Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Some Dropbox users are missing files from their accounts. And in response to this problem, Dropbox is offering these users a little something for free. The San Francisco-based file synchronization and sharing company has confirmed that a bug in its desktop application might have accidentally deleted files from a "small number of users" who have used the Selective Sync option, a feature that enables users to sync folders to a computer.

The company said users who haven’t applied Selective Sync settings to their accounts haven’t been affected. To resolve the issue, Dropbox said it has patched its desktop client, retired affected versions of Dropbox and made sure all its users are using newer versions of its software. The company also took additional preventive measures:…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/101314/dropbox-apologizes-losing-user-files

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Indy Dhami.

The past couple of months have seen several leaks of sensitive celebrity pictures and videos. This leak is of course unfortunate and highly embarrassing for all of the victims involved. So how does this security lapse relate to corporate information that may be stored in the cloud? It is important for all employees of an organisation to understand data of any type rarely resides only on the device where it was created or stored.

Once uploaded to cloud storage services, it becomes much more difficult to manage and monitor who has access to that data. Information security professionals need to provide technical solutions and facilitate improved awareness of how to create, classify and manage data that resides in the cloud. The two Information Security Forum (ISF) reports Securing Cloud Computing and Data Privacy in the Cloud describe how organisations can protect themselves while moving sensitive information in and out of the cloud…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Admire Moyo.

Understanding and capitalising on hybrid cloud are priorities for today’s CIOs. That’s according to Servaas Venter, country manager at EMC Southern Africa, who explains because it incorporates public and private clouds, a hybrid cloud brings together the best of both worlds by enabling businesses and their IT organisations unprecedented flexibility where they host their many and varied workloads.

Market analyst firm Gartner believes almost 50% of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017. It says in the past three years, private cloud computing has moved from an aspiration to a tentative reality for many large enterprises. Hybrid cloud computing is at the same place today as private cloud was three years ago: actual deployments are low, but aspirations are high, according to Gartner…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=138383:Hybrid-cloud-makes-sense-for-CIOs&catid=869

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Nexenta (@Nexenta), the global leader of Software-Defined Storage (SDS) (#softwaredefinedstorage) solutions, today announced that TMC’s Cloud Computing Magazine has named NexentaEdge as a 2014 Cloud Computing Storage Excellence Award winner. NexentaEdge is the industry’s first software-only scale out block and object storage solution.

The Cloud Storage Excellence Award recognizes companies that have introduced or improved cloud storage solutions. NexentaEdge was announced at VMworld 2014 in San Francisco, where attendees had an opportunity to view the product first hand. NexentaEdge is designed to deliver high performance global inline deduplication on petabyte scale clusters…

Grazed from TheREM. Author: Editorial Staff.

The future of the entire computing technology lies in the cloud technology. This statement has been repeated over and over again by various leaders of technology, and cloud computing has become a mainstream thing after all the major players have begun to venture into it. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella has time and again stressed over the importance of cloud computing, and Microsoft’s “policy of One” has been reflecting in all their products. Google’s Google Drive has also been one of the leading cloud systems with the boom in android sales they are constantly expanding. The iCloud is comparatively new, yet a very impactful service. Let us take a look at them.

Storage:

Considering their storage, Google Drive gives you 15GB of free storage. The OneDrive recently increased its capacity to 15GB, and it also offers an additional 3GB if you enable automatic upload of camera pics on the drive, and another 5GB for referring 10 friends. The iCloud, on the other hand offers the least amount of storage at merely 5GB. More storage is available for all three of them on payment of additional money…

Read more from the source @ http://www.therem.org/icloud-vs-onedrive-vs-google-drive-which-is-the-better-cloud-service/1218460/

Grazed from ITJungle. Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

OVH, one of the largest cloud computing and hosting providers in the world and the largest hosting provider in Europe, has gotten a bunch of Power8 machines and is offering virtual slices of the machines for customers to play around with as it works out how to more fully commercialize the service.

OVH was founded in 1999 outside of Paris by Octave Klaba, and the name is short for on vous héberge, which is French for "we host you." The company built its first datacenter nearly a decade and a half ago in Paris, and now operates 16 datacenters worldwide. Notably, OVH has operations in North America and Canada now as well as centers in France, Finland, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The company has over 180,000 customers that it is hosting, which to put that into perspective is considerably larger than IBM’s SoftLayer customer count (somewhere around 27,000) and is on par with Rackspace Hosting, which has more than 200,000 customers across its cloud and hosting businesses…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Drew Turney.

Bryant University, a private education provider based in Smithfield, Rhode Island, with a 150-year history, has around 3,400 students, over 85 percent of them residential, as well as 700 staff and faculty members. The 420-acre, 50-building campus is run by a centralised IT function, meaning staff members have their work cut out for them.

All Bryant University students receive a laptop configured and issued by the IT department, and they’re encouraged to use their own devices to collaborate with teachers and each other. Director of computer and telecommunications services Rich Siedzik called the resulting online learning management system "state of the art", but said the proliferation of devices and application endpoints needed to support it led to a 300 percent increase in the amount of data stored and managed by the university in just the last four years…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Rachel Wilcox.

As IT recruiters collectively bemoan the dearth of cloud professionals, the doom-and-gloom predictions that cloud services would result in the death of the IT department now seem nothing short of laughable. The most recent research from industry body the Cloud Industry Forum suggests that cloud computing has achieved mainstream deployment in the UK, with 78 per cent of organisations adopting at least one cloud-based service.

Conducted in June 2014, the survey of 250 senior IT and business decision makers indicates 15 per cent growth since September 2013 and 62 per cent growth since 2010. Large private enterprises show the highest rates of adoption at just over 80 per cent. But as cloud comes of age and organisations scramble over one another to tie their colours to its mast, the excitement over the flexibility of cloud services is being tempered by concerns over the security of cloud data storage…

Grazed from EnterpriseTech.  Author: George Leopold.

Here’s the reality when it comes to datacenter energy consumption: If the cloud industry were a country, according to a recent study, it would be the fifth largest energy consumer in the world.

The survey of datacenter energy consumption has a definite slant: It was funded by the National Mining Association and something called the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy. Still, the reality in the U.S. and emerging markets like China is that most of the electricity the industry consumes is produced in coal-fired plants. Moreover, energy consumption at datacenters will only increase as more users with more wireless devices tap into cloud services…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Arthor Cole.

Is the data center industry on the verge of a massive wave of consolidation, one that will make past efforts look tame by comparison?  Quite probably, as virtualization, cloud computing, Flash storage and a host of other technologies rewrite the economic rules regarding the care, maintenance and utilization of data resources.

Last week, I highlighted some of the efforts the U.S. federal government has taken to trim down its gargantuan data infrastructure. The effort has already slashed the IT budget by about $1 billion, although lack of reporting mechanisms and benchmarking could put the actual savings closer to $3 billion…