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…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

What lurks in the shadows? For many midsize companies, it is the specter of unapproved cloud services leveraged by end-users needlessly putting both corporate data and cloud-based networks at risk. As it becomes clear just how far shadow cloud services extend, a question emerges: Can IT professionals regain control, or is this free-for-all here to stay?

Behind Closed Networks

According to a recent article from CIO, "many companies contain workstations with software that is not approved by the Information Technology (IT) department; instead, it has been adopted and installed by individuals or even, in some cases, entire departments." Simply put, not just employees but entire business units are now willing to circumvent IT policies they find too restrictive, and the open nature of public cloud services makes this a simple task…

Grazed from CNBC. Author: Ari Levy.

Wall Street has become quite familiar by now with cloud computing. The model of delivering services over the Web has gained so much momentum that public market investors, who traditionally parked their tech dollars with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Cisco, have dozens of new stocks to choose from if they want growth.

But despite the hype surrounding cloud and the rapid influx of capital from money managers, Wall Street is still puzzled when it comes to valuing cloud vendors. That’s because, of the 26 index members to go public most recently, 21 are losing money on a GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) basis. And not just a little dough. Those unprofitable companies were a combined $388.7 million in the red in the last quarter…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Pity your private cloud, if you have one. If cloud analysts are to be believed, private cloud is losing ground as public cloud providers — chiefly Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft — keep adding features and functions, many of which target enterprise IT buyers.

Last week, for example, Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman blogged that 95 percent of enterprise IT types he surveyed found something lacking in their own private clouds. Of course Bittman loaded the gun for them, distilling the gripes he’d already compiled as reasons “your enterprise public cloud is failing” into key categories and then polling an audience about them at a Gartner event…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Kristopher Spadea.

Thought you were going to read about erotica in the cloud? Sorry to disappoint! But there are indeed 50 shades of grey and more when it comes to selecting cloud computing services. So if you are thinking about migrating to the cloud or if you want to improve your ROI in the cloud, here are the shades of “grey” you’ll need to be defining:

Shades of Grey in Business Objectives – Identifying Why You Are Moving Into The Cloud

1. There are as many business objectives for the cloud as there are shades of grey, such as capex to opex budgeting, flexibility, agility, high availability, etc. Why do you want to move to the cloud?
2. Saying that your objectives are important isn’t enough. How important are these outcomes to the success of your business? Are they all equally important, or can you rank them?…

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

Never has the hunger for bandwidth been as high as it is today. To meet that demand, Bell Labs, the industrial research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, has been studying how high-end networks use converged IP and optical transport technologies to meet today’s network demands.

The researchers found that converged IP/optical control integration could reduce network resource requirements without compromising service availability. This was done by "comparing the relative cost of integrating and coordinating resiliency methods in both the IP routing and optical transport network. Resilience is the network’s ability to resume normal operations if a failure occurs and is an essential component of an operator’s highly reliable network."…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Ericka Chickowski.

The volume and diversity of cloud services in use by companies continues to rise significantly year-over-year. And, according to a report out yesterday by Skyhigh Networks, the good news is that security capabilities have also matured as deployments have grown. Increasingly more services are offering better encryption, multi-factor authentication and ISO 27001 certification proving their in-house security practices.

Nevertheless end user organizations are still struggling with data governance and access control in the cloud. The Cloud Adoption & Risk (CAR) Report showed that from fourth quarter 2013 to fourth quarter 2014, the average number of cloud services in use within the enterprises increased by 43 percent to 897 services, which includes both sanctioned and shadow IT applications…