharing of human and physical resources and there are hundreds of compelling new businesses tapping into this idea…

Grazed from EurAsiaReview.  Author: Cindy Hurst.

A nation’s success in military operations often rises and falls on the basis of how well it communicates. When a nation does not secure its communications effectively, its enemies intercept and read its communications and win thereby military and diplomatic advantages.1

Vice Admiral Noel Gayler, former director of the National Security Agency, once wrote, “Important as it is in peacetime, communications security becomes even more important in wartime.”2 For a few decades, nations have been relying on encryption systems to protect a wide variety of computerized transmissions ranging from commerce to government to military communications…

Grazed from TheNewStack.  Author: Joe Emison.

The rise of cloud computing (read: VMs, containers, bare metal by API) is of enormous benefit to businesses everywhere: we can now deliver products faster and better using fewer workers than ever before. And we are seeing a concordant interest in technologies that improve on the first iterations of cloud computing, from monitoring tools to containers and Docker. But the knee-jerk focus on improved versions of cloud computing ignores the fact that cloud computing is in the process of being disrupted by cloud-based services in a way that will ultimately render these improvements irrelevant to most organizations and developers.

The middle tier is being abstracted by cloud services. The developer doesn’t have to deal with all the complexities that have historically come with managing apps. It is the service provider, not the user, that manages the application servers, containers, monitoring and everything else. A user developing a thick AngularJS web app just makes a call to the service…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Ron Miller.

Conventional IT wisdom says that you’re safer and more secure when you control your own on-premises datacenter. Yet if you think about every major data breach over the last two years, whether Anthem, Sony, JPMorgan or Target, all involved on-premises datacenters, not the cloud.

In fact, if a cloud service has proper controls, it could be safer than running your own datacenter. Amazon, Google, Salesforce and Box to a company have much more at stake when it comes to security. A breach could prove devastating to their businesses…

Grazed from UberGizmo.com.   Author: Editorial Staff.

Traffic jams are a part of our everyday problems, and there is no denying that most of our time is spent suffering through these jams. How about we tell you that soon you will be able to foresee these jams! and No, it is not an April fool gimmick. Reportedly, Microsoft is working on a research that could forecast traffic jams.

The company has collaborated with the Federal University of Minas Gerais,which is among Brazil’s largest universities, to initiate the research project, known as Traffic Prediction Project. If all goes well, then we could foresee a jam up to an hour before it happens…