Grazed from Fool.  Author: Adam Levy.

When it comes to searching for something on the Internet, most people head over to Google. A growing portion of Internet users (19.2% of U.S. searches) use Microsoft’s Bing,but very few consider Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN  ) a big competitor in search. But Eric Schmidt, speaking in Berlin earlier this week, said the giant e-tailer is its biggest competition.

Google is facing antitrust regulations from the European Commission. While Schmidt’s wasn’t directly addressing regulators, his speech was clearly aimed at swaying their opinion. To that end, Schmidt says Google has a lot of competition on the Internet, but why does he think Amazon is its biggest competitor?…

Grazed from SFGate.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Hackers have shaken the free-software movement that once symbolized the Web’s idealism.  Several high-profile attacks in recent months exploited security flaws in the open-source software created by volunteers collaborating online, building off each other’s work.

Developed in the 1980s, open-source software has become so pervasive that it now powers global stock exchanges, the International Space Station and, according to researcher International Data Corp., appears on about 95 percent of computers and servers…

Grazed from TelecomPaper.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Belgian companies are increasingly using cloud services and applications –consciously or unknowingly- and employees are working more with mobile devices, with both trends reinforcing each other, a study from Base Business showed, conducted with Trends and Datanews. The study asked 1613 business customers about their mobile communication behaviour.

Mobile has become a basic need, Base said. People increasingly communicate through different channels and mobile devices. An overwhelming majority of respondents make daily use of mobile data. Mobile has become the new way of working and taken on an important strategic role, Base CEO Jos Donvil said…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

CTERA Networks announced today that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named CTERA’s Cloud Storage Services Platform a 2014 Cloud Computing Storage Excellence Award winner presented by TMC’s Cloud Computing Magazine. The Cloud Storage Excellence Award recognizes companies that have introduced or improved cloud storage solutions.

"With the CTERA platform seeing increasing worldwide demand from enterprise IT and cloud service providers, the TMC Cloud Storage Excellence Award offers further industry validation that versatile and scalable cloud storage services platforms are thriving in the modern IT department," said Jeff Denworth, CTERA SVP of Marketing. "CTERA enables organizations to securely and simply share, serve, and protect employee data in the world’s largest and most demanding cloud environments, while allowing IT to continue to deliver the best cloud storage experience to its users."…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Signe Brewster.

Jack ThayerDNAnexus, a Mountain View-based startup that leverages the cloud to turn raw DNA sequences into useful data, announced today that Regeneron Genetics Center is the latest health care company to use its system to search for new drugs.

The startup is already sifting through 1,000 exomes–the 1 percent of the human genome that is most relevant to health–each week, stripping away any information that could tie it back to its source while pulling out the interesting data points that can help laboratories and companies connect genes with different health problems. Institutions can use the pool of information to quickly search for a new drug or even a diagnosis for a single patient…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Matt Asay.

Forget Netflix. While Amazon has been holding up the media giant for years as an example, Netflix never resonated with mainstream enterprises. Most companies simply aren’t ready to unleash chaos monkeys on their infrastructure. But GE? That’s a different story. In a surprisingly candid and punchy interview with InfoWorld, Chris Drumgoole, GE’s chief operations officer of Information Technology, dissed private clouds as merely "well-orchestrated virtualization" and declared GE will reduce its data center assets by 90% in favor of the public cloud. Is GE the new poster child for the public cloud?

Cloud is the new normal

Remember when public cloud was only suitable for development and test workloads? You don’t have to think back very far: there are plenty of vendors that still try to sell that story. The problem is that it’s not true and hasn’t been for some time. Just ask Gartner analyst Lydia Leong, who noted, "Out of ~20 government participants at my Gartner [Symposium] roundtable, only one hadn’t begun to use cloud," which represents a "Major change from last year." If the government is going into the cloud, everyone is…

Read more from the source @ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-public-cloud-just-got-a-new-poster-child/

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

IBM may have dithered with the wrong initial strategy when creating a business model for cloud computing, but it’s tackling the internet of things aggressively. On Wednesday it launched a new platform for building IoT-related apps. The platform is called IoT Foundation and the idea really sounds like a data escrow in the cloud where you can keep information and then ship it out to trusted parties as needed.

(I am irked at IBM for trying to co-opt IoT Foundation as a legit name for a product. It’s like calling your NoSQL data store Big Data Platform or perhaps your cloud storage product Simple Storage Service.) The IoT Foundation product is part of IBM’s Bluemix platform as a service, which in turn runs on IBM’s SoftLayer cloud computing platform…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

The secret to spotting a golden resume is to first accept the fact that you are probably not going to find one perfect IT candidate who meets all of your desired qualifications, fits in perfectly with your MSP office’s atmosphere, and performs above expectations with every single project. You need to approach the hiring process with realistic expectations about what you really need from a candidate. Once you know what you are truly looking for in a prospective employee, it becomes much easier to spot the resume that is right on target.

Let process drive resumes to you

Before you find that golden resume, you will have to have some process in place for collecting applications from qualified candidates. There are so many avenues to recruiting these days that you may have to experiment with which forums generate the best matches for your particular needs…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/finding-talent-cloud-what-csps-need-know

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud Cruiser has launched version 4 of its solution for hybrid IT consumption-based service delivery. The aptly named Cloud Cruiser 4 builds on previous versions’ features with the ability to track usage and costs with real-time visibility, greater financial control and hard cost savings of up to 10 percent of an annual IT budget.

Cloud Cruiser, which focuses on enabling hybrid cloud environments by providing IT with a centralized delivery service, traditionally plays in the cloud services provider market. It’s a set of features and functionality that cloud services providers are interested in, said Deirdre Mahon, CMO of Cloud Cruiser, in an interview with Talkin’ Cloud…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: David Linthicum.

The rise of cloud computing has led to the reassessment of how both cloud and non-cloud systems approach security. Considering the complex and distributed nature of cloud-based platforms, security approaches that leverage identity are the best fit. This will require a fundamental shift in thinking — and in technology.

There are many players in the field of identity and access management (IAM) ranging from the old guard of Oracle, CA, and IBM to newer players that are built specifically for the cloud. However, the movement to identity-based solutions is not as easy as the technology providers describe. While it’s fairly straightforward to build new approaches to security in new applications that reside on the cloud, the harder aspect of IAM is to extend this security model to the traditional enterprise, so the entire environment is secure. Security should be consistent and systemic, which is lacking in most traditional enterprise systems. This security problem needs to be solved before moving to the cloud…