Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Shawn Drew.

The right cloud solution can make a business more agile, more cost-effective and even more secure, but despite what evangelists might say, it is not an IT department’s panacea. Only by understanding the potential disadvantages of cloud computing can IT managers ensure that their migration is as successful as possible.

Finding Trouble in the Cloud

Over the past few years, the cloud has cemented itself as a developing technology that is going to be at the center of IT for decades to come. However, this does not mean that IT managers can simply schedule a cloud migration and assume success. Computer Weekly highlights the potential missteps when moving to the cloud, going over four real-world examples of instances in which businesses found trouble due to either a lack of understanding of how the cloud works or an overestimation of its potential benefits…

Grazed from Phys.Org. Author: Editorial Staff.

A team of computer scientists at NJIT has won a multi-year grant from the National Science Foundation to come up with a platform that would allow mobile devices to interact with each other with help from the cloud. The technology they are developing is designed to support collaborative applications in areas such as healthcare, safety, and social interaction, potentially benefiting millions of users.

The proposed mobile cloud computing platform would not only stimulate the creation of groundbreaking applications, it would also leverage the cloud to expand the processing power, network bandwidth, storage space, and battery life of individual devices.
"Our goal is to make smart phones smarter," says Cristian Borcea, associate professor and associate chair of the Department of Computer Science, who is the grant’s principal investigator…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Zulfikar Ramzan.

Security in the cloud is on a lot of people’s minds following the hacking of celebrities’ iCloud accounts. When we hear about user accounts on cloud services and SaaS applications getting compromised, we start thinking more about he types of security capabilities that cloud providers offer versus what they leave unaddressed, and where responsibility should lie.

Although many people think that security is a monolith, in reality it’s much more of a mosaic — full of nuances and subtleties. There are undoubtedly various kinds of threats associated with cloud services. From the perspective of the cloud service provider, the most pressing security issue involves protecting its back-end infrastructure from outside attackers. An attacker who can break in through the back door can abscond with a wealth of data…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dan Kusnetzsky.

Hewlett-Packard’s move to acquire Eucalpytus (see HP buys Eucalyptus, puts Marten Mickos in charge of cloud unit by my colleague Larry Dignan) is the latest example of asupplier trying to be a part of every industry party. Like all major hardware players, HP wants want to be involved with cloud regardless of the stack of software used to create the cloud computing environment.

They do this because they wish to be chosen by their installed base regardless of the industry trend or technology. If we take a moment to consider the major systems and software players, a strong majority of them are involved with Amazon AWS, Azure, OpenStack, VMware vSpere and even Cloud Stack. I don’t believe that they expect any one of those to be the clear winner and all of the others will go away…

Grazed from CIOInsight. Author: Dennis McCafferty.

Momentum for cloud deployment is reaching full-throttle levels, according to a new survey report from Evolve IP. The accompanying report, titled "Cloud of Dreams: The Adoption of Cloud Services—2014," reveals that an immense majority of tech employees and leaders feel the cloud represents the very future of IT. Most have already launched cloud services, and nearly as many intend to expand their use of cloud resources.

Just as in the classic movie "Field of Dreams," "organizations built their ballparks (clouds), found some initial players (adopters) and waited to see if they were right to believe in themselves," according to the Evolve IP report. "They were, [as] rapid flight to the cloud continues with organizations planning on moving their infrastructure, applications and more to the cloud…

Grazed from WashingtonPost. Author: Linda Bernardi.

Everyone has heard about the cloud, which powers the smartphone apps we all love. The cloud is also vital to large companies, yet their adoption of the cloud hasn’t been as seamless. Large companies are hampered by years of old systems, programs and data, hundreds of thousands of employees spread across the world, distributed operations which are often siloed (disconnected).

They not only have to run their traditional businesses but now have to evolve to deploy across the complex cloud landscape and have everything readily available on smart devices. It is a complicated environment along with security, policy and other requirements. Not only do they need to deploy cloud for internal operations but also to support their massive customer base…

Grazed from HealthCareGlobal. Author: Stephanie Ocana.

Cloud-based services are steadily becoming more widely adopted by healthcare organizations. The past year alone has seen a surge of interest regarding the potential of cloud computing with many players set to start moving healthcare-related applications across to cloud platforms in the coming months. The accelerating migration to cloud computing represents a change for the way the healthcare industry sources its information technology (IT). But will this shift affect other areas of healthcare? According to Accenture, the answer to that question is “yes.”

Healthcare is moving to a digital platform, becoming more patient-centered and data-driven. Large international players such as Microsoft, Qualcomm Life, Philips, Verizon and AT&T have launched cloud-based vertical solutions aimed at the healthcare sector, and the global trend is that cloud solutions are supporting greater sharing and accessibility of health data…

Read more from the source @ http://www.healthcareglobal.com/tech/1630/How-Cloud-Computing-is-Changing-the-Healthcare-IT-Industry

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Howard Solomon.

Cloud computing is the latest hot technology, but a number of organizations still don’t think it’s completely safe for mission-critical or proprietary applications. That includes some of the biggest companies in the world, admits PaaSLane, a software as a service offering that scrutinizes and helps prepare code for the cloud.

So on Tuesday it will announce version 2.5 with local profiling, which enables source code to be analyzed on premise, uploading only its statistics for analysis into its cloud. It could be seen as a step backwards by PassLane, owned by Cloud Technology Partners of Boston, whose service went live in May. The idea is that large enterprises would upload their code for processing…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Jason Bowden.

Cloud based business intelligence is a game changer in the digital business. All types of businesses, from small to large enterprises are equally adapting to the emergence of cloud based tools to enhance business intelligence. Small to medium business enterprises are now embracing cloud based applications to make their marketing strategies highly competitive. Large firms, on the other hand, are using cloud business intelligence solutions in further expanding their market and using it for experimentation in furtherance of building a more productive market environment.

Cloud business intelligence (BI) delivers productivity tools and applications that are highly beneficial to businesses. Among these benefits include the speed of deployment and implementation of various business apps, scaling up of web applications and the integration of business intelligence apps to enhance business productivity and cost effectiveness…

Grazed from Science 2.0.  Author: Editorial Staff.

"Nobody understands the cloud," shouts a character in a recent comedy about a couple trying to remove a private video from the Internet.  In reality, the cloud is completely understandable, and it’s one of few areas in climate where the emissions costs are also. And because it is quantifiable it can benefit from combinatorial optimization. the famous rucksack problem where a traveler has to try and fit everything in without leaving anything behind.

Cloud computing involves using remote servers for data storage and processing. It can provide users with more storage space and computing power and  they can access it from anywhere in the world. But environmental critics are part of the ‘nobody understands the cloud’ masses and worry that distributed servers running continuously, where an individual user’s laptop might be shut down when it is not in use, could be harming the atmosphere…