Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Such has been the popularity of the practice that it has prompted some commentators to predict the ‘death of IT; to suggest that most IT purchasing decisions will be made by business units within a few years. However news of IT’s death are greatly exaggerated, according to US based Verizon Enterprise Solutions.

After surveying almost 200 of its own customers and drawing on research from the likes of the Boston Consulting Group, Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, Accenture, Forrester Research, Gartner and IDC, it has concluded that "IT is firmly in the driver’s seat when it comes to cloud purchases and business transformation."…

Grazed from Eurealert. Author: PR Announcement.

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 NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Bulter.

Like some of its major competitors, would Amazon Web ever offer an on-premises private cloud management software? AWS Vice President of Marketing Ariel Kelman wouldn’t rule it out – “never say never” he said – but he added that company executives have discussed doing it, but it just doesn’t fit AWS’s business model at this time.

AWS is a services business that operates at massive scale. The company has a market-leading public IaaS platform with a plethora of web services that it updates and adds to all the time. The model of a fast-changing, constantly updating cloud doesn’t work very well in an on-premises private cloud model, Kelman said…

Grazed from DentistryIQ. Author: Trevor James.

“Companies that don’t take advantage of cloud computing will be in the minority in less than six years.” These words come straight from a recent article in Inc. magazine. Conversely, if your practice is considering a cloud-based computing system, you’ll be in the majority in 2020. Dental practices are not immune to this technological shift. Driven in part by the need for mobile computing and the use of electronic health records, more dental practices are moving to the cloud.

According to a study from consulting firm Emergent Research and financial software company Intuit, the percentage of U.S. small businesses using cloud computing will grow from 37% to nearly 80% during the next six years. SecurityWeek magazine reports: “In a study looking at how small and medium-sized businesses viewed security, privacy, and reliability in the cloud, 94% said their security had improved after adopting cloud applications…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Lori MacVittie.

The Internet of things (IoT) is over-hyped, but considered to promise real business value according to a recent CompTIA survey, "Sizing Up the Internet of Things" which revealed 51 percent of IT executives believe IoT opportunities justify the hype with 48 percent believing there’s more hype than substance right now.

Both are correct, of course. We’re in the midst of a ramp up of IoT hype and while there have been significant business opportunity already scooped up by those in a position to do so, the hype is also high. It’s the beginning of a technology trend, after all. Rising hype is to be expected…

Grazed from TheHill. Author: Cory Bennett.

The European Union updated its guidelines for protecting personal information under EU data security laws, which are more stringent than those in the U.S. In short, EU officials told developers they were doing a bad job encrypting data. While all the basic building blocks of good encryption methods exist, they said, implementation is lacking and testing is ineffective.

“The scientific study of such protocols can be said to be still not mature enough,” said the report, which was compiled by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA). EU officials have also encouraged companies to ensure the U.S. government does not have unfettered access to EU citizens’ data…

Grazed from IEEE. Author: Robert N. Charette.

It being the Thanksgiving holiday week in the United States, I was tempted to write once more about the LA Unified School District’s MiSiS turkey of a project, which the LAUSD Inspector General fully adressed a report [pdf] released last week. If you like your IT turkey burnt to a crisp, over-stuffed with project management arrogance, served with heapings of senior management incompetence, and topped off a ladleful of lumpy gravy of technical ineptitude, you’ll feast mightily on the IG report.

However, if you are a parent of the over 1,000 LAUSD school district students who still have not received a class schedule nearly 40 percent of the way into the academic year—or a Los Angeles taxpayer for that matter—you may get extreme indigestion from reading it. However, the winner of the latest IT Hiccup of the Week award goes to Microsoft for the intermittent outages that hit its Azure cloud platform last Wednesday, disrupting an untold number of customer websites along with Microsoft Office 365, Xbox Live , and other services across the United States, Europe, Japan, and Asia. The outages occurred over an 11-hour (and in some cases longer) period…

Read more from the source @ http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/blob-frontend-bug-bites-microsoft-azure-cloud-?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IeeeSpectrum+(IEEE+Spectrum)

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Seth Payne.

“Cloud Computing” is the reigning buzzword in high-tech these days. Everything, it would seem, is either in the cloud, powered by the cloud, or some variation on the theme. I remember when hosted email was just that: hosted email. Today, such offerings are considered cloud offerings even though they have not changed since first being introduced over 15 years ago.

After all is said and done, we are still working with the same essential technology: compute, network, and storage. The reason cloud computing is so attractive is because it affords us incredible flexibility in how these basic elements are utilized – with both speed and specialized toolsets…

Grazed from TelecomPaper. Author: Editorial Staff.

Global data protection company, SafeNet has announced ProtectV for Service Providers, an encryption offering that lets service providers deliver enhanced data protection and access control to their customers when storing their data in cloud and virtual environments. ProtectV can be deployed into a customer environment as part of a service provider’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, and delivers full encryption of virtual machines and storage volumes that their customers can use to protect their data and segregate it from the provider and other customers.

It prevents unauthorised data access by enabling organisations to separate and control their information in multi-tenant environments, including public and hybrid cloud models. ProtectV for Service Providers is available for Amazon Web Services partners and VMware cloud platforms…

Read more from the source @ http://www.telecompaper.com/news/safenet-launches-encryption-as-a-service-offering–1051228

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Study has found the number of firms who have at least a portion of their computing infrastructure in the cloud continues to go up – but it’s the technology underneath this adoption which is the most interesting. The latest research, which polled 1672 respondents and aimed to measure cloud computing trends among technology decision makers, found over a third (38%) were “comfortable” hosting in the cloud given the state of current cloud offerings, and 56% were still weighing up their options.

As cloud usage goes up, backlog theoretically goes down, and so this study proves. 69% of respondents have at least something in the cloud, up from 61% the year before and 57% in 2012. In comparison, only 18% say they plan to deploy within the next 12 months, down from 24% in 2013…