Grazed from EdTechMag. Author: Dr. Frank Smith.

IBM is taking its Big Data and cloud capabilities overseas to help transform a French institution into a "smart business school" with international reach. EMLYON Business School has partnered with IBM to use the company’s technologies to provide a more personalized education experience to its international students.

Cloud computing techniques can make education more compelling and encourage students to explore more topics, Katharine Frase, vice president and CTO of IBM’s public sector, told EdTech. It’s also a technology that makes sense for a school that intends to offer courses in multiple languages to countries on multiple continents…

Grazed from StreetWise. Author: Jacob Maslow.

I don’t mean to be a stick in the mud here. I know there are a lot of analysts who are happy that Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is pursuing the fast-growing cloud computing industry in a very public way. Indeed, Microsoft has made its cloud business strategy the centerpiece of its transition from a traditional desktop-based software company.

This is all well and good. However, if you look at the numbers, it can’t help but leave you with a sinking feeling in your stomach. Let’s put it this way, Microsoft has an annual revenue of close to $100B. That’s how big Microsoft is. We’re talking about its Xbox, hardware initiatives, and of course Windows and Windows-based software. Of that figure, $5.5B came from cloud computing and its cloud business…

Grazed from Microsoft. Author: Editorial Staff.

Progressive is looking to expand its use of cloud computing to help it realize greater organizational efficiencies, “investing less time on infrastructure and more on providing high-value services to the business,” write two of the company’s executives in a guest post on the Office Blogs.

Office 365 “will be an important part of our cloud approach and we are now taking the first steps by setting up identity management and deploying Office 365 ProPlus, the user-based subscription version of Microsoft Office, to our more than 26,000 employees,” write Scott McPherson, manager of enterprise architecture organization and software and security group, and Matt Lynn, domain architect of unified communications and collaboration group at Progressive…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently achieved a five-year high in its share of the cloud infrastructure service market, a segment that includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), hybrid cloud and private cloud. Market research firm Synergy Research Group reported that AWS grabbed a 30 percent share of the cloud infrastructure service market in the final quarter of 2014.

What contributed to the success of this well-known cloud computing platform? AWS’ 25 percent cloud infrastructure service revenue growth between the Q3 and Q4. AWS, Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) outperformed the total cloud infrastructure service market’s growth and gained market share; Microsoft achieved the market’s highest year-over-year revenue growth (96 percent), while Google recorded 81 percent year-over-year revenue growth…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

When it comes to hybrid cloud computing partners of VMware (VMW) have been stuck between a proverbial rock and a hard place. In terms of applications running in a local dater center, VMware has been rock solid. But in terms of the cloud VMware is overshadowed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and a small army of cloud service providers that rely heavily towards open source software.

VMware this week took a major step towards making things less hard for its partners in the cloud with the release of VMware vSphere 6, an upgrade that among other things adds support for the open source OpenStack cloud management framework and an implementation of VMware NSX networking software that later this year will be able to span on premise environments and the VMware vCloud Air public cloud service…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-companies/02032015/vmware-bets-big-hybrid-cloud-computing-OpenStack

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: James Bourne.

86% of cloud apps used by enterprises fall under the category of shadow IT, while nearly three quarters aren’t ‘Safe Harbour’ approved, according to an industry report from CipherCloud. The research findings, coming amidst worries of more sophisticated mobile malware and vulnerabilities, suggest organisations need to do more to assess what’s going on in their internal IT. One major US enterprise polled estimated it had 10 to 15 file sharing applications in use; the real number was almost 70.

More than half (52%) of publishing apps were considered high risk, while 42% of social apps and 40% of career-based apps were also considered risky. Enterprises in both North America and Europe are leveraging cloud applications extensively. An average global enterprises uses more than 1000 apps, and though North American businesses (1245) predictably use more than European firms (981), the gap is closing…

Grazed from WorldEconomicForum. Author: Dan Jerker B. Svantesson.

Cloud computing, by its very nature, transcends location, geography and territorial boundaries. Data accessed in one country might be stored half way across the world, or even in servers in multiple countries. International law, on the other hand, sees the world through the lens of various jurisdictions, which are inherently linked to location, geography and territorial boundaries.

So when cloud computing and international law interact, sometimes the results can be highly problematic. For example, in December 2013 the US government served a search warrant on Microsoft under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. The warrant authorised the search and seizure of information associated with a specific web-based email account that is stored at Microsoft’s premises in Dublin, Ireland…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

The Treasury Board of Canada is creating a government-wide policy on the use of cloud computing services. It has asked for input from the industry, but already this journey is taking some interesting directions. “Of particular interest are the privacy implications of using cloud computing services, particularly where the data is either hosted outside the country or by foreign-owned organizations,” writes Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa.

Indeed, proposed contractual clauses address encryption and data storage, as well as rules about where the data can reside. Per the Treasury Board’s industry request: The services provider (the contractor) must not store any nonpublic, personal, or sensitive data and information outside of Canada. This includes backup data and disaster recovery locations…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

There’s little question that the business world is a competitive place, but probably no area in business truly defines cutthroat quite like cloud computing. At the moment, we are witnessing a heated price war pitting some of the top cloud providers against each other, all in a big way to attract as many customers as possible. It hasn’t been easy, at least not at first.

Many companies have been slow to embrace cloud computing, citing unease with giving a third party access to sensitive data and other possible trade secrets. As a way to get past these fears, leading cloud vendors started slashing prices, setting off an intense race to see who can provide the lowest prices…

Grazed from Talkincloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

A new MeriTalk survey of 300 U.S. federal IT decision-makers showed that the number of reported breaches on U.S. federal computer networks has nearly doubled since 2009. The majority of these professionals are concerned about cybersecurity as they update their data centers as well.

The survey, underwritten by Palo Alto Networks (PANW), revealed 67 percent of U.S. Feds are concerned with cybersecurity as they modernize their data centers. Also, 49 percent said they believed that the data center modernization process makes cybersecurity more challenging…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-research/02032015/how-are-feds-handling-data-center-defense