Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jaikumar Vijayan.

Google’s Compute Engine cloud infrastructure hosting service suffered a nearly two-hour disruption between late Feb. 18 and early Feb. 19 causing disruption for customers on a global scale.  The disruption started at 10:59 p.m. Pacific Time on Feb. 18 and was resolved shortly before 1 a.m. on Feb. 19, a Google incident report noted.

The company blamed the outage on a glitch in an internal software system used to manage virtual machine egress traffic on the Google Compute Engine. According to Google, the software stopped issuing updated routing information bring outbound traffic to a halt…

Grazed from DataCenterDynamics.  Author: Drew Amorosi.

The privacy push continues at Microsoft, as the software and now cloud giant announced that its Azure cloud platform, Office 365, and Dynamics CRM Online have been verified by the British Standards Institute (BSI) as complying with guidelines laid out in ISO’s international standard for protecting personal information in the cloud. The company also noted that Bureau Veritas has provided the same verification for Microsoft Intune.

According to two official company blogs, Microsoft is “the first major cloud provider to adopt the world’s first international standard for cloud privacy,” and Azure “is the first cloud platform to adopt ISO 27018.”…

Grazed from WhaTech.  Author: Editorial Staff.

In November 2013, in a post on the itnews.com.au web site, IT consultant Dez Blanchfield described OpenStack as "the one technology likely to pose a competitive threat to the Amazon Web Services and Google juggernauts."

Citing Gartner, he explained: "AWS now has five times the infrastructure-as-a-service compute capacity of its 14 biggest rivals put together. The individual efforts of Rackspace, Microsoft, IBM, HP, CSC or Telstra are unlikely to create a genuine competitive threat in the near-term."  So, OpenStack is clearly important. Very important. But what exactly is it? And 14 months down the track, how is it faring?…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella remarked in October that the company’s Azure cloud computing platform "supports any OS on any container technology, so we support both Linux and Windows Server," before declaring that "Microsoft loves Linux." Today, as enterprises mull placing their big data workloads on third-party clouds, the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant is extending its embrace of the rival, open-source operating system.

Linux—indeed the open-source movement in general—has already had a major impact on how Microsoft approaches the exploding market for business cloud solutions, according to Oliver Chiu, product marketing manager for Microsoft Hadoop/Big Data and Data Warehousing. The company "is committed to openness, underscored by recent announcements including 20% of Azure Virtual Machines run on Linux, ‘Microsoft loves Linux’, open sourcing the .NET Core, our contributions to Apache Hadoop, and support for Docker containers," he asserted in Feb. 18 blog post…

Grazed from YouEye. Author: PR Announcement.

YouEye, provider of an Agile Research Platform that decodes customer experiences, today announced that the company was recently a finalist in the prestigious 2014-2015 Cloud Awards Program in the "Data Innovation of the Year" and "Most Promising Start-Up" categories. Other nominees included Cloudera, CloudSigma and the US Energy Information Administration. The quality of the nominees underscores YouEye’s ability to compete with multimillion-dollar programs and well-established industry leaders.

YouEye stands out in the cloud services market by providing an innovative Agile Research Platform that combines powerful study design and multimedia capture tools for desktop and mobile with a best-in-class experience analytics suite that identifies critical behavioral, sentiment, and event trends, providing qualitative context to quantitative data…

Grazed from CIO-Today. Author: Dan Heilman.

CRM giant Salesforce unveiled updates to its Analytics Cloud on Thursday that it says will fuel the next wave of mobile Relevant Products/Services innovation. With the new updates, users will be able to import and analyze new data Relevant Products/Services sources, build entirely new dashboards and share insights in just seconds from their phones.

In addition, a free "playground" version of the Analytics Cloud was released for desktop and mobile devices. With that product, users can employ Analytics Cloud using their own imported data or a variety of preloaded data sets…

Grazed from Entrepreneur. Author: Ann C. Logue.

The average cost to a U.S. business of a lost or stolen record containing customer information is $201, according to the 2014 Cost of Data Breach Study conducted by the Ponemon Institute for IBM. The most expensive incidents are due to malicious attacks, not to human error or process failure. That’s a problem for your business.

Mega-retailer Target may have had to pay cash to counter its late-2013 data hack, which reportedly affected up to 110 million customers, but it was lucky. Similar breaches have resulted in the destruction of companies. “If you get it wrong, your business can be erased,” says Ken Ammon, chief strategy officer at Xceedium Inc. in Herndon, Va. Xceedium sells platforms used by government and major corporate customers to manage access privileges on information systems…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

Hybrid cloud is becoming more popular among enterprises, which is reflected in new data from RightScale. RightScale’s "2015 State of the Cloud Report" showed that many enterprises are focused on implementing a hybrid cloud strategy that encompasses public and private clouds along with existing virtualized environments.

Additionally, RightScale researchers found that enterprise central IT teams are now making the majority of cloud spending decisions in organizations worldwide. "As enterprise IT has become more open to public cloud and more comfortable with cloud security, it is now in a strong position to broker cloud services to internal customers and drive cloud adoption forward," RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said in a prepared statement…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-research/02192015/rightscale-do-enterprises-want-private-public-or-hybrid-clouds

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Cloud computing and storage deals are set to rise in 2015, which should cause a jump in solutions well suited for more types of industries and businesses, including midsize firms. It’s an opportunity for MSPs to expand their offerings and target the growing midsize market.

Mergers Matter

A new market forecast report by 451 Research featured in Enterprise Tech found that technology mergers and acquisitions trends that flooded the cloud, software and storage market in 2014 should continue through 2015. One segment, cloud computing, is set to add layers of new services to complement current offerings…

Grazed from Fujitsu.  Author: PR Announcement.

Fujitsu today announced that it will migrate all internal systems to a new cloud platform, underlining the benefits of cloud computing as a more efficient, flexible and cost-effective solution even for the largest global companies. It will consist of approximately 640 large-scale and complex systems across some 13,000 servers globally that encompass a mixture of legacy and cutting-edge systems.

The transition will proceed in stages starting in February 2015 and is scheduled to be completed within five years with an expected reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) of 35 billion yen...