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…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Rick Delgado.

The modern office is nothing like it was in the past. In fact, in many cases it’s not even a physical location. Improvements in technology have allowed us to work from anywhere, whether right at home or flying on a plane. Our lives have become increasingly demanding, meaning we require better tools to help us get the same amount of work done while we’re on the go.

This has significantly contributed to improvements in mobile technology. Within the past few years we’ve shrunk our machines, cut their wires and made our cell phones smarter. These developments aren’t just for personal convenience either. Sure, the ability to access social media and take quick pictures is great, but mobile devices are also incredibly useful for sending and accessing information from almost anywhere. It’s this benefit that has caused such rapid integration of smartphones into the workforce…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Steven Scheer.

Team8, an Israeli venture capital fund focused on the cyber-security industry, said on Tuesday it had raised $18 million in its first round of funding, including investment from Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco . Also participating in the round were Bessemer Venture Partners, Marker LLC and Innovation Endeavors, which was founded by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

Led by veterans of the Israeli army’s 8200 intelligence and electronic espionage unit, Team8 aims to develop cyber-security companies that offer more in-depth protection than the usual defence against hacking attempts by generic malware. Bessemer partner David Cowan said that could set them apart from the legions of security start-ups in Silicon Valley…

Grazed from GovTech. Author: Brian Heaton.

The Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) and Amazon Web Services have partnered to make it easier for state agencies and other customers of the DIR to move to the cloud. The DIR has negotiated a contract with Amazon that enables state customers to buy cloud services directly through the vendor.

Amazon is one of 22 companies the DIR has contracts with for cloud technology under its cooperative contracts program. Prior to the new arrangement, Texas agencies had to conduct their own separate procurements and vendor solicitations. While the DIR has contracts with various Amazon reseller businesses, the new contract is the first statewide agreement Amazon has held, according to Shannon Kelley, contract manager with the Texas DIR…

Grazed from DailyTech. Author: Jason Mick.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) on Jan. 29 submitted a pretty intriguing trademark finding to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In the filing it applies for a trademark on the term "Windows 365." The filing was first spotted by a reader of Neowin.

I. A Game Changer Quietly Steps Up

What at first looks like a ho-hum filing really hints at a potentially market-changing upcoming product. Imagine, for a second, a Lumia 635 budget smartphone that could destroy the most powerful Apple, Inc. (AAPL) iPhone in gaming graphics at a tenth the cost That’s the radical promise of Windows 365. The description given is as follows:…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Last week, the second-largest U.S. health insurer, Anthem, announced that as many as 80 million customers had their account information stolen. Not much is known about which systems were hijacked, but Anthem said all of its businesses were affected, so it’s easy to figure that the attack was far-reaching.

"’The names, addresses, birth dates, and Social Security numbers stolen from the Indianapolis-based insurance giant are gold for criminals,’ said James P. Nehf, a professor of law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis," USA Today reported. Once again, there is a major data breach on internal servers…

Grazed from AppDeveloperMagazine. Author: Richard Harris.

Piston Cloud Computing and ActiveState Software are partnering together to use Piston with ActiveState’s Stackato Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities to offer an OpenStack and Cloud Foundry PaaS based private cloud environment. Piston provides a turn-key infrastructure management and automation layer while Stackato provides a platform to manage, develop and deploy software.

With the combination of Piston and Stackato, customers can deploy a production-ready IaaS plus PaaS stack in a single day. Stackato is based on the Cloud Foundry and Docker open source projects. It provides development teams with built-in languages, frameworks and services on one single cloud application platform…