Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Matt Asay.

If you’re an enterprise software vendor today, there’s only one company to fear: Amazon. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger perhaps said it most honestly ("if a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever"), but the sentiment is widely shared — or it should be. After all, AWS (Amazon Web Services) plays by different rules, spoiling the comfortable margins and business models of yesterday.

While AWS used to confine itself to the relatively small IaaS market, it now dabbles in everything from email and calendaring systems to document storage services and various PaaS solutions. Indeed, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has declared, AWS is in the "business of pain management for enterprises," and there’s plenty of pain to go around…

Grazed from FederalRadioNews. Author: Jared Serbu.

The Pentagon is already working on changes to federal acquisition rules which would require stepped-up notification procedures when private companies hosting DoD data have their systems penetrated by hackers. But the department evidently feels a sense of urgency about those rules when it comes to its still-emerging use of cloud computing.

On Feb. 8, DoD published a class deviation — a sparsely-used procedure that lets the department implement regulatory changes immediately — telling all of its contracting officers that if they are purchasing anything remotely resembling cloud computing services, they must follow new procedures the DoD CIO laid out last month in its new security requirements guide for cloud computing…

Read more from the source @ http://www.federalnewsradio.com/1323/3805533/DoD-accelerates-security-rules-for-cloud-computing

Grazed from BusinessCloud. Author: Ian Murphy.

One of the key benefits of Software as a Service (SaaS), cloud, containers and even application virtualisation is the ability to create a self-service approach for users and customers. According to a survey by Matillion that took 12 months, covered 150 countries, 18 business sectors and involved responses from 10,000 senior decision makers, the promise of self-service for Business Intelligence (BI) is more myth than substance.

The survey, which can be found here (registration required), focused on one single question: "What is your biggest challenge around management" and respondents were given seven options to choose from.

• Freeing up IT resource from reporting/analytics
• Replacing a BI system
• Delivering mobile BI
• Reducing the cost of producing reports
• Unlocking data buried in systems
• Reporting/analysing across multiple systems
• Delivering self-service reporting/analysis…

Grazed from NetworkAsia.  Author: Brian Karlovsky.

 Hitachi Data Systems is set to acquire SAP Cloud service provider, oXya, in a bid to extend its portfolio of managed Cloud services.  The acquisition is expected to close by the end of March and is subject to customary closing conditions.

Upon the close of the acquisition, oXya, with more than 500 employees, will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Data Systems and will continue to execute its current business model under oXya vice-president and chairman, Frederic de Belloy, reporting to Hicham Abdessamad, HDS executive vice-president, Global Services…

Grazed from PR.Com.  Author: PR Announcement.

The proliferation of cloud computing, big data, BYOD, mobile and inter-connected networks have become opportunistic breeding grounds for cyber criminals to disrupt business operations and cause financial loss as well as to gain access to corporate and personal data. Such losses were estimated last year in excess of $500 billion effecting companies of all sizes.

The impact of a corporate security exposure or breach is staggering and prior implications have proven to result in a loss of revenue, customer confidence and litigation…

Grazed from New York Post.  Author: James Covert.

What would Steve Jobs do if he were still alive and well at Apple?  Aspiring tech tycoons might better ask: What would Steve Jobs do if he were still alive and someplace else?

That’s the advice from John Sculley, the legendary Pepsi exec who famously fired Jobs from Apple — only to be ousted himself a decade later after increasing the company’s revenues tenfold…

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Sue Trembley.

In January 2012, new EU rules designed to create a secure and unified landscape for the collection, use and retention of data were announced.  The changes in regulation were based in part on consumer research undertaken two years earlier and aimed to reflect growing concerns around online data privacy, the evolving digital landscape and globalisation.

The new rules would give individuals greater control over their personal data, make businesses more accountable for that data – with stricter requirements for protection and penalties around data breaches, for example – and commit EU member states to a set of consistent, legally-enforced regulations and rigid definitions…

Grazed from LawBlogs.  Author: Mike Nonaka.

On February 7, 2013, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) council released a supplement to the payment card industry data security standards (PCI-DSS) on the use of cloud technologies and considerations for maintaining PCI DSS controls in cloud environments.  The supplement is intended for merchants, service providers, assessors, and other entities in evaluating the use of cloud computing in the context of PCI DSS.

The supplement considers “cloud computing” to mean a model for enabling on-demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or cloud provider interaction…

Read more from the source @ http://www.lawblogs.net/go/pci-council-releases-pci-dss-cloud-computing-guidelines

Grazed from BusinessStandard.  Author: Editorial Staff.

"Our industry does not respect tradition. It only respects innovation," Satya Nadella said in February 2014 when he was appointed chief executive officer of Microsoft. After 39 years, the company Bill Gates co-founded had come to be perceived as an out-of-touch behemoth that relied too much on its Windows operating system and failed to move into new markets, like mobile.

Key products such as Microsoft Office – the suite of applications that includes Word and Excel-had been designed around Windows, with only parts converted to work on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android systems. Nadella’s accession would be a chance to reorient the company, getting it to introduce products that looked outside Windows and to develop new business models…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

A few years ago, there was a shift in the world of machine learning.  Companies, such as Skytree and Context Relevant, began popping up, promising to make it easier for companies outside of big banks and web giants to run machine learning algorithms and to do it at a scale congruent with the big data promise they were being pitched.

Soon, there were many startups promising bigger, faster, easier machine learning. Machine learning became the new black as it became baked into untold software packages and services — machine learning for marketing, machine learning for security, machine learning for operations, and on and on and on…