Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Kyle Cebull.

Investors, bankers and financial planners have a responsibility to their clients to secure their personal and business financial information. It’s not just about good business practices; it’s the law. When your company reputation and livelihood is on the line, it’s important to have a full understanding of how any decision you make regarding the data of your customers and clients can affect security.

For the most part, financial services companies have been hesitant to adopt cloud technologies, labeling it as not secure enough. Many principals find themselves asking the question, “Is the cloud secure enough for the financial industry?” There are a few factors at play in the discussion of cloud security for the financial industry…

Grazed from Re/Code.net. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Business software giant Oracle kicks off its massive OpenWorld conference in San Francisco tonight with a keynote address by founder and newly named CTO Larry Ellison. It will be Ellison’s first public appearance since a managerial shift announced earlier this month in which he ceded his CEO job to presidents Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, who now jointly share the title and have split operational responsibilities.

In an interview Friday, Hurd gave Re/code a short preview of what Ellison will be covering in his remarks. Expect to hear the word “cloud” a lot, but not in the way you’ve come to think of it. Oracle, which sells large companies much of the software they use to run their businesses, has begun shifting its business toward selling software-as-a-service, or SaaS…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Overcoming any skepticism about Platform as a Service will require more of an operational focus. As discussed in our last post, there’s a lot of "dev" in PaaS, but not enough "ops." Recently, JP Morgenthal, director of the cloud computing & DevOps practice at Perficient (and a long-time enterprise software thought leader), led a BrightTalk panel discussion on promoting PaaS adoption to skeptical enterprises. He was joined by Ed Anuff, Apigee; Sean Allen, OutSystems; and Sarbjeet Johal of Unified Cloud.

The first challenge is that definitions of PaaS tend to be relatively murky, and often overlap with Infrastructure as a Service. (Even the Wikipedia definition of PaaS is flagged with "multiple issues.") Helping to kick off the discussion, Allen defined PaaS as "a cloud-based service that integrates and manages all aspects of your application stack…. anything that allows you to build cloud-based applications without worrying about storage or other stack-based components."…

Grazed from Examiner.  Author: Victoria Ross.

Ericsson, the Swedish telecom provider, has purchased a majority stake of a platform in service provider Apcera. It has done this because, “Cloud technology is disrupting the global ICT infrastructure market, and service providers must modernize to provide more value to their customers,” according to its press release to CloudTech on Friday.

Closer to home, LA based ConnectX, the space-based supercomputing company, unveiled in a press release on Friday its bold mission to unlock the value and insight of all Big Data by creating the first space-based supercomputing platform…

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud.  Author: Ahmed Banafa.

The cloud isn’t just for techies anymore. Understanding what’s next for cloud computing is crucial for businesses at all levels. Managers are responding to the real opportunities that the cloud offers to develop new business models, forge closer ties with customers and tap into the expertise of employees and partners. From a technology that was initially adopted for efficiency and cost savings, the cloud has emerged into an innovation powerhouse.

The next generation of cloud computing will deliver value to the business faster by automating everything from request to deployment and configuration—and it will do so up and down the stack and across the entire infrastructure. In order for the next generation of computing to achieve these goals, there are five platform requirements:…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Mark Gibbs.

It’s Friday morning and marketing tells you they need a Wordpress blog up and running by Monday and they want a theme like this and features like that and, and, and …  you’ve not got much time if you plan to have a weekend off so the last thing you’re going to want to do is work with a remote server. If you did you’d be loading themes one after another, testing them with various plugins, and generally beating the application into submission while dealing with the delays inherent in using a machine that’s somewhere out on the Internet. That would mean you’d be waiting just that little bit longer (or quite possibly, a lot longer) to do everything than you’d prefer.

The answer is, of course, to run the application locally but that will often involve a huge amount of preparation and messing around. I have a fantastic shortcut: Bitnami Stacks.  Bitnami Stacks are server-based open source applications packaged to a consistent standard with all of the app’s required libraries and dependencies, optimized for performance, and kept updated to the latest stable version…

Grazed from RealBusiness.  Author: Editorial Staff.

We’ve sure heard a lot about cloud computing this decade. Yes, the potential for storing information in virtual data centers is great, especially when it comes to complementing that other much-hyped innovation: Big Data. But the cloud can also serve as an IT solution on a day-to-day level — that is, if businesses can figure out the best strategy to implement it. Until recently, that has been a struggle.

“Things are a little slow because cloud was more of a buzzword in the past,” says Raman Padmanabhan, chief information officer for the Commercial Healthcare Sector at Xerox. “People didn’t fully comprehend the full potential of a cloud infrastructure, outside of companies that were delivering ITO [Information Technology Outsourcing] as a service.”…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Daniel Green.

Apple’s launch of the iPhone 6 Plus reflects a wider trend of mobile devices slowly replacing PCs as the central device for the consumer’s every day use. The rise of cloud computing has enabled mobile devices to fulfil most computing tasks so that “any trade-offs are outweighed by the convenience and flexibility provided by the mobile devices.” Companies like Apple and Samsung have capitalised on the growing consumer demand for PC-like devices, with the introduction of ‘phablets’ beginning to change the very concept of a ‘personal computer.’ While tablets have certainly found a niche market, they remain an awkward size for basic mobile uses such as receiving mobile calls and texting.

The increased size of mobile screens, with the iPhone 6 Plus screen measuring 6.22 x 3.06 x 0.28 inches in size, will also help to close the gap between mobile phones and the traditional desktop experience. Video conferencing via user-friendly mobile apps such as Skype are predicted to be even more commonplace in the work place, with corporations investing more in remote working and flexible working practices by relying more on cloud technology and online productivity tools…

Grazed from TechPageOne.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Business agility. It’s the true driver of cloud computing adoption — and it trumps efficiency, cost and the other things people talk about.  For example, when marketers sign up for Typepad online, they do so because the technology enables them to solve problems on their own timetables — not those of a centralized IT organization.

Likewise, when developers start virtual machines in the Amazon cloud because it takes six weeks to get similar resources from central IT, they do so because they need the virtual machines now — not because of how much less expensive the public cloud might appear…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Brandon Kelly.

We live in an era of constant, accelerating change, and the only organizations that are equipped to keep pace are those that are capable of competing at cloud speed. Does trading out packaged software installed on your own servers for the cloud based versions offered by your vendor accelerate your organization to cloud speed?

Sorry, no.   So what the heck is cloud speed anyways?  Competing at cloud speed is a goal that every organization should have, and it requires learning fast not failing fast, it involves creating the flexibility to adapt to trends that spread globally faster than ever before, to respond to competition from unexpected sources, and provides a potential antidote to decreasing corporate lifespans.   Accelerating to cloud speed requires your organization to operate under a series of principles that make it both FAST and agile…