Grazed from DarkReading. Author: Bill Kleyman.

When it comes to cloud adoption, one of the longest standing debates revolves around data integrity and security. The FUD around cloud always has involved issues of security and information access. But what if we have it all wrong? What if we are actually misunderstanding the true, underlying business model of a modern cloud environment?

But before we get into that, let’s look at the current data breach landscape. A recent 2014 Ponemon study shows that a probability of a material data breach over the next two years involving a minimum of 10,000 records, at an on-premise data center, is nearly 19 percent. In addition, the study reports:…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.

Cloud computing is becoming more and more prevalent in the financial sector, though many respondents of a recent survey claimed to have less than 50 percent of a solidified, concerted cloud strategy, with controls and security being main concerns. According to the worldwide survey of more than 100 professionals conducted by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and sponsored by CipherCloud, 61 percent of respondents believe a cloud strategy is in the formative stages within their organization, with 39 to 47 percent planning to use a mix of in-house IT, private and public clouds, and 18 percent planning to use private clouds.

None of the respondents has plans to be hosted mostly in a public cloud, according to the report. "Primarily the top security concerns were more focused around data protection," Luciano Santos, vice president of research and member services at the Cloud Security Alliance, told eWEEK. "Data confidentiality, data governance and data breach were the top-ranked security concerns identified by the financial institutions that participated."…

See more at: http://www.eweek.com/small-business/financial-firms-in-search-of-a-cloud-strategy.html#sthash.aaucheLZ.dpuf

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

A recent survey of 1,000 executives discusses some of the benefits enterprises are seeing as a result of cloud computing. What catches the eye, however, is the number of executives who are seeing benefits they never really expected — close to one in four, in many cases. For example, 25 percent say they unexpectedly experienced improved communications within their organizations.

Another 22 percent report increased revenues they did not anticipate, and 22 percent say they experienced greater customer satisfaction — again, not part of the original plan. It’s also notable that 21 percent say cloud has actually delivered improved security. In total, 83 percent of executives report benefits they did not expect to see…

Grazed from BostonGlobe. Author: Jay Fitzgerald.

EMC Corp., the largest technology company in Massachusetts, thinks Wall Street doesn’t understand it. So on Tuesday, the Hopkinton company — known best for its data-storage business, it employs 68,000 people worldwide and reaps $24 billion in annual revenue — will hold a strategy summit in New York City. EMC hopes to convince analysts, investors, and others it really is on the right track.

Most of its top executives, including longtime chief executive Joseph Tucci, will be present to share information, review strategic options, answer questions, and listen to ideas and criticisms. But chances are the summit won’t change many minds. Increasingly, critics say EMC has become a stagnant goliath that isn’t doing enough to pump up its share value and articulate a long-term vision for the 36-year-old company…

Grazed from BusinessSpectator. Author: Michael Cornwell.

The era of flash storage is definitely here and ready for large-scale use by companies of every size, from enterprises to SMEs. With new technologies, companies will benefit from the advantages of using flash drives for storage. Here are some reasons that are being identified by companies as to why they can no longer do without this technology.

Capable of harnessing the data explosion

Companies are still struggling with tight IT budgets, whilst trying to manage large amounts of data. IDC has predicted that the amount of data will increase by more than 50 percent each year over the next few years. This will only increase the demand for storage systems. At the same time, Companies are also demanding higher performance, more power and efficiency, as a result of new technology initiatives such as cloud computing, virtualisation and big data…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Although having a laugh at so-called “enterprise clouds” is a respected pastime in some circles, there’s an argument to be made that they do serve a legitimate purpose. Large-scale public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine are cheap, easy and flexible, but a lot of companies looking to deploy applications on cloud architectures simply don’t need all of that all of the time.

So says Bill Hilf, the senior vice president of Helion (the company’s label for its cloud computing lineup) product management at HP. He came on the Structure Show podcast this week to discuss some recent changes in HP’s cloud product line and personnel, as well as where the company fits in the cloud computing ecosystem…

Grazed from CIOToday. Author: Jef Cozza.

Big Blue moved to beef up its Watson artificial intelligence operation with the acquisition of AlchemyAPI, a machine-learning systems maker. Announced Wednesday, the deal aims to bring 40,000 new developers into IBM’s Watson developer community.

IBM said it plans to integrate AlchemyAPI’s deep-learning technology into the core of its Watson platform, augmenting Watson’s abilities to identifiy hierarchies and understand relationships within large sets of data Relevant Products/Services. The company said it expects the new technology to significantly improve Watson’s learning capabilities. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Alex Davies.

WE’RE ENTERING THE age of the connected car, wherein automakers pump resources into infotainment systems and technologies that let consumers use their phones (and laptops, for anyone still using those things) to communicate with their vehicle. Just about every major automaker has developed a proprietary app that lets owners do things like track their car’s location, review fuel consumption, and see how fast their kids are driving.

That means that everyone who bought a car before these systems became common (or was too cheap to spring for one) is a potential customer for an aftermarket system, and offerings have multiplied of late. Among them is Delphi’s Connect, which plugs into any car’s OBD-II port to provide location tracking, service alerts, and the ability to use one’s smartphone as a key fob and turn the car into a 4G LTE WiFi hotspot…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/2015/03/cloud-computing-can-make-old-beater-connected-car/

Grazed from CloudComputingToday. Author: Arnal Dayaratna.

The following Infographic, sponsored by Sauce Labs, provides data on the changing landscape for application testing given a computing environment increasingly characterized by agile application development, continuous integration processes and mobile apps. As illustrated below, the survey of IT professionals showed that continuous integration and agile methodologies led to the adoption of more automated testing.

Meanwhile, cross-browser testing has achieved greater importance and developers are finding that most of the issues applications experience involve mobile devices in contrast to desktops…

To view inforgraphic visit http://cloud-computing-today.com/2015/03/06/1072434/

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

Not much over a year ago, few people knew about containers, and fewer still knew about Docker. Since then, the idea of building server and applications out of container-based micro-servers, has exploded in popularity. Red Hat has been watching this and now with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host (RHELAH) the company has its own operating system/container pairing to offer the business world.

RHELAB is a purpose-built container host for secure and reliable containerized applications across the open-hybrid cloud. It provides all of the components you’ll need to easily package and run applications written for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 and 7 as containers…