Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Annoucement.

New research released today by CompTIA, the information technology (IT) industry association, reveals that more than 90 percent of companies are using some form of cloud computing, a clear indication that the cloud has quickly become an essential ingredient of modern IT.

CompTIA has defined four stages of cloud adoption: Experiment, Non-critical Use, Full Production and Transformed IT. Companies will move through these stages based on several factors, including technical know-how, risk tolerance and budgetary constraints.  But as users move beyond experiments and trials into more advanced applications, they’re also facing more challenges, according to CompTIA’s Fifth Annual Trends in Cloud Computing study…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Editorial Staff.

The problem with encrypting data is that sooner or later, you have to decrypt it. Keep your cloud files cryptographically scrambled using a secret key that only you possess, and it’s likely no hacker will have the codebreaking resources necessary to crack them. But as soon as you want to actually do something with those files—anything from editing a word document or querying a database of financial data—you have to unlock the data and leave it vulnerable. Homomorphic encryption, a still-mostly-theoretical advancement in the science of keeping secrets, could change that.

A homomorphic encryption scheme is a crypto system that allows computations to be performed on data without decrypting it. A homomorphically encrypted search engine, for instance, could take in encrypted search terms and compare them with an encrypted index of the web. Or a homomorphically encrypted financial database stored in the cloud would allow users to ask how much money an employee earned in the second quarter of 2013…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Divina Paredes.

Cloud computing is uniquely susceptible to the perils of myths due to the nature, confusion and hype surrounding it, says David Mitchell Smith, Gartner vice president and fellow. Myths are sometimes harmless but they do have an effect on how we approach solutions and can impede innovation, he states in a recent research paper. “Many myths are rooted in fear and misunderstanding. They can drive decisions and strategies based on fear and this leads to oversimplifications and mantras that are the real dangers.”

Even with a mostly agreed on formal definition, multiple perspectives and agendas still conspire to mystify the subject ever more. Add the incessant hype and there can be a resultant confusion that permeates IT (and beyond) today, he says. He lists some of the most “dangerous and misleading” cloud myths…

Grazed from Dell. Author: PR Announcement.

Dell recently unveiled its most advanced and easy-to-manage portfolio of PowerEdge servers, designed to help customers worldwide address and optimize the evolving spectrum of application and workload requirements. The new Dell PowerEdge portfolio– which begins with five form-factors across blade, rack and tower servers– provides customers with choice in how they address industry trends including cloud computing, mobility, big data, and software-defined.

These are factors that more than 80 percent of IT decision-makers report as investment priorities for the next 12 months, according to the Future Ready IT survey, recent worldwide research commissioned by Dell and Intel…

Grazed from VMTurbo.  Author: Webinar Announcement.

How to Deliver Real-Time Automation & Hyperscale Operations – with a VDI use case from a Fortune 50 Health Insurer

OpenSky Corp. helps transform IT infrastructure for the world’s most innovative clients, and was specifically tasked by a Fortune 50 Health Insurer to increase the efficiency of its VDI environment and guarantee zero downtime… all while scaling from 1,500 to over 25,000 seats in less than four years.

In the process, OpenSky’s Don McKeith realized that to fully deliver the project, a fundamentally different operations framework was necessary. What happened next provided insights from which every IT organization can learn…

Grazed from TechGoondu.  Author: Aaron Tan.

Robots, drones and driverless vehicles will propel the next decade of growth in the cloud computing industry, according to a Dell executive.  In an interview with Techgoondu at the Cloud Asia 2014 conference last week, Martin Yates, strategic enterprise practice director at Dell Asia-Pacific and Japan, said the increased processing power delivered over the cloud will offer unlimited possibilities in advanced automation.

“You’ll see an acceleration of cloud computing in areas like drones,” he said, noting that companies like DHL and Amazon are already using or experimenting with drones to deliver packages…

Grazed from USANews.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The Software program-Defined Data Center (SDDC) is at an early stage in its improvement, but software and hardware vendors are currently lining up to sell you SDDC items. EMC lately released its Federation Software-Defined Data Center Answer, a combined software stack that it hopes will serve as a reference architecture for all future application-defined data centers, equivalent to the way the Java EE reference architecture is a template option for several Java enterprise applications.

The objective of a SDDC is to do away with massive infrastructure boxes and replace them with network solutions dedicated to and tuned to the requirements of person applications. This will let applications to be decomposed into compute workloads, transport workloads, and storage workloads – and these many tasks can be executed wherever it makes the most sense…

Grazed from SysCon Media.  Author: Michael Bushong.

We got into the Halloween spirit here at Plexxi—check out this Plexxi pumpkin carved by our talented marketing manager, Khoa Ma!  Jack-o-lanterns aside, we know the thought of navigating trends like the Internet of Things and Big Data can be frightening, especially if you are unsure of how to approach them.

As these trends gain popularity and deployments increase, IT architects often worry about increased activity on already taxed infrastructures. Our own Mike Bushong is our resident expert on this topic and he penned an interesting blog post this week on networking’s atomic unit and “going small to scale up.” Creating smaller units of capacity makes the network easier to manage, and most importantly, scale…

Grazed from CRN.  Author: Kari Hamanaka.

The head of an early-stage security analytics company has a well-thought-out strategy for partnerships moving ahead amid what he called accelerating demand for smarter approaches to security.

Austin, Texas-based SparkCognition is just about a year old and has established partnerships with IBM Watson, SoftLayer and Power, and while most of its sales currently are direct, Founder, President and CEO Amir Husain is already in the beginning stages of building out the company’s channel…

Grazed from CIOInsight.  Author: Samuel Greengard.

The march to cloud computing has accelerated to a sprint over the last few years. Nevertheless, many CIOs and other senior executives overlook or are unable to unlock the value of clouds, according to a new report from cloud provider Canopy, in conjunction with Vanson Bourne, which recently conducted a survey of 950 CIOs, CFOs and other decision-makers.

The study found that 81 percent of CIOs and CFOs in the U.S. fear their business will become uncompetitive, with a large majority of them (74 percent) believing this will happen as soon as the next 15 months. In fact, these executives estimate that their businesses lost a collective $41 billion in revenues last year due to the lack of ideal cloud solutions…