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

Grazed from CNNMoney. Author: PR Announcement.

VMware, Inc. today announced VMware vSphere® 6, the newest edition of the industry-defining virtualization solution for the hybrid cloud and foundation for the software-defined data center. With more than 650 new features and innovations, VMware vSphere 6 will provide customers with a highly available, resilient, on-demand cloud infrastructure to run, protect and manage any application. VMware vSphere 6 will be complemented by the newest releases of VMware vCloud® Suite 6, VMware vSphere with Operations Management™ 6, and VMware Virtual SAN™ 6.

VMware today also re-enforced its support of open frameworks for building and managing clouds with its new VMware Integrated OpenStack distribution. This first-ever OpenStack distribution from VMware will empower IT to provide developers with open API access to enterprise-class VMware infrastructure…

Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Ben Sullivan.

Hybrid cloud seems to be the darling child of the IT media at the moment. Vendors have jumped on the fact that almost every end-user survey is claiming that organisations will be looking to deploy hybrid solutions, as opposed to cloud-only solutions, in near future. But does this herald the backing by the end user community of hybrid cloud or just a reluctance to fully embrace the cloud?

Part of the reticence to move to a full cloud solution appears to be that, in the minds of some individuals, hybrid cloud delivers a convenient halfway house – an opportunity to try out the cloud, without diving fully in. But in reality this facet is highlighting the biggest issue with hybrid cloud – the majority of these solutions focus on on-premise and/or cloud-based access, with just a fraction of content or functions available…

Grazed from NewsWeek. Author: Kevin Maney.

No venture capitalist is crazier about outer space than Steve Jurvetson, who has been listening to unrealistic space company pitches for two decades. In the early 2000s, he helped back SpaceX. But mostly he’s impatiently waited for space to turn into Silicon Valley’s next playground—the kind of pulse-quickening, virgin land of hope and opportunity that the Internet once was.

Well, this is space’s Netscape moment, Jurvetson tells me. As often happens in technology, a bunch of advances in different fields are converging to make space less the final frontier and more like the next startup garage. In 1995, Netscape’s explosive IPO signaled that several technologies—the PC, software, the clunky government-run Internet, Tim Berners-Lee’s hyperlinking and Netscape’s graphical browser—had come together to create a world-changing new platform…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Trevor Jones.

Cisco has struggled to make inroads in public or private cloud, so the vendor is banking on its networking experience to play a key role in enterprises’ hybrid cloud deployments. The San Jose, Calif.-based company’s cloud strategy relies on shifting its networking focus from hardware to software. Cisco made a splashy roll out of its cloud intentions last year that hasn’t translated into much yet, but its latest efforts around a unified cloud networking platform and subscription models could change that — at least with its existing customers.

"They’re going out with their strength, which is connectivity between all these clouds rather than differentiating with one cloud itself," said Dave Bartoletti, principal analyst with Forrester Research, Inc., based in Cambridge, Mass. "Cisco wants to be the glue that connects all your clouds together and not battle it out with commodity vendors for cloud servers."…

Grazed from BetaNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Many of the things we do online require an ID and password, but typically whilst this makes things easier for the site it doesn’t always do a lot to protect the user, who may be revealing more information than they need. For example you may have to reveal your full date of birth and address to a video streaming service in order to verify your age and region, running a risk that the information may fall into the wrong hands.

Now researchers at IBM have announced plans for a new cloud-based technology to help consumers guard their personal data. The technology, called Identity Mixer, uses a cryptographic algorithm to encrypt the identity attributes of a user, such as their age, nationality, address and credit card number in a way that allows the user to reveal only selected pieces to third parties…

Grazed from Computing. Author: Sooraj Shah.

Technology giant EMC is to cut jobs after it forecast a lower-than-expected profit for the year, but CEO Joe Tucci said that he expects the launch of six new products to bring in more than $1bn (£663m) in revenues in the next few years.  Although Tucci did not divulge what the new products would be, he said that they would be focused on cloud, mobile, social and big data.

But EMC staff will be more concerned about the firm’s plans to axe a number of employees. "EMC management approved a restructuring plan," the company said in an SEC filing. "The plan consists of a reduction in force which will be substantially completed by the end of the first quarter of 2015 and fully completed by the end of 2015," EMC added…