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…

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…