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…

Grazed from MidSize Insider.  Author: Shawn Drew.

A new survey on the state of cloud security shines a light on the increasingly complex task of securing data and applications, with which midsize businesses are having a particularly tough time. These businesses need to understand the importance of security and find a way to mitigate risk as they make the almost inevitable push toward the cloud.

Businesses Finding Difficulty With Cloud Computing Security

The latest cloud security insight comes from a survey conducted by AlgoSec, which asked cloud-based security questions of over 350 IT professionals, data center architects, application owners and CIOs. The results of the survey, summarized in eWeek, prove that even as the cloud becomes a standard part of almost every information infrastructure, cloud computing security has a long way to go…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: Virginia Backaitis.

"The times they are a changin’." For anyone who’s not a fan of rock music history that quote may not resonate, but it comes from a song that Bob Dylan wrote in the 1960s. It describes a period when the world began to change how it looked at issues like women’s rights, racism, poverty and social policy.

Though the term wasn’t used at the time, "more democratized" fits the bill pretty well. More people had an opportunity to play a role in their own future. And people began to learn that when they worked together they could get more, and often more significant things, done with greater satisfaction…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

Security on the public cloud is one of the most important concerns for CIOs. Microsoft Azure cloud CTO Mark Russinovich identified ten key security risks of public cloud services, including malicious insiders, shared technology, data breaches, artificial intelligence and data loss. He also outlined strategies and best practices for users and service providers to beat these risks.

“We are in the third era of computing – the cloud and mobile era – but security considerations on cloud are still not widely understood. It is important to address the public cloud security concerns to facilitate its adoption,” Russinovich told delegates at the annual IP Expo 2014 in London. “This is important because there is no cloud without trust.”…

Grazed from SCMagazine. Author: Doug Drinkwater.

The firm’s principal cyber-security strategist Jeff Jones was presenting at the IP Expo Europe exhibition in London on Thursday, where he suggested that the leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had impacted the Redmond technology giant and the cloud computing market as a whole.

The firm claims to offer more than 200 cloud service products but has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons over the last 18 months; first over claims that SkyDrive was continually tapped by the NSA, and then over the US DOJ decision that the government could view information held at its non-US data centres…

Grazed from BSMInfo. Author: Pete Johnson.

The data center world was changed forever by the virtualization revolution – and that change has only accelerated with the cloud computing technology that followed. Over the last 18 months the market has settled on the notion that any sizable organization that has enough workload diversity benefits the most by using both public and private cloud in a hybrid model.

Throughout this evolution, VARs and MSPs have had to ask themselves hard questions about where value can be added. The world of simply delivering hardware does not exist anymore – other aspects of the value chain have to be explored. As businesses begin to adopt hybrid cloud and all the flexibility it promises, a new class of products that help them do so effectively is emerging – and this is the perfect place for VARs and MSPs to play in because of the huge potential for added value on an ongoing basis…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bsminfo.com/doc/tips-to-adding-value-to-hybrid-clouds-with-cloud-management-platforms-0001

Grazed from ITWire. Author: Greg Barnes.

Integrating OpenStack, the free open source cloud computing software platform, with an advanced cloud architecture based on application delivery controller (ADC) technology offers significant advantages for cloud data centre operators.  While OpenStack gives IT professionals an open and standards-based approach to scalable and agile cloud deployment, an ADC-based architecture utilises L4-L7 network application services to provide a consistent solution for cloud provisioning and management.

Their integration allows cloud data centre operators to combine application networking services seamlessly with their other infrastructure, permitting them to meet service-level agreements (SLA’s) and compliance. A choice of form factor provides the flexibility to create a tailored offering in a high-density multi-tenant environment…