Grazed from NextGov. Author: Editorial Staff.

An update to the Defense Department’s cloud computing strategy aims to decentralize the process for purchasing commercial cloud solutions away from the Defense Information Systems Agency and toward individual agencies, according to a draft document of the retooled cloud strategy obtained by Nextgov.

The 46-page draft document has not been released publicly and is subject to change, according to a DOD spokeswoman. DOD acting Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen alluded to its pending release in a recent speech. The new strategy, “DOD Cloud Way Forward,” describes a “cradle-to-grave process” that service providers and customers can follow to get DOD computing to the cloud…

Grazed from EnterpriseTech. Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

IT spending is growing at a few measly points a year, at best, and guess what? Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, is not even breaking a sweat. And the reason why is simple: revenues from the chippery that Intel sells in servers, storage, and switches has been growing much faster than the market at large and is projected to do so out until 2018, which is the edge of Intel’s planning horizon.

At the company’s annual Investor Meeting late last week, the top brass of the chip giant gave Wall Street and the rest of us who care about Intel’s fortunes because so much of the datacenter is underpinned or driven by Intel some insight into how they think the future will play out…

Grazed from IT BusinessEdge. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

GridVision, a small and midsized business (SMB) IT specialist, has launched a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool that helps companies spend less time maintaining their IT environments and more time serving their customers. When it comes to IT management, small business owners have two choices.

They can either pay IT experts a tidy sum to keep their systems up to snuff, or they can become IT experts themselves spending their days manually updating and configuring their servers, desktops and Web services. It goes without saying that neither of those scenarios appeal to businesses that are just getting off the ground. So Christian Ehrenthal, GridVision’s co-founder and CEO, looked to the cloud…

Grazed from InfoStor. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Data security and backup software specialist Symantec and IT heavyweight Hewlett-Packard (HP) are partnering for a disaster recovery as-a-service (DRaaS) product anchored by HP Helion OpenStack. HP Helion Openstack is the Palo Alto, Calif.-based tech company’s business-oriented take on the popular open-source cloud computing platform. Announced in May, HP Helion OpenStack represents a $1 billion investment by the company, excluding data center build-out projects.

In August, HP said its Helion portfolio has helped lift its cloud computing segment. While reporting the company’s third-quarter 2014 financial results, HP’s CEO Meg Whitman said in an earnings call that since launching Helion, "we’re seeing strong engagement from customers, and we’re extending our share leadership in private cloud." By partnering with Symantec, HP is leveraging its OpenStack know-how to help businesses keep their applications running in the event of IT mishaps…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: Ivan Harris.

Ten days ago I hosted a seminar on cloud security at the Public Sector Enterprise ICT conference in London. In a show of hands at the start of the discussion, the forty or so attendees were unanimous in their agreement that the issue of security is one of the most important considerations in the journey to the cloud.

Joining me on the panel was Tony Richards, the head of security at G-Cloud and Ian Gale from Bristol City Council. The panel had some great advice about how to overcome common security concerns. Here is a summary of what they think organisations can do:…

Grazed from StateTechMagazine. Author: Rick Cook.

Originally developed to connect storage area networks for high-performance computing, Fibre Channel dominates large data center architecture. As many as two-thirds of data centers use Fibre Channel in one if its incarnations. The most prevalent versions of Fibre Channel offer bandwidth of 8 or 16 gigabits per second. However, demand for bandwidth is rapidly growing, and faster iterations of Ethernet threaten to overtake Fibre Channel.

In response, the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) this year released the Gen 6 Fibre Channel Physical Interface standard, which doubles speeds to 32Gbps. By combining channels, the new specification offers speeds up to 128Gbps, along with new features designed to increase reliability…

Grazed from Scicasts.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

Scientists and engineers in all disciplines can now store, share and analyze data through Jetstream, the first all-science cyber-computing platform, a $6.5 million project funded by the National Science Foundation. The iPlant Collaborative based at the University of Arizona’s BIO5 Institute will play an important role in development and operation of Jetstream.

"iPlant has more than five years’ experience providing cloud-based analyses," said Nirav Merchant, co-principal investigator of the iPlant Collaborative, director of Bio Computing at Arizona Research Laboratories and a member of the BIO5 Institute. "We will bring our expertise to run and manage the underlying cloud infrastructure, making it accessible and easy to use for researchers in all science disciplines."…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

The rapid growth of cloud computing continues. As we implement systems, migrate applications, and move infrastructure to the cloud, proceedings seem to be going better than most people expected. I’m certainly thankful for that, but I’m particularly grateful for four developments this year.

First, I’m thankful that, for the most part, public cloud-based systems have done a good job of keeping outages to a minimum and avoiding data breaches. Despite the Microsoft Azure outage last week and a few other minor outages, public cloud providers have done a much better job at staying up and running than IT does with most internal enterprise systems…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

A new Netskope report revealed that nearly half of all cloud application activity now occurs on mobile devices. The research, titled "October 2014 Netskope Cloud Report," also showed that nearly 89 percent of cloud apps are not "enterprise-ready," and more than one-third of all data leakage policy violations occur on smartphones and tablets.

"There’s a veritable storm of corporate activity across a wide variety of cloud apps, and it’s increasingly happening on mobile devices and often from remote locations," Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri said in a prepared statement. "This makes it even more difficult for IT to keep tabs on sensitive corporate and customer data on user-owned devices, especially when you consider that the majority of these apps aren’t enterprise-ready."…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-research/11252014/netskope-most-cloud-apps-are-not-enterprise-ready

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Stewart.

There seems to be every reason in the world to move applications into the cloud today, yet that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a rigorous approach to evaluating whether it’s the best fit for your client’s particular application and business. There are a few seminal factors that play into a cloud assessment and the decision to move a customer’s workload to a third-party cloud service.

The priority of these factors will differ from organization to organization. Culture and pre-established viewpoints will also affect decisions. The role of the value-added reseller (VAR) and implementation partner is to provide an objective filter for decision makers, and to evaluate the customer’s business and IT organization for cloud readiness…