Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Lance Wright.

As cyber security becomes a larger focal point in the media and minds of online shoppers, consumers understandably have increasing concerns when it comes to what protections are offered by retailers. Across channels, only 55% of shoppers think retailers use security systems that adequately protect their data, and not surprisingly so.

In fact, Trustwave reports that data breaches increased by 53.6% from 2012 to 2013, with more than half of thosebreaches targeting ecommerce sites. Of special concern is highly sensitive data, including credit card numbers andpersonally identifiable information. But with customer expectations on the rise and IT budgets commonly on thefall, how can retailers meet the security needs of today’s digital environment? For many organizations, turning to cloud-based commerce solutions helps fill the gap…

Grazed from HuffingtonPost.  Author: Matt Sheehan.

A year ago, few outside of China knew the name Jack Ma. Today, he’s the most sought after man at Davos. The founder and face of Alibaba Group, “the Steve Jobs of China,” the richest man in Asia — Ma’s appellations are as numerous as the industries he is conquering.

Alibaba Group is a sprawling Internet empire that took on some of America’s leading online titans — and won. Its consumer-to-consumer platform (Taobao) routed then-goliath Ebay, and its business-to-consumer megastore (Tmall.com) dominates Amazon. Alibaba has ventured into mobile payments, cloud computing, social media, and is now testing streaming international content. The company is second only to Walmart in global transactions, and its $25 billion initial public stock offering last fall was the largest in history…

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Mike W. Thomas.

The National Science Foundation is funding a partnership between the University of Texas at San Antonio and other universities that will work with open cloud technology to develop advanced computing systems for scientists and engineers. The participating universities, along with other scientific institutions, will share $6.6 million grant money.

UTSA’s Cloud and Big Data Laboratory will participate in the project known as Jetstream — which will be based at Indiana University’s Pervasive Technology Institute and the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center…

Grazed from Nasdaq.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A new wrinkle in federal rules this year aims to urge more hospitals and other medical providers into the 21st century.  Those expectations have helped lift a handful of companies in IBD’s Computer Software-Medical group, a group at the intersection of health care and Internet technology — and key suppliers to the health industry’s conversion from paper to digital electronic records.

Cerner, Athenahealth, and Veeva Systems are at the head of that list. All three have seen benefits from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus bill. All have also seen their share of recent ups and downs…

Grazed from CIOToday.  Author: Dan Heilman.

In its initial public offering, shares in online file storage company Box were trading at $24.24 on Friday afternoon, 73 percent higher than its IPO price of $14 a share. With that impressive opening morning, the start-up company caught up to the $2.4 billion valuation that it garnered in its most recent private financing round last summer, possibly allaying concerns among investors that the company had been overvalued.

In a video presentation to investors Friday, Box co-founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, said that his company was at the forefront of "a once-in-a-generation shift" in storage. Among the company’s clients are General Electric and the drug maker AstraZeneca…

Grazed from ODCA. Author: Editorial Staff.

While the segregation of infrastructure resources into these three components is useful to a degree, they are more appropriately considered as a cohesive set of aggregate resources that can be purchased, provisioned, and managed as a whole. This is especially important as the lines between software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and IaaS blur.

SaaS offerings continue to add options and flexibility (thereby delving into PaaS); recently, the industry introduced the concept of IaaS+, which blurs the line between IaaS and PaaS by adding modular services on top of infrastructure services…

Read more from the source @ https://www.opendatacenteralliance.org/advanced-search-and-tools/advanced-search/infrastructure-workgroup/cloud-infrastructure

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

VMware (VMW) is giving small cloud startups a chance to grow their businesses with the launch of vCloud Air Edge, an incubation program designed to help small businesses develop their cloud-centric offerings as well as help launch companies currently developing “new, potentially disrupting enterprise solutions on vCloud Air,” according to the company.

The incubator program was spurred by the popularity of VMware’s cloud-based service programs for independent software vendors looking to leverage the virtualization company’s hybrid cloud solutions. Further interest from venture capitalists, cloud startups and on-premise ISVs convinced VMware to expand the program to startup companies, according to a company blog post…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Kenneth Corbin.

If you’re a cloud service provider, the federal government wants to hear from you. Federal agencies are actively shopping for new cloud computing technologies, but vendors will help their cause by packaging their services to be more readily implemented in a government environment that is highly security conscious and almost preternaturally cautious about rolling out new IT systems.

The feds have been developing a system for streamlining the security requirements for cloud service providers (CSPs). Under the FedRAMP program, vendors can submit their cloud service for a review by an inter-agency panel to gain clearance to operate across the government, or can seek approval of a single department or agency…

Grazed from JDSupra. Author: Quinn Emanuel.

In the May 2014 issue of the Business Litigation Report, we discussed a hot topic in law and technology: cloud computing. That topic did not cool down over the summer. Businesses and courts—including the Supreme Court—have continued to grapple with issues presented by computing in the cloud, including who owns the rights to key cloud computing technologies. Given the increased competition and growth in the cloud computing market, such litigation is likely to continue in the future, and will need to take changing legal rules into account.

The Cloud Computing Market

Broadly defined, “cloud computing” refers to the shared use of computing resources over a distributed computer network. Those resources may include storage, processing, communication, or other computer tasks. The network over which such resources are accessed may be public like the Internet, private like many enterprise IT environments, or a hybrid network combining public and private elements. The business case for shifting computing resources to the cloud is based on the flexibility that cloud computing provides. Instead of needing to buy racks of expensive servers and other equipment as a necessary first step to launching a business, today’s startups can order “virtual” IT centers consisting of only the resources they actually need…

Grazed from Vator.TV. Author: Graham Turney.

A startup founder faces a wealth of decisions every day that can profoundly affect the fate of his or her business. One such decision is choosing where to host a site or application. Until recently, that choice often appeared to be among several near identical infrastructure providers. As the cloud has matured, however, the industry has begun to recognize two broad categories in the cloud — managed and unmanaged vendors.

According to Gartner, Rackspace is the leader in the managed space. In a recent blog (included below), our CEO, Taylor Rhodes, outlined the differences between managed and unmanaged clouds and the ramifications of those differences for your business. Here’s what he outlined:…