Grazed from ABCNews. Author: Julie Pace.

President Barack Obama wants Congress to pass legislation requiring companies to inform customers within 30 days if their data has been hacked, a move that follows high-profile breaches at retailers including Target, Home Depot and Neiman Marcus. A White House official said Obama will announce the proposed legislation Monday, along with a measure aimed at preventing companies from selling student data to third parties and from using information collected in school to engage in targeted advertising.

Obama’s proposals are part of a White House effort to preview components of the president’s State of the Union address in the lead-up to the Jan. 20 speech. The official, who insisted on anonymity, was not authorized to discuss the proposed legislation by name ahead of Obama’s speech at the Federal Trade Commission…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Over the weekend, Verizon’s cloud service, Verizon Cloud, was offline as it looked to add ‘seamless upgrade functionality as well as other customer-facing updates.’ The maintenance period was put in to improve the service and to ensure further updates went ahead without any hitches to customers.

The telco giant warned the fixes could take up to 48 hours, but was completed after 40, with Verizon taking the bizarre step of issuing a press release to announce the work had been done. “The seamless upgrade functionality allows Verizon to conduct major system upgrades without interrupting service or limiting infrastructure capacity,” the release states. “Traditionally, updates have been made via rolling maintenance and other methods…

Grazed from DevNetwork.  Author: Event Announcement.

DeveloperWeek 2015 is San Francisco’s largest one-week tech event series with over 60 week-long events including the DeveloperWeek 2015 Conference & Expo, Accelerate 2015 (1,000+ attendee hackathon) GirlDevWeek Events, Robotics Dev Summit, DevOps Summit, 1,000+ attendee tech hiring mixer, and 60+ city-wide workshops, open houses, drink-ups, across San Francisco!

DeveloperWeek puts the spotlight on new dev technologies. Event hosts and supporters of last year’s DeveloperWeek include Google, Facebook,Yelp,Rackspace, IBM, Cloudera, Red Hat, Optimizely, SendGrid, Blackberry, Microsoft, Neo Technology, Eventbrite, Klout, Built.io, Ripple, GNIP,Tagged,HackReactor, and 30+ more here!…

Grazed from BusinessSpectator. Author: Michael Swinson.

For a new technology to reach mainstream acceptance, two things are generally required. Firstly it must address and overcome concerns flagged by early critics (in the way that clever user interface design has effectively countered the criticism that smartphones are too small for business functions).

Secondly, it must receive some endorsement from the key incumbent players in the market (in the way that Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia ultimately confirmed the overriding power of the smartphone). On this basis, cloud computing (which has long been regarded as an “emerging” technology) now seems primed and ready for a mainstream breakthrough…

Grazed from BusinessStandard. Author: Manish Godha.

Shared computing services, whether applications or platforms available over internet, have granted small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) unprecedented access to technology sophistication. The potential inherent in information technology has been immense and the possible impacts are only getting more pronounced. Technology not only bolsters efficiencies but also influences fundamental changes in the business models themselves.

But getting technology to work for a particular business has traditionally been arduous, requiring significant expense, effort and skills. As such, access to ‘enterprise-class’ has been limited to large businesses that can invest in application and operational support. Cloud, however, allows access to technology without worrying about deploying, operating, maintaining and investing…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Andrea Goldberg.

At the beginning of a new year it is customary to size up the past year and look forward to what awaits. In the technology space, a lot of the hype in 2014 was around cloud computing, Apple’s new offerings, and the Internet of Things. To those unfamiliar with the term, the Internet of Things is simply the name given when smart devices are built into ordinary objects, such as clothing, so that the embedded devices can provide data back and forth from the cloud.

This transfer of data enable insights and determines actions. While cars have had this type of technology for a while, this year gave us smart watches, connected toothbrushes, contact lenses, and tennis rackets. You no longer need to go to a tennis clinic to have your swing analyzed, just purchase a connected device and plug into the cloud…

Grazed from SysCon Media.  Author: Pat Romanski.

Cloud Foundry open Platform as a Service makes it easy to operate, scale and deploy application for your dedicated cloud environments. It enables developers and operators to be significantly more agile, writing great applications and deliver them in days instead of months.

Cloud Foundry takes care of all the infrastructure and network plumbing that you need to build, run and operate your applications and can do this while patching and updating systems and services without any downtime…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

As promised back in October as part of an expansion of the Microsoft’s hyperscale cloud capabilities, the company has made its new G-Series virtual machines (VM) for Azure generally available.

G-Series is the new king of Azure VMs, according to Corey Sanders, director of program management for Microsoft Azure. "G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD [solid-state drive] of any virtual machine size currently available in the public cloud," he said in a Jan. 8 Azure Blog post…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Steve Herrod has seen a lot in the enterprise IT space, having spent 12 years at VMware — the last several years as CTO and vice president of R&D — before leaving in 2013 to join venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners.

And right now, after seemingly dozens of high-profile cyberattacks in as many months, Herrod has security on his mind. He came on the Structure Show podcast this week to tell how he’s thinking about that space…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada.  Author: Don Sheppard.

Last year I would have called this my IT predictions for 2015.  This year my crystal ball is pretty cloudy (no pun intended).  It’s safe to say that Apple Watches and Windows 10 will be delivered in some form.  Although cloud computing will certainly continue to make progress towards maturity, 2015 may be the year that the term “cloud computing” is finally retired (or perhaps re-invented with a new meaning).

Let me note that lots of predictions for 2015 are already available.  For some reason, 2015 seems to be a magic year.  One vision that first appeared in 2011, the Intel Cloud 2015 Vision, has been well publicized.  Gartner, Forrester and IDC have published their 2015 predictions.  It’s certainly nice that we can make totally new predictions every year!…