Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing, says Gartner, “is uniquely susceptible to the perils of myths due to the nature, confusion and hype surrounding it.” This is not good. “These myths slow things down, impede innovation and induce fear, thus distracting from real progress, innovation and outcomes.”

True enough, myths tend to do that, but I’d suggest there is nothing unique about cloud’s ability to attract myths. Any new technology development creates confusion and hype, and hence myth. Gartner has listed 10 of what it says are “some of the most dangerous and misleading cloud myths.” Some of these I would agree are well established, thus damaging the image and impeding the uptake of cloud and inhibiting organisations from enjoying the full benefits of cloud…

Grazed from InvestCorrectly.  Author: James Vrionis.

Inventors at International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) have put together a patented technique that takes advantage of analytics to increase the performance of cloud computing services and reduces their associated costs. This is done by moving workloads around, in the same cloud center or a distant one, based on an automated analysis which optimizes use of cloud resources. The automated analysis allows workloads to run in the cloud in the most efficient way possible.

IBM’s newest invention is able to automatically take cloud computing resources from different cloud centers, which allows clients to optimize their service performance and lower costs by reducing the amount of manual intervention needed in order to properly allocate software, hardware, and services on the cloud. The automated technique used by IBM is also beneficial for the end-user, as it gives them more control over where their cloud workloads will run…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

The “market” for system- and network-level technologies has become (or at least needs to become) more comprehensible to many business managers in a world where we understand that cloud and managed and/or virtualized computing services are increasingly driving our IT functions. CEOs who might have never heard the term Application Delivery Controller, load balancer or log file now have a chance to grasp the new back-end jive-talk and develop an appreciation for the provenance and health of the technology inside their firms’ operational guts.

Piggy in the middleware

Network engineers at Cisco know that the holiday season is approaching, but haven’t let the forthcoming revelry stop them from releasing the “alpha” of Snort 3.0 this late into December. Snort (yes, they do use a piggy for the logo) is an open source Intrusion Prevention/Detection System (IPS or IDS, depending on which way you swing) capable of real-time traffic analysis and packet logging…

Grazed from CTOVision.  Author: Bob Gourley.

Reporting by Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley in Bloomberg is shedding new light on a destructive attack against an oil pipeline that caused a massive explosion in Refahiye Turkey in 2008. The event occurred six years ago, but information is just coming out indicating the cyber attack component of this event.

Robertson and Riley’s reports indicate that the pipeline was fitted with sensors and cameras to monitor all 1099 miles of the pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean, but the blast did not trigger a single distress signal. They also did not trigger the massive explosion and continuing combustion in eastern Turkey…

Grazed from NYTimes.  Author: Mark Scott.

FROM their glass-fronted office parks and start-up lofts in Silicon Valley, American tech companies oversee ever-expanding global empires.

Google has a bigger slice of the online search market in Europe than it does at home, where rivals like Microsoft still give it a run for its money. More than 80 percent of Facebook’s 1.3 billion users live outside the United States, with Brazil and India among the social network’s most important markets. And Apple, which generates roughly 60 percent of its revenue overseas, now sells more iPhones and iPads in Shanghai and St. Petersburg than it does in San Diego…

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Mark Gibbs.

Drones are on the verge of becoming everyday service vehicles that will shuttle small items and eventually large ones between warehouses, retailers, and consumers as well as monitor traffic and agricultural operations, deliver pizza, survey building sites, execute search and rescue, …  the list of possible uses is huge.

All of these operations will be done at the local level initially but within a few years you can expect to see drones performing cross country flights for things like surveying and deliveries as a matter or routine. All we’re waiting for is the Federal Aviation Authority to get its act together and issues rules for the commercial use of drones (this is expected to occur in 2015)…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

It should be pretty obvious by now that most enterprises will not adopt “the cloud” as the next phase of data infrastructure, but many clouds. Indeed, with large numbers of employees embracing a variety of public services to process and store corporate data, many organizations already use multiple clouds without even knowing it.

This could be a huge potential problem even beyond the obvious questions of security and availability. If the deployment of cloud services is allowed to continue in a piecemeal fashion, the enterprise could very well end up recreating the same silo-based infrastructure that currently diminishes performance in the data center…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Microsoft has finally flipped the switch on a series of enterprise-grade updates to its Azure cloud computing platform, which the Redmond, Wash.-based company first teased in a cloud-themed press event on Oct. 20. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, announced Azure Premium Storage, a high-performance cloud storage service backed by speedy solid-state drives, during the event.

Today, customers can take the offering for a spin. Microsoft Azure’s director of product marketing, Vibhor Kapoor, announced the Azure Premium Storage public preview in a Dec. 11 company blog post. The service "stores data on the latest technology Solid State Drives (SSDs) and offers up to 32 terabytes of storage per virtual machine," he explained…

Grazed from DataCenter Dynamics.  Author: Drew Amorosi.

Moving IT infrastructure into the cloud is a hot trend, but it appears the practice is burning brighter on one side of the Atlantic. That’s according to newly released survey data showing those who hold the budget purse strings in the US have been faster to move their IT infrastructure to the cloud when compared with their UK counterparts.

The survey of IT decision makers in both regions showed that one-third of those surveyed in the US have moved a “significant” amount (50–70%) of their organization’s IT infrastructure into the cloud, whereas in the UK, more than three-quarters have shifted less than 50%. UK respondents cited a lack of proper tools and technical skills as the primary factor for slower cloud migtation. On the US side, those surveyed said the decision to place infrastructure in the cloud was motivated by perceived improvement in service levels, uptime, and reliability…

Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: Mary Branscombe.

Microsoft plans to open-source the framework that helps developers of cloud services like those behind the popular Halo 4 game.  Building cloud services for millions of users means connecting and coordinating thousands of servers, and handling tasks and information across all of them. Project Orleans is a framework built by the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research using .NET, designed so developers who aren’t distributed systems experts can build cloud services that scale to cope with high demand and still keep high performance.

The Orleans framework was used to build several services on Azure, including services that are part of Halo 4, and Microsoft had an enthusiastic response when it released a public preview of the technology in April this year. Now Sergey Bykov of the eXtreme Computing Group says (http://orleans.codeplex.com/) they will open-source the project…