Grazed from Atlasmonitor. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Human Body Version 2.0 project features none other than arch-Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil as its main proponent. The goals have been openly stated for some time: In the coming decades, a radical upgrading of our body’s physical and mental systems, already underway, will use nanobots to augment and ultimately replace our organs.

We already know how to prevent most degenerative disease through nutrition and supplementation; this will be a bridge to the emerging biotechnology revolution, which in turn will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution. By 2030, reverse-engineering of the human brain will have been completed and nonbiological intelligence will merge with our biological brains…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Matt Asay.

No wonder private cloud vendors have started calling themselves "hybrid" clouds: the private cloud vision has failed — utterly and completely. Gartner analyst Tom Bittman asked why 95% of private clouds are failing, but the answer seems clear: the very notion of a privately provisioned cloud service is contradictory and nearly always doomed. Unfortunately, the odds of failure may skyrocket when enterprises turn to OpenStack.

Fail early, fail often

Roughly five years ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive Andy Jassy spotlighted the problem with private clouds: "Companies usually are not able to provision accurately the amount of data center capacity that they require, and this problem recurs when they create their own internal cloud infrastructure."…

StackEngine, the platform that gives organizations the power to simply and massively deploy, manage, and scale resilient Docker applications, today announced the results of its inaugural ‘State of Containers’ survey, focusing on the issues and causes both leading to and prohibiting Docker adoption in the enterprise.

The survey, which polled 745 respondents in the enterprise virtualization and cloud computing field, was put together by StackEngine in partnership with both VMblog and CloudCow. It found that Docker adoption in the enterprise is indeed real and ahead of schedule, with more than 70% either using Docker or evaluating it in their organization. In fact, just 7% responded that they had not heard of the container solution, with 65% saying they were using VMware as their current infrastructure.

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Jay Chapel.

The cloud has changed the game for business and IT. The cloud is a disruptive technology – it fuels innovation, drives performance gains and enables businesses to do more with very little upfront investment. Users can source and deploy their own IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions in a matter of minutes with a few mouse clicks. These user-led cloud acquisitions produce silos of clouds with little to no IT governance, introducing risks to data security, business continuity and expense control.

What is Cloud Governance and Why is it So Important?

According to the website For Dummies, governance is the practice of applying policies that relate to using services. It’s about defining the organizing principles and rules that determine how an organization should behave. Before diving in, let’s take a step back and look at the IT governance process in general, because many of the same principles are relevant to the cloud environment…

Graze from Whir. Author: David Hamilton.

VMware made a series of announcements last week in support of unified “One Cloud” platform for the hybrid cloud that, according to the company, is the “first unified platform for the hybrid cloud.” On Monday, Feb. 2, VMware announced several updates that support this One Cloud effort including the new vSphere 6 platform, VMware Integrated OpenStack, Virtual SAN 6, vSphere Virtual Volumes, and vCloud Air Hybrid Networking Services.

With VMware being a direct provider hybrid and public cloud services through vCloud as well as through its ecosystem of cloud service provider partners, many voices from the hosting and cloud community have weighed in on VMware’s new capabilities and what it means for the industry…

Grazed from CloudWedge. Author: Editorial Staff.

When you think about buying cloud apparatus, you probably think about a large IaaS providers offering up virtual machines in efforts to achieve your organization’s core objectives. What if it is your duty to find the top performing cloud solution and you’ve stumbled upon the concept to bare metal cloud computing. Instead of using virtualized instances of machines, bare metal does exactly what it says it does; it provides a cloud infrastructure using bare metal resources versus a hypervisor.

Bare Metal Clouds Outperform Virtualized CloudsRackSpace is a company that has reinvented itself as a cloud service provider. RackSpace has recently gone live with its bare metal cloud offering which is quickly becoming popular. RackSpace has a product line up that they have dubbed OnMetal; which guarantees administrators a bare metal instance of a system based on their cloud’s needs. This innovative technology is said to have surpassed virtualization endeavors in terms of speed and performance. According to research from RackSpace, they explicitly claim that their OnMetal offerings outperforms all virtualized instances of VMs…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Katherine Noyes.

Few would deny the appeal of the cloud for enterprise file storage and sharing, but for some organizations—particularly those in heavily regulated industries—security concerns can outweigh those potential benefits. Enter Box Enterprise Key Management (EKM), a new solution now in beta that aims to give businesses the ability to maintain exclusive control over their encryption keys.

Hard on the heels of its initial public offering late last month, Box on Tuesday unveiled Box EKM, a service that targets security-conscious organizations with technology delivered in partnership with Amazon Web Services and Gemalto. “In the old days, if you wanted to encrypt and protect data inside your organization, IT could set it up,” said Rand Wacker, Box’s vice president of enterprise products…

Grazed from CDW. Author: Editorial Staff.

It’s “heart”-ening just how many technologies there are to love this Valentine’s Day. Our HIT List this week is sweet on interoperability, connected care and cloud computing, to name just a few. Where would you have Cupid take aim?

1. Fast, flexible and free. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, aka FHIR, is a new standards framework garnering some serious attention from healthcare leaders and vendors. Developed by Health Level Seven (HL7) International, the no-cost FHIR platform is designed to help organizations quickly and easily address the increasing demand for interoperability. Bet you can’t wait to find out more…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Don Sheppard.

With all the buzz on cloud migration, IT industry experts have insisted that enterprises need a corporate cloud computing policy, but is it really necessary for cloud success? Is an explicit cloud policy essential, nice to have, or optional? By cloud policy, I mean an enterprise-wide cloud governance statement of direction, not just a tactical IT directive or a departmental purchasing rule. Enterprise policies typically cover business critical topics such as:

• Product – what business do you want to be in (and not in)?
• Personnel – rules for human resources, ethical behaviour and fairness
• Legal – commitment to meet regulatory, compliance and government relations requirements
• Finances – practices for accounting, use of capital and delegation of authority…