Grazed from ChinaTimes.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The first batch of the US$222 million investment in the 21Vianet Group, a leading carrier-neutral internet data center services provider in China, has signaled the intention of Lei Jun, founder and CEO of handset maker Xiaomi, to make major inroads into the cloud computing sector, according to the Beijing-based Caixin Online.

On Dec. 1, 21Vianet announced an investment of US$296 million to buy 69.9 million Class A and 128.8 million Class B ordinary shares in Kingsoft Corporation, Xiaomi and Temasek, a Singapore-based sovereign wealth fund…

Grazed from Cisco.  Author: Editorial Staff.

For many in the Oil and Gas industry cloud computing might seem like a confusing IT buzzword with very little substance. Trying to wade through the complexities of all its offshoots (public, private, on-premise cloud) without understanding the base concept probably just makes things worse. So is this just technology for technology’s sake or are there some real benefits to cloud computing for Oil and Gas?  The answer is unequivocally yes. Cloud computing will significantly change the way the Oil and Gas industry will use IT, and, in fact, the change is already underway.

Not so new after all

The term cloud computing can be a bit vague but if you instead think of it in terms of the function it actually performs, it becomes straightforward. If cloud computing was called “Hosted Application Services” it might not be so confusing!…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Trevor Jones.

A move from the data center to the cloud can be costly and labor-intensive, but a number of vendors offer specialized tools and services to help IT pros cloudify their applications.  Large companies like Accenture to boutique firms like Cloud Technology Partners Inc. give IT shops a simpler path to cloud, and as more enterprises move to the cloud, these types of services will gain popularity.

Migration vendors say the key is to review customers’ entire portfolio, including product lifecycles, to determine a roadmap for moving to cloud. Some older applications with high dependencies will likely have to remain on-premises, while virtualized applications will be the easiest to transition…

Grazed from BusinessWeek.  Author: Colin McCabe.

The cloud has been the subject of much hype recently, and with good reason. There are significant benefits of moving to the cloud, including shorter application deployment times and plummeting costs. These measurable benefits make it tempting for businesses to run towards the cloud. Right now the most challenging, important and strategic decision that CIOs face is how to build the right cloud for their business.

CIOs that make the right choices can significantly improve their organisation’s competitiveness, flexibility and IT economics for the next decade or more. Fearing security risks and being locked in to unsuitable arrangements, many CIOs are reluctant to let go of the traditional model of capital expenditure, hardware budgets and data centres…

Grazed from SFGate.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Paul Kocher, one of the country’s leading cryptographers, says he thinks the explanation for the world’s dismal state of digital security may lie in two charts.  One shows the number of airplane deaths per miles flown, which decreased to one-thousandth of what it was in 1945 with the advent of the Federal Aviation Administration in 1958 and stricter security and maintenance protocols. The other, which details the number of new computer security threats, shows the opposite. There has been more than a 10,000-fold increase in the number of new digital threats over the last 12 years.

The problem, Kocher and security experts reason, is a lack of liability and urgency. The Internet is still largely held together with Band-Aid fixes. Computer security is not well regulated, even as enormous amounts of private, medical and financial data and the nation’s computerized critical infrastructure — oil pipelines, railroad tracks, water treatment facilities and the power grid — move online…

Grazed from Bloomber.  Author: Andrew Harris.

Cisco Systems Inc. claims Arista Networks Inc. (ANET) is using too much of its technology in taking its business, even duplicating copyrighted work right down to inadvertent typos.

Arista, run by former Cisco vice president Jayshree Ullal, has been winning market share in one of Cisco’s most important businesses: the sale of machines called Ethernet switches which are used in data centers by Internet companies, banks and other large companies…

Grazed from Datamation.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

IT managers are in for big changes during the next few years as billions of connected devices light up the Internet of Things (IoT), according to IDC.  The Framingham, Mass.-based technology research firm published its IoT predictions for 2015 and they point to massive disruption in data center market.

Ninety percent of data center and enterprise systems management environments are expected to switch to new business models to handle IoT and BYOD devices by 2017. Forty percent of IoT data will be processed and stored at, or close to, the network edge by 2018.  IoT at the edge: By 2018, 40 percent of IoT-created data will be stored, processed, analyzed, and acted upon close to, or at the edge, of the network…

Grazed from InformationAge.  Author: Chloe Green.

It’s been a fascinating 2014 for the cloud.  Some very niche technologies are hitting the mainstream, while the debate over data protection and governance clearly isn’t going away any time soon. So, we predict the cloud will rise high in 2015 – but how (and where) it is tethered to the ground will matter more than ever:

SDN and NFV will enter the enterprise

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) have become well established within the telecoms industry, where they have helped service providers industrialise and automate their service delivery to a large extent.  In the enterprise, however, the familiar hodge-podge of switches, firewalls, and routers still remains.  But with vendors of all sizes starting to build the open SDN and NFV specifications into their hardware, IT departments will soon enjoy cloud-like levels of automation within their own environments…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Kristen Lee.

At SIMposium 2014, the annual CIO event hosted by the Society for Information Management, Stephen Braat of IT service provider CDW gave CIOs some insight into where he and his clients have found points of risk in their cloud operations. Security, privacy and data protection loom large, of course, said Braat, a vice president of cloud and managed solutions at the Vernon Hills, Illinois CDW.

Unfortunately, one of the first missteps CIOs make is to rely on the vendor contract to address their concerns. “If you’re trying to affect those things contractually or after the fact, it’s really too late,” Braat warned. “The biggest mistake any of you can make in cloud computing is assuming it’s made to be well-protected, that it’s made to be secure, and it’s made to be redundant.”…

Read more from the source @ http://searchcio.techtarget.com/tip/Advice-for-CIOs-on-cloud-computing-risk-management

Grazed from FCW. Author: Sean Lyngaas.

The Defense Department might be missing out on benefits of the cloud and increasing the risk from cyber threats because of flawed implementation of its cloud-computing strategy, an inspector general report has found. The DOD IG reviewed three cloud contracts from October 2013 to September 2014 and found that DOD authorities did not get the waivers they needed to use a non-DOD-approved cloud service provider because DOD’s CIO "did not develop an implementation plan that included assignment of roles and responsibilities and associated tasks, resources and milestones," the report states.

Furthermore, auditors said the CIO did not have a detailed written process in place for getting a waiver. The department also has provided insufficient training to acquisition and contract specialists who buy cloud services, states the report, which was published Dec. 4…

Read more from the source @ http://fcw.com/articles/2014/12/05/dod-ig-cloud-report.aspx