Grazed from Wired. Author: Mark Greene.

Over the last 20 years, software has slowly eaten the world. Marc Andreessen pointed out this trend in 2011 and noted that increasingly industries are going to be disrupted by software. Here we sit four years later with an “app” for everything. “There’s an app for that” is leading to the acceleration of fragmented software.

The Rise of the App

The rise of the app has meant a shift away from large and complex applications that typically were bundled into a platform or suite (think ERP) to a world of small, consumable, and easy to use apps with specialized functionality. The movement from monolithic applications to individual apps is providing more personalization opportunities…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Dan Kusnetzky.

Fortscale’s Idan Tendler, CEO and co-founder, came by to discuss what his company has been doing since our last conversation at the Splunk user group conference roughly a year ago. Each time I have the opportunity to speak with him, I learn something more about how analysis of the organization’s operational and machine logs can help.

This time Tendler pointed out that many of today’s security breaches or thefts of customer data can be attributed either to malicious staff behavior, or staff not following the enterprise’s data governance or security policies. Staffers are typically given access to many of the organization’s data assets…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Danny Bradbury.

Vancouver-based firm CA Cloud is offering CIOs the chance to run their own private cloud implementations, using open sourced cloud platform OpenStack. The benefits of cloud computing are well understood: elasticity, cost-effectiveness, and the option for automation and self-provisioning of services.

For many companies, moving to a public cloud-based infrastructure (where lots of customers share a single server) is too risky. Heavy regulation and compliance issues, along with their own security concerns, may prevent them being part of a multi-tenanted environment. Many may not have the time or resource to build up a cloud infrastructure outside their own organisation…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Klint Finley.

Running a startup isn’t fair. To succeed, you need talented software engineers who can write good code. You need experienced product managers who can guide those engineers along the way. And in the end, you need savvy marketing types who can promote the finished product. But inevitably, most of the top talent goes elsewhere.

Tech giants like Google and Facebook—not to mention incredibly well-funded newbies like Uber and Dropbox—always have an advantage in the talent wars. They can attract the best and the brightest with enormous salaries, juicy stock options, and a host of other perks, from chic Silicon Valley open office spaces to sprawling coffee bars to of-the-moment artwork…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Natalie Leher.

When your data and files are going to be ‘up there somewhere’, it’s only normal that you’ll want to think security in the cloud. You could of course adopt the strategy of never betting more (data) than you can afford to lose. However, the cost reductions available and the massive move of your competitors to the cloud may force you to use rather more of it than you anticipated. Gotta keep up with the neighbors, right? Well, it turns out that the applications you live next to in cloud computing can also be a source of security risk for you…

1. Not So Nice Neighbors Depending on what kind of cloud computing you want to do, other customers may affect you in a couple of ways. For example, if a multitenant cloud database is not properly designed, a flaw in somebody else’s application may open the door for a hacker to everybody’s data in that database…

Grazed from DataCenterDynamics. Author: Drew Amorosi.

This week Google announced it would provide a cloud computing performance evaluator called PerKit Benchmarker. The evaluation tool is hosted on the open-source collaboration site Github, and will allow users of the Google Cloud Platform, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft’s Azure to measure their current provider’s performance against industry-established benchmarks.

“For those of you developing applications on the cloud, performance is often a critical concern”, Google’s Cloud Platform Performance Team wrote in a blog. “It turns out that it’s surprisingly difficult to evaluate cloud offerings beyond just looking at price or feature charts”. Google said it then invited input from other cloud providers, industry analysts and academia – in all, more than 30 parties – to help develop the benchmarking framework. Industry contributors included, among others, CenturyLink, Microsoft, Intel, Rackspace, and ARM…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Seth Mitchell.

Twelve million. That’s the number of physical servers around the world still running Windows Server 2003, according to Microsoft’s count. But July will see extended support for the beloved 11-year-old workhorse operating system come to an end. It’s never easy to change, but since when has IT been immune to change? You deal with change every day.

IT teams today serve less as technicians and more as service providers to the business, thanks to highly virtualized environments and cloud computing in its various flavors. To keep pace with business demands in these contexts—better yet, to stay one step ahead of the game—IT needs to make the leap to a next-generation server operating system…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Iain Thomson.

The US Congress, now fully under Republican control, is getting busy with laws to protect data: two bipartisan bills appeared on Thursday that would bring the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) bang up to date in the 21st century. The first piece of proposed legislation [PDF] is the Electronic Communications Privacy Amendments Act of 2015, submitted in the Senate by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and in the House by Representatives Kevin Yoder (R-KS) and Jared Polis (D-CO).

The bill would require cops and the Feds to show probable cause when seeking a search warrant to rifle through people’s emails and other data. (California is mulling over a similar requirement.) Under today’s rules, set back when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, deem that any email can be searched, with probable cause or not, provided at least 180 days have passed since the message was sent and received…

Grazed from FederalTimes. Author: Aaron Boyd.

Federal agencies are under presidential order to consider cloud-first policies when developing IT projects, however the type of cloud environment they use is left up to the discretion of agency officials. During a cloud panel hosted by Red Hat on Feb. 12, several agency CIOs debated the virtues of public and private clouds, with one suggesting private clouds don’t really fit the as-a-service model.

"The private cloud concept is a little bit of a transitional concept between where we were and where we need to be," GSA CIO Sonny Hashmi said. "Are we at the point in the industry where full public cloud can meet all of our challenges in terms of security, control, compliance, auditability?…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Joab Jackson.

How much cloud computing does your enterprise application need? Hewlett-Packard has some of the guesswork out of cloud procurement by adding seven new preconfigured options to its Helion set of cloud services. The Helion VPC (virtual private cloud) offerings are tailored to meet a range of computing requirements, from lighter workloads such as software development to more demanding jobs such as running complex ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.

The configurations are based on the data center and cloud usage that HP has found with its clients usage of the cloud, said Jeff Moyer, HP senior director of global infrastructure and hosting services. By determining the right amount of computational resources needed for specific workloads, HP has potentially reduced the amount of planning that organizations would need to do to procure the optimal amount of infrastructure services…