Grazed from CIO. Author: Dominick Paul.

Marshall Goldsmith, an executive coach to the corporate elite, is the author of the very popular book called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. And while the title may be true as it relates to your individual career path, I have news for C-suite executives everywhere: it is not true when it comes to adopting new technology.

In fact, what got you here – to your current state of success – is precisely what will get you to the next level. The problem is, as CIOs and IT professionals, we sometimes allow ourselves to be pressured into acting contrary to what we know is the right thing to do. Here’s what happens. A CEO approaches a CIO and says (in a nutshell), “What’s our cloud strategy? We have to get everything into the cloud.”…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Chris Patterson.

Even with ‘The Internet of Things’ slated to be the buzzword of 2015, cloud computing will continue to remain firmly in the minds of IT departments. Therefore, I thought I thought I’d share my four big cloud trends to expect this year.

1. Cloud Computing Will Become More Mainstream

As cloud becomes more mainstream, the question among progressive IT shops when rolling out new applications will shift from “why cloud?” to “why not cloud?” This is bolstered by the increasing prevalence of public-private compute infrastructures that allow simple placement of workloads where they make the most business sense…

Grazed from Brookings.edu. Author: Cameron F. Kerry.

President Obama went to the FTC a few weeks ago to address ways to protect privacy and identity in what he called “a dizzying age” of new technologies. One of the many new technologies changing the ways people interact with information is cloud computing. Whether it’s Jennifer Lawrence saving intimate photos to Apple’s iCloud, startups scaling up with Amazon Web services, or businesses and consumers moving their documents to Microsoft 365 or Google Docs, cloud computing is becoming a familiar part of our digital daily lives.

Cloud services offer benefits of large-scale computing, which include efficiency, scalability, security, and computing power, as well as ubiquitous access to data from an increasing variety of devices. But turning over data wholesale to someone else also comes with questions about privacy, confidentiality, security, and control…

Grazed from Finance@Yahoo. Author: Editorial Staff.

IBM is reportedly planning its largest corporate layoff ever – cutting 111,800 of its staff. A report by a respected Silicon Valley journalist for Forbes says around 26% of the company’s 430,000-strong workforce will be cut this week. The previous largest corporate redundancy was also carried out by IBM, when it cut 60,000 staff in 1993.

The company’s reorganisation is codenamed Project Chrome, and most of the staff being laid off are in the US. It will pave the way for IBM to focus on cloud computing, it is claimed, rather than its traditional hardware business. Reporter Robert X Cringely wrote: "To fix its business problems and speed up its ‘transformation’, next week about 26% of IBM’s employees will be getting phone calls from their managers. "A few hours later a package will appear on their doorsteps with all the paperwork."…

Read more from the source @ https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-cut-more-110-000-091702312.html

Grazed from SysConMedia.  Author: Charles Hall.

Cyber threats are becoming more advanced, persistent, and focused. The threat landscape is rapidly changing, and evolving faster than ever. Today it is difficult to determine who is winning: either those behind the cyber threats, or those fighting to prevent and remediate the threats. The strategy against cyber threats has been to throw more and more technology at the problem, in an attempt to keep up, and it is not working.

What if there was a way to prevent a cyber attack before it could ever happen? While no solution will prevent 100% of attacks, the goal should be to get as close as possible. Moving to a more proactive solution makes it increasingly difficult for attackers to achieve successful attacks…

Read more from the source @ http://www.sys-con.com/node/3284302

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

Let’s face it, cloud computing is uncharted territory for many organizations. To sort-of paraphrase Winston Churchill, never in the field of computing have so many depended on so few. Enterprises are gradually, and inexorably, turning over significant portions of their infrastructures to outside cloud providers. Lately, there’s been talk of consolidation of big cloud providers to a few major providers.

The potential over-reliance on cloud providers is, in fact, making many enterprise CIOs and business leaders nervous. This may be the second round of angst in the cloud maturity cycle, once the first hurdle is passed. For some lessons on what to expect here, look no further than the U.S. federal government’s huge web of agencies…

Grazed from StreetWise.  Author: Jacob Maslow.

A number of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) observers were shaking their heads at the seeming backsliding of new Microsoft CEO during the company’s recent Windows 10 roll out. In his short roll out speech, Microsoft head honcho Satya Nadella said that Microsoft’s goal should be to move people from simply needing Windows to loving Windows.

Some people had a problem with this line of thinking because they argue that this is precisely the corporate mindset that led to Microsoft missing the boat on some of the most important consumer technology shifts in the past two decades.  How exactly did Microsoft screw up by focusing too much on Windows? Let’s just stick to the big ones. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) launched the iPod…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Sharon Wagner.

A lot can happen in a year, and in the world of cloud computing, 2014 was a breakout one. Cloud adoption finally experienced a tornado of demand that swept up large enterprises en masse. Yet as businesses move services to the cloud and increasingly depend on third-party vendors, important questions should be answered around who is responsible for managing these services and how service quality should be measured.

The main objective of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is to clearly define relationships and set expectations for adequate service levels between the buyer and the seller. In the case of the cloud, this would be the cloud provider and the cloud consumer. A traditional SLA is a rigid and custom contract with complicated legalese focused around operational metrics provided by IT and using IT internal resources…

Grazed from PFhub.  Author:  Kaitlin Longmire.

Apple will use iCloud to store Biometric data from Apple Pay; according to the iPhone maker, the move is being made to ensure a seamless process of mobile payment when using the Apple Pay service. To ensure a secure data verification system, instead of storing information on the device only, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) will also store fingerprint data of users on its iCloud – Apple Inc.’s own cloud service.

This is just a plan at this stage; Apple as of yet has not started storing this data because this initiative raises a lot of questions in terms of user security and privacy. Information about the possibility of the move was revealed by a reliable website, which got hold of a recent patent bought by the tech giant with information about the coveted move…

Grazed from NationalGazette.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Last year software program maker K2.com stopped relying on Amazon.com (AMZN) for its cloud services and turned to Microsoft (MSFT) instead. K2 Chief Executive Officer Adriaan van Wyk says he’s satisfied with the choice—most of the time. The developer tools of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service are superior, he says, and he likes its customized customer service.

However occasionally Azure is slow, and on Nov. 18 it suffered a international outage that lasted several hours. As insurance coverage, Van Wyk has moved five % of his business enterprise back to Amazon Internet Services. “We still like Microsoft,” he says. “At the similar time, it’s been a bit bumpy. The 5 % makes certain if we have to move back to AWS we can do it rapidly.”…