Grazed from  CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

2014 was an extremely busy year for cloud computing, as more and more businesses migrate and cloud increasingly becomes the de facto setting for IT. The competition between vendors for infrastructure as a service continued ferociously, with Microsoft and IBM cutting back some of AWS’ market dominance.  Before we look at what might happen in 2015, here’s a quick reminder of the main events and highlights from 2014:

Cloud in 2014

March: IBM rebrands as a cloud-first company, lays out its strategy. 2014 has been a year of turbulence and change for the large legacy tech vendors. IBM announced it was to push $1bn of its resources into cloud and that it was rebranding as a cloud company. Rival companies also gave it the big one this year; SAP, for example, made frequent overtures about its ambition to become ‘THE’ cloud company.

Read more: IBM’s cloud strategy: Will it become the best in the business?…

Grazed from CloudWedge. Author: Hadley Jones.

Have you ever thought about how much money it takes to set up a cloud computing service? Behind the end-user convenience of low or no capital investment and pay-per-use agreements, somebody has to finance the infrastructure, the computing power, the networking and the personnel to look after it. Cloud service providers have to take a deep breath and write large checks to put the service in place – or find somebody else who is willing to make the investment. So where (if you were so inclined) should you put your money if you want a good return on investment?

The Money-Makers

Enthusiasm for cloud service providers as an investment opportunity seems to have calmed in recent times. Some emerging companies make it clear that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is still far away, if indeed it can ever be reached. Box Inc., the innovative online file sharing and synchronization service provider, recently filed to go public with this statement: “We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future.”…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Lillian Ablon.

When cybercriminals can easily buy cheap hacking programs with exotic names like Fiesta, Lucky, Nuke, Siberia, Sploit, Tornado, Sweet Orange and Cool, what chance that anything online can remain safe? Lillian Ablon and Martin C. Libicki offer ideas for how to close down Web thieves.

Black markets for computer-hacking tools, services and by-products, including stolen credit card numbers, continue to grow, posing threats to businesses, governments and individuals. A prominent recent example was the capture of an estimated 40 million credit card numbers and 70 million user accounts in the December 2013 breach of retail giant Target. Within days, those data appeared—available for purchase—on black market websites…

Grazed from USA Today.  Author: Mike Snider.

The pocket PC is set to make a return.  But these aren’t the forgotten Pocket PCs of the last decade. These are fully-powered portable Windows workstations for consumers and professionals alike.

L.A.-based start-up firm The Hive is unveiling its new Amplicity portable smartphone-sized personal computers this week at the Consumer Electronics Show. The Windows-based products are about the size of a smartphone – just more than half an inch thick and rectangular at about 3-by-5 inches (4.8 inches)…

Grazed from SysConMedia.  Author: Natalie Lerner.

Hosting a website shouldn’t be a tedious task. With so many web hosting vendors to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start. Before you begin shopping, it is imperative that you create a list of traits that each web host must possess before making your short-list.

As many with experience will tell you, all web hosting companies are not created equally and depending upon the types of apps you are trying to launch, it may be important to note that not one size fits all when you are shopping for web hosting services…

Grazed from MacroInsider.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Final year software maker K2.com stopped relying on Amazon.com (AMZN) for its cloud solutions and turned to Microsoft (MSFT) as an alternative. K2 Chief Executive Officer Adriaan van Wyk says he’s delighted 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 client service.

Yet occasionally Azure is slow, and on Nov. 18 it suffered a worldwide outage that lasted numerous hours. As insurance, Van Wyk has moved five percent of his organization back to Amazon Internet Solutions. “We nonetheless like Microsoft,” he says. “At the identical time, it’s been a bit bumpy. The five % tends to make confident if we have to move back to AWS we can do it swiftly"…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Seagate Technology a world leader in storage solutions, today unveiled two new storage products for the home, Seagate Personal Cloud and Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay. Seagate Personal Cloud provides the accessibility of cloud storage with the peace of mind that content is stored safely at home.

What differentiates these two Personal Cloud drives apart is how easily they can stream content to smartphones, set-top boxes, tablets, PCs or televisions via the Seagate Media application. Additionally, when used in conjunction with the acclaimed Seagate Mobile Backup app and Dashboard software, Seagate Personal Cloud also serves as a central backup device for PCs, Mac computers, USB drives, iOS and Android mobile devices…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Jason Perlow.

 This week I had the pleasure of being a guest on NPR’s Airtalk program, on the subject of Robert Zemeckis’ 1989 film Back to the Future 2 and its predictions for the year 2015.  It was an entertaining conversation, and as usual I played the role of down-to-earth technologist that had to point out that many of the "predictions" used in the film were developed primarily as comedic gags, and weren’t really meant to be an accurate portrayal of what life might be like in the year 2015.

 There are a few things in the film that echo some of today’s concerns about technology — such as the surveillance state, drones and data privacy — but overall the 2015 that Marty McFly and Doc Brown visit seems inspiring and pleasant, albeit dated and anachronistic, given the huge miss on the Internet and mobile devices in that film…

Grazed from SysConMedia.  Author: Srinivasan Sundara Rajan.

IoT May Over Whelm Cloud: The potential adoption of the Internet of Things in industries like manufacturing, healthcare will definitely bring much needed automation and agility into the operations, but if they are not  properly planned out these initiatives may lead into an explosion of data whose magnitude will  simply derail the whole initiative or result in a huge cost of operations that will out smart  the benefits they bring in.

As I mentioned in my last article, the concept of Fog Computing (which is term coined by CISCO) is more of an EDGE computing where by much of data analytics and decision making are happening to a location much closer to its source, leaving only certain kind of decision making  to centralized cloud location…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Chris Preimesberger.

Consumers and enterprises crave always-on, on-demand and mobile access to just about everything: applications, work documents, video streaming and social networking. The list is lengthy. The networking industry that underpins the seemingly insatiable desire for constant information streams has undergone massive shifts in access and efficiency in the last couple of years.

How do you think your mobile device houses so much of the world’s information? Well, it isn’t by magic. With the rise of software-defined networks and virtualization redirecting the industry, players—from big vendors to startups and developers—have jumped into the markets from all angles to enable the next generation of computing…