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…

Grazed from IEEE.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing are emerging as a promising service platform for the next-generation Internet. By integrating heterogeneous service models and devices into a cohesive system, IoT exhibits tremendous potential to meet the information-processing demands of smart environments. Similarly, the pervasive nature of cloud computing promises to make low-profile “things” resource rich by enhancing their processing and storage capabilities.

IoT encompasses various technical areas, such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs), embedded systems, radio frequency identification (RFID), and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication systems. IoT will enable the development of smart and autonomous environments by allowing billions of “things” to communicate to provide services in fields such as business, healthcare, social networks, logistics, agriculture, and e-commerce…

Grazed from IBNLinve.  Author: Editorial Staff.

As Microsoft is celebrating its 40th anniversary today, we can’t help but admire at the way the software giant has been able to establish its empire on Windows operating system that runs on many of the world’s desktops, laptops, phones, and servers.

Having enjoyed such a position in the consumer and business market, will it ever open its palms and let others leverage its potential of being the most-used OS for free? One of the company’s top engineer says yes.  Mark Russinovich, one of Microsoft’s top engineers said during the ChefConf conference that the company could open source the code that underpins the OS…

Grazed from LegitNews.  Author: Nathan Kirsch.

In 2010 we first learned about the OnLive Game Service and how they were going to be one of the dominant companies in building the future of cloud computing. In late 2012 the company was acquired by Lauder Partners and a new company was formed called OnLive Inc.

Over the years the Onlive Cloud Gaming service has been used by millions of users in the US and Europe, but that appears to be coming to an end on April 30th.  It appears that Sony has stepped in and bought many of the assets that OnLive had in a deal that has not had the terms disclosed…

Grazed from GenomeWeb. Auhor: Editorial Staff.

The National Institutes of Health issued a position statement this week revising its existing polices on use of cloud computing services for storing and analyzing controlled access data stored in the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGAP). In response to repeated calls from the community, the NIH began reviewing its existing policies for accessing and using information contained in dbGAP to give biomedical researchers the option to use cloud infrastructure analyze data from the repository on.

Under the existing policy, dbGAP data could not be analyzed using cloud compute because of concerns about the security of the data and to avoid risking the privacy of research participants. Now, according to the newly issued position statement, the NIH will allow investigators to request permission to move dbGAP genomic and associated phenotype data from NIH repositories to public or private cloud systems for data storage and analysis…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Sander Van Vugt.

Every major IT vendor wants to convince data center administrators that their infrastructure isn’t up-to-date without cloud. But do you really need cloud to be considered modern? And what kind of cloud? Cloud computing offers a maximum amount of versatility on servers. Deploying a server in a cloud environment is easy because it is automated. System administrators are no longer needed for the install. Instead, the user can automatically deploy one within minutes.

OpenStack is an open source cloud infrastructure. It has origins in the Linux kernel for operating systems, but doesn’t just fit Linux apps. An OpenStack infrastructure is open enough for integration with other platforms, such as Windows. Integration happens at two levels. At the lower level there are the compute nodes, which are the servers that host VMs — known as instances…