Grazed from Cloud-law.eu.  Author: PR Announcement.

The inaugural Cloud Law event taking place in London November 25th with participating enterprise general counsel and professional advisors is set to address the regulatory complexity confronting cloud computing in Europe. With an extensive panel of experts, the event aims to navigate enterprises through the complex regulatory and legal issues arising from outsourcing and untangling the European Data Protection Directive.

“The long term interests of all stakeholders in the development of cloud computing are only served if those with shared values come together and agree clearer rules of the road than is currently the case,” commented Dervish Tayyip, Assistant General Counsel of Microsoft who will be speaking at the conference. “It is a solvable problem and in the interests of all those stakeholders that we start now. The event will throw a spotlight on the privacy and security concerns of capital markets seeking to outsource critical-business information in the cloud. It will also assess how cloud computing which could deliver significant cost efficiency and innovation for the healthcare system, nevertheless raises issues for compliance with patient confidentiality…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Ubuntu Linux has already enjoyed the distinction of being the most popular platform for hostingOpenStack clouds. But now, Canonical has taken its commitment to OpenStack a step further with the announcement of its own OpenStack distribution.

Called the Canonical Distribution for Ubuntu OpenStack, the platform is the company’s newest enterprise computing product and is available starting now in public beta form. Canonical is pitching it as the OpenStack solution that offers "the widest range of commercially supported vendor options for storage, software-defined networking and hypervisor from Canonical and its OpenStack partners."…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Joab Jackson.

Hoping to enlarge its pool of corporate customers to include the enterprise market, startup BitYota will soon offer its data warehouse service on the Microsoft Azure cloud, thanks to a partnership between the two companies.  "Microsoft is truly partnering with us, not just providing a compute infrastructure," said Graham Summers, BitYota chief operating officer. "There are so many parts of the organization we can tap into."

Although BitYota’s early customer base has largely been small businesses and startups, traditional enterprises are increasingly considering the service for new projects, Summers said. They could use the cloud service to analyze marketing or operational data, without the need to set up all the hardware and software infrastructure to maintain a data warehouse in-house…

Grazed from CIO-Today.  Author: Shirley Siluk.

Before Salesforce kicks off its Dreamforce event in San Francisco on October 13, it’s inviting developers to compete for $1 million in cash prizes by building innovative new mobile apps for sales, service and other uses. The $1 Million Hackathon is set to start at 6 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday, and will continue through noon Sunday.

Hackers will compete for prizes in three categories: Force.com mobile apps, Heroku mobile apps, and Force.com with Heroku mobile apps. The first-place hacker or hacker team in each category will win $100,000, with the three first-place winners then competing for an additional grand prize of $150,000…

Grazed from Net-Security.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A majority of IT organizations are kept in the dark when it comes to protecting corporate data in the cloud, putting confidential and sensitive information at risk. This is just one of the findings of a recent Ponemon Institute study commissioned by SafeNet. The study, titled "The Challenges of Cloud Information Governance: A Global Data Security Study," surveyed more than 1800 IT and IT security professionals worldwide.

The research indicates that while organizations are increasingly using cloud computing resources, IT staff is having trouble controlling the management and security of data in the cloud...

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Microsoft is gathering more believers of its Cloud OS vision. Cloud OS is a consistent cloud computing platform that encompasses infrastructure, apps and data, and spans the data centers of hosting service providers, customers and Microsoft’s cloud. A year after its launch, the Microsoft Cloud OS Network is reaching new heights. In its December 2013 debut, Microsoft’s Cloud OS Network got off the ground in 90 markets and 425 data centers.

Twenty-five partners joined during the program’s launch, including Capgemini, CGI, iWeb and Lenovo. "Here at Microsoft, we think we’re the best bet for customers because we alone provide a consistent, enterprise-grade platform that is hybrid by design, and one that is based on our experience delivering more than 200 cloud services to billions of people," said Microsoft’s Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of Cloud and Enterprise Marketing, at the time…

Read more from the source @  http://www.eweek.com/cloud/microsoft-grows-its-cloud-os-partner-network.html#sthash.QPrpIHJ1.dpuf

Grazed from TechVibes.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Canadian business executives have heard plenty of talk about the cloud, but most have a low awareness of the potential benefits of cloud-based solutions to their businesses.  That’s the finding of a survey of Canadian C-suite executives released by Microsoft Canada, which found that 90 per cent of senior Canadian executives are not familiar with what cloud computing means and that two-thirds are "only just beginning to familiarize themselves" with the cloud.

Of the 10 per cent who feel they are familiar with cloud computing, fewer than half (45 per cent) were able to select the correct definition from a list of choices.  "I think the findings reveal a disconnect between what the cloud really is, what it offers, and how it is perceived by Canada’s C-suite decision-makers," said Microsoft Canada president Janet Kennedy…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective.  Author: Robert Delgato.

For many business owners, growing their companies remains a key focus that drives many of their business decisions. One tool that is being adopted more often, especially in recent years, to facilitate this is that of cloud computing. The cloud offers companies more agility, lower operating costs, and more efficient and productive work, but even with those advantages, some businesses may struggle finding a cloud provider that’s right for them. In many cases, the question isn’t if the business should do it, but rather how well the cloud will fit into the existing organization’s processes. When the time comes to make an important decision over who you will choose to handle your cloud storage needs, here are five things you should consider…

1. Security Capabilities

One of the major factors holding business owners back from embracing the cloud is the concern over security. When you use a cloud storage provider, you’re essentially giving your valuable data to a third party with the expectation they’ll keep it safe. Even so, with numerous news stories involving security breaches at big companies, business leaders may not be enthusiastic about giving their data to someone else. Most cloud storage companies have responded to these concerns by improving their own security, adding in new measures aimed at protecting clients’ data. When you pick a cloud storage provider, make sure they have sufficient security measures. These can include anti-virus software, data encryption, firewalls, and routine security audits…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbo.

Hitachi Data Systems(HDS) is looking to build out its network of cloud services provider partners that offer cloud servicesthat carry the "Powered by Hitachi Data Systems" mark. To do so, the company has launched the Hitachi Cloud Service Provider Program.

According to HDS, the new partner program is intended to deliver enterprise-grade cloud technology to partners in addition to joint business planning, cloud service design and a go-to-market approach that helps partners deliver high-quality services to their customers…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: Antonio Manzalini.

Ultra-broadband network proliferation, advances in information technology and the evolution of endpoint devices have created the conditions for re-inventing telecommunications networks and services architectures.  Software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) are just two facets of the so-called “IT-zation or softwarization” of telecom infrastructures.

SDN decouples the software, control plane, from the forwarding hardware of nodes such as routers and switches and executes the control software in the cloud or in any standard or hybrid processing resources made available, such as blades or servers. SDN doesn’t just affect the evolution of Layer 2 and Layer 3 services such as switching and networking, but also impacts Layer 4 to Layer 7 network functions…