Grazed from ZDNet. Auhor: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

Linux and open-source software had many high points this year, but it also had many low ones as well. Let’s just get it over with and start with the worst.

Linux and open-source fiascoes

1) Heartbleed

When you program with open-source the right way, it creates great software. When you accept open-source as magic, you end up with Heartbleed. Heartbleed, if you don’t recall, was an OpenSSL security hole that affected hundreds of millions of websites, It’s root cause was that everyone–and I mean everyone–just assumed that it was safe because it was open source. So, for years no one bothered to check to see if the code really was reliable. It wasn’t…

Grazed from EpochTimes. Author: Veronica Davis.

Simply put, cloud computing is ‘computing power delivered anywhere, anytime, driving on the global connectivity of the World Wide Web.’ It’s become a fascinating revolution, writing the first chapter of a new era of web browsing and web experiences. Not only do small and growing businesses get to enjoy the power of computing without having to deploy file servers, storage systems, e-mail servers, and what not, but it also means that you can have access to a whole library of your personal data and your most important productivity applications anytime, anywhere.

All you need is your account and login details to access the cloud based service or application on any smartphone, tablet or other device and you can resume from where you left off. File storage services offering GBs of space, web based content management, website publishing, online video clip making and other multimedia services such as a super cool one I discovered earlier today: ShakeM. Here’s a toast to some of the best cloud based services making the internet such an enjoyable and empowering experience for the most demanding of web users…

Grazed from BizTech. Author: Ricky Riberio.

The technology that companies use is changing at a blistering pace. While companies are still considering whether or not to virtualize their servers, other enterprises are planning on turning their entire infrastructure into a software-defined machine. The software-defined enterprise starts, first and foremost, with fundamental architectural shift we are seeing in the industry.

And that is the movement to a software-defined data center. And that software-defined data center can be delivered on-premise or off-premise, known in the world as hybrid cloud computing. That’s where the world is going," said VMware President and COO Carl Eschenbach. Eschenbach was one of several IT leaders who gathered to discuss the most important and needle-moving technology challenges facing businesses today, as part of CDW’s Bring IT On technology leadership series…

Read more from the source @ http://www.biztechmagazine.com/article/2014/12/vmware-president-carl-eschenbach-says-software-defined-data-center-future

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Kristen Lee.

In this third of three blog posts on IDC’s IT outlook for 2015, analysts tackled the topic of cloud. Here IDC’s Robert Mahowald, program vice president of SaaS and cloud services; Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president for enterprise system management software; and Rick Villars, vice president of data centers and cloud, outlined three ways in which the cloud will shake up IT ecosystems in 2015 and how IT leaders can prepare.

Hybrid cloud adds complexity to IT environments

IDC predicts that by 2016 more than 65% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud technologies. “This is going to really drive a number of changes across the structure, management, and just operational velocity of many IT organizations,” Turner said. Enterprises are being driven to adopt hybrid cloud for a number of reasons, Turner said. These include the need for cloud service diversity, the demand by end users for more and more self-service IT, and the growth of OpenStack and open source containers…

Read more from the source @ http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/total-cio/cloud-2015-continued-unrelenting-disruption-to-traditional-it/

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Application performance continues to be a concern for organizations of all sizes, and according to a new report from Enterprise Management Associates and sponsored by New Relic, cloud-hosted application performance management is now the second most common use case for production software-as-a-service (SaaS), right after office productivity applications.

The report, "Public Cloud Comes of Age: Application Performance Management (APM) Strategies & Products for Production-Ready Cloud Ecosystems," noted several challenges enterprises are currently facing in migrating to and using cloud services and infrastructure. But since it’s also a sponsored report, it also provided significant detail on application performance management and monitoring vendor New Relic, so expect a touch of bias…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-research/12242014/report-cloud-hosted-apm-second-most-common-saas-use-case

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Jordan Novet.

My main hope for 2015 is that the industry can move on from the “What is the cloud, public clouds are good/bad, private clouds are good/bad” debate and essentially become more nuanced in our understanding. Generally the experience of 2014 is that most people like the model of consumption matching demand, but still have concerns on the nature and types of workloads that we can port.

2015 is the year when we stop talking about the cloud as a “What if?” choice and start talking about the different architectures and their suitability for your workloads. So unlike some commentators who have thrown the collective towel in on cloud computing focusing on purely public cloud over the Internet and calling it a “commodity” or the domain of a few, we are students of history and think we are merely in the Precambrian phase of cloud evolution and look toward the next more impactful stage…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Dan Newman.

Today, four of the most impactful streams of technology – social media, mobile, big data, and cloud are gradually converging into one powerful force that’s making way for a huge shift in the current business landscape. While the combination of these technologies will unlock new opportunities for businesses, it will also change the way we live and work. On the whole, convergence technology is the new innovation to watch. Sound interesting?

If your interest is piqued, then you might be intrigued to hear that convergence technology is going to be utterly indispensable for businesses as well. Let me explain. Businesses are leveraging the power of social, mobile, cloud, and big data already. To this point, these powers have been compartmented, more or less…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Patrick Harris.

We’re almost halfway into the decade that has redefined computing. Fifteen years ago, Marc Benioff and I thought there had to be a better way than floppy disks. So we set out to disrupt the industry with a new technology model, and it’s clear that our bet on the cloud was a good one.

Today, we’re entering a third wave of computing, where everyone and everything is connected. In the last two years alone, 90 percent of the world’s data was generated as a result of cloud, social, mobile, and connected technologies that transformed business models and consumer behavior. In 2015, successful companies will leverage these trends to capture and personalize every customer interaction in the cloud, transforming the way they connect with their customers…

Grazed from LATimes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Fresh Internet outages continued to plague North Korea on Tuesday, and speculation about the cause of the rogue country’s systemwide crash earlier in the day broadened to include a hacking group that hinted it was responsible. North Korea’s Internet connection went down about 2 a.m. Tuesday and wasn’t restored for more than 9 1/2 hours, prompting speculation that the U.S. government might have waged a cyberattack against Pyongyang in retaliation for the Nov. 24 hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The FBI has accused North Korea of committing the attack on the Los Angeles-area studios where the controversial film "The Interview" was made, portraying a fictional assassination plot against North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. North Korea’s online community consists of only about 1,000 Internet Protocol addresses, estimates the Dyn research firm that evaluates Internet performance worldwide…

Read more from the source @ http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-north-korea-internet-outages-20141223-story.html

Grazed from Diginomica. Author: Martin Banks.

If the natural and obvious `join’ between cloud services and mobile devices is to become not just possible but standard practice, then tools that accommodate those any and all of those devices as integral parts of cloud services have to become widely available. They are, at least. Now starting to appear.

Take, for example, the recently launched Toshiba Cloud Client Manager (TCCM) system, which first saw the light of day last year as a prototype plug in option for the company’s then new, on-premise Smart Client Manager. Since then it has been re-engineered as a stand-alone, modular, cloud-delivered system that will, as new modules appear, seek to provide a full systems and mobile data management (MDM) infrastructure to connect mobile clients to cloud services…