Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Twitter filed a lawsuit against the FBI and the Department of Justice on Tuesday to publish a full "transparency report," which documents government requests for user information. Its objective is to gain more information about government surveillance of its users. The published report does not include national security requests — Twitter has been prohibited from disclosing that information.

But Twitter believes it’s entitled under the First Amendment to "respond to our users’ concerns and to the statements of U.S. government officials by providing information about the scope of U.S. government surveillance." What’s really happening here? The government is requesting user information from Twitter, but wants Twitter to keep quiet about that fact…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen.

Enterprise IT is constantly evolving, and is driven to innovate with emerging technologies and processes. Open source has the capability to meet future enterprise IT requirements, and this has led many enterprises to take a look at these technologies. A survey by Black Duck Software in 2014 showed more than 50% of all enterprises surveyed are expected to contribute to and adopt open source.

The need for open enterprise cloud

Modern IT operations depend on a strong underlying infrastructure, especially in enterprise environments where high capacity and performance are essential. An open enterprise cloud can enable organizations to meet these future IT needs, as the platform can be tailored to meet the exact requirements of an organization – regardless of size…

Grazed from ReCode. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Business software giant Oracle is getting serious about cloud computing and has made its first hire demonstrating exactly how serious. Sources familiar with the move tell Re/code that two weeks ago it hired Peter S. Magnusson, the former VP of Engineering at Snapchat and a former director of engineering at Google, to run its cloud computing efforts.

At the company’s Oracle Openworld event in San Francisco last month, founder and CTO Larry Ellison spent a lot of time talking about Oracle’s plans to build a platform-as-a-service and an infrastructure-as-a-service offering. Among its new offerings are its core database technology, which is now being offered as a service available in the cloud, as well as a cloud-ready version of Java, the programming language over which it took stewardship when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010…

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Microsoft researchers have figured out a new way to keep data and applications secure in the cloud, by cordoning them off in memory from the underlying infrastructure. The approach, which Microsoft calls Haven, could help enterprises feel more comfortable using the cloud for mission-essential data and applications, said the researchers, who are presenting the approach at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation in Broomfield, Colorado, this week. Microsoft researchers Andrew Baumann, Marcus Peinado and Galen Hunt authored a paper about Haven, which USENIX named the best of the conference.

They use a technique called “shielded execution,” which protects the program and associated data from the platform on which they run, including the cloud provider’s operating system, administrative software, firmware, and other software that supports the application. Haven provides additional protection that can’t be offered by existing techniques, runs on commodity operating systems and works with any legacy application…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Michael Vizard.

Between the advent of Hadoop and the rise of the cloud, there not only is more data than ever to manage, but that data is more distributed than ever. But as Hadoop deployments begin to shift into the cloud, it is starting to look as though there soon might be a lot more Big Data deployments on public cloud computing platforms.

With that issue in mind Dataguise, a provider of data governance software optimized for Big Data environments, today announced it is extending its DgSecure platform to support deployments of Hadoop in the cloud. As part of the effort, Dataguise is also announcing that Altiscale and Qubole, two providers of Big Data platforms in the cloud, have joined the Dataguise Big Data Protection Partner Program, which already include Clouder, Hortonworks, MapR and Amazon Web Services…

Grazed from MidSizeInsider. Author: Jason Hannula.

The movement of data and software services to the cloud has left some businesses feeling less secure. Skyhigh Networks brought together academic experts for the first industry-focused cryptography advisory board to provide insights on using encryption schemes as part of cloud computing security, Becca Lipman reports on Wall Street & Technology.

Secure Cloud Data Through Encryption

The use of encryption means control of business files and data remains with the firm, while the cloud services provider independently handles software and infrastructure. Encryption is applied at the data source, and decryption occurs only when an accessing application or user has been authenticated. The cloud service handles the encrypted data without having access to the contents…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Rob Wright.

Following a series of unexpected reboots at several high-profile cloud computing service providers, cloud security experts warn that enterprises should prepare now to mitigate the effects of more security-related service disruptions in the future. Two weeks ago, Amazon Web Services Inc. notified its customers of an EC2 "maintenance update" that required a reboot of about 10% of its hosts globally.

The reboot applied a security update that corrected a flaw in the open source Xen hypervisor, which Amazon uses in its cloud architecture; the host servers required a system restart that rendered them unavailable "for a few minutes" while the patches were being applied, according to a blog post from Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Bluewolf, a leading global business consulting firm, today announced it has achieved Salesforce FullForce Master Program Certification for both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. This elite recognition is granted to salesforce.com partners who have proven expertise in delivering industry and cloud-specific services and solutions to sales and customer service teams, thus providing clients unprecedented success.

Bluewolf earned its Salesforce FullForce Master Program Certifications based on overwhelming success in implementing Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, sales and customer service expertise, and ability to offer differentiated solutions that optimize customer moments and drive business results…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: David H. Deans.

Here’s the challenge. Your CEO won’t accept anything less than a world-class IT infrastructure that meets the expectations of his most informed Line-of-Business leaders. If you’re the CIO and you don’t want to rely upon public cloud service providers, then are you ready to deliver the caliber of IT services that they can provision? Take a moment. Consider the implications. Ponder the impact of your actions.

All the leading public cloud services providers routinely design and assemble their own data center infrastructure components, due to their extreme needs for scale and cost control. Regardless of the cloud services company, a common element among all these devices is a requirement to run an open-source operating system, such as Linux, and various other purpose-built open-source software components. Gartner, Inc. refers to this trend as the Web-scale IT phenomena…

Grazed from InsideCounsel. Author: Linda L. Rhodes.

The economics of cloud commuting are compelling, and cloud solutions offer customers the flexibility to rapidly provision and release computing elements. As a result, use of cloud services is clearly growing. However, buying cloud services is different from buying traditional outsourced services. Cloud providers are able to offer low cost, flexible solutions because they standardize their offerings for multiple customers.

Accordingly, cloud providers are less likely than traditional outsource providers to adapt their solutions to the customer’s needs or negotiate contract terms to meet the customer’s requirements. The key to successful cloud computing is to find the right fit between the cloud solution and your business needs…