Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Jason Hannula.

Software-defined technologies are an up-and-coming option for virtualization across networks, servers and data storage. Bill Kleyman’s Data Center Knowledge article points to how this can benefit small and midsize businesses (SMBs) through the creation of commodity data centers.

Software-defined technologies accelerated virtualization in the data center by removing a dependency on specific hardware platforms and providing assistance with task automation. The physical design of data centers is also changing to incorporate modular and custom alternatives. The resulting shift in the data center landscape presents commodity-level options for SMBs to economically consider private data center development…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Sue Poremba.

Employees who bypass company-approved technologies to use shadow cloud services are putting the overall company and network at risk for more data breaches, compliance failures and a loss of integrity during business transactions, according to a new warning from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Increasing Risks

Shadow IT situations, in which employees use any technology that has not been approved by the company, have been creating problems for a long time. By instituting policies surrounding the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement, IT departments have been able to rein in some shadow IT problems. However, as cloud computing continues to gain popularity and more employees use the cloud on their personal devices, shadow cloud has added a new level of risk…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Sue Poremba.

The next generation of cloud computing could actually be found in a cloud format that has already been around for a while. The bare-metal cloud brings all of the advantages that have become synonymous with the cloud but minus one element — there is no virtualization.

The Need for Better Cloud Architecture

With the growth of technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) taking up bandwidth and storage space, there is a need for better cloud architecture, Joe McKendrick writes on ZDNet. Cloud experts and researchers think that this can be accomplished in part by using bare-metal access, or “an alternative to the virtualization technologies currently used to share cloud hardware, allowing for experimentation with new virtualization technologies that could improve reliability, security and performance.”…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Todd R. Weiss.

Google has acquired Zync Render, a visual effects cloud rendering vendor that has been involved with movie hits including Star Trek Into Darkness, American Hustle and Flight, and will integrate it into Google’s Cloud Platform. The Zync Render deal was announced by Belwadi Srikanth, a Google Cloud Platform product manager, in an Aug. 26 post on the Google Cloud Platform Blog.

Terms of the acquisition were not released. "Creating amazing special effects requires a skilled team of visual artists and designers, backed by a highly powerful infrastructure to render scenes," wrote Srikanth. "Many studios, however, don’t have the resources or desire to create an in-house rendering farm, or they need to burst past their existing capacity."…

Grazed from FedTechMagazine. Author: Nicole Blake Johnson.

The National Science Foundation wants to transform the way cloud services are designed and delivered to support a new wave of applications for medical devices, power grids, transportation systems and other critical areas. NSF is funding two $10 million projects aimed at empowering “academic researchers to experiment with novel cloud architectures and pursue new, architecturally enabled applications of cloud computing,” NSF CIO Amy Northcutt wrote in a recent blog post.

“While most of the original ideas that laid the foundation for cloud computing came from the academic research community, as clouds grew in popularity, industry has more recently driven their design and use,” Northcutt explained. That’s why the NSF-funded projects will complement industry efforts…

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: Jimmy Nicholis.

Both businesses and consumers are increasingly reliant on services such as Apple’s iCloud, which has been implicated in the celebrity picture attack. Companies are now using it to store intellectual property as well as information about its customers, and this makes it a prime target for hackers.

For its part Apple has said it is investigating the issue, with iCloud under severe scrutiny on the basis of speculation from 4chan, the internet board where the story originated. Yet even now clues have surfaced over what has happened, which should also lead us to an appropriate response…

Grazed from Cloud Computing Tech. Author: David Deans.

As the chief executive at your company, if you discovered that you had some major financial standards compliance issues within your organization, would you be concerned about the risks associated with that exposure? If your designated outside auditor had bypassed your internal finance department and chose instead to work directly with your individual Line of Business leaders, would you want to know why? Moreover, would you intervene?

Yes, it’s a rhetorical series of questions. And I think we all know the answers. Did you know there’s a movement that’s already in progress that could impact your company’s provision and consumption of IT services, with a corresponding potential exposure concern that’s related to compliance issues?…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

If you’re in the cloud space, you’ve heard the term "noisy neighbor" before. If not, here’s a tip: It’s not about the house next door with the weird kids who play German death metal at full blast. It’s about your cloud provider’s support of tenancy. Cloud workloads that put large demands on the server, storage, database, or network — hurting the performance of other workloads that share those resources — have been a problem both inside corporate data centers and, in particular, on SaaS and IaaS cloud platforms. When you own the servers you at least have some control over the situation. If others control the servers — the case in the cloud — all you can do is to complain to them.

This "noisy neighbor" issue is a core reason why many enterprises have not moved their important applications to the cloud. The fear is that someone running an intensive application on another machine instance in the same infrastructure you’re sharing may affect your performance. In my experience, however, this fear isn’t borne out in practice…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/suffering-cloud-contention-its-not-the-clouds-fault-249528

Grazed from CloudComputingInfo.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Just before the beginning of VMworld 2014 VMware announced the rebranding of its owned and operated public Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS) service vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) into the more friendly and Apple-like VMware vCloud Air.

This announcement prepared the ground for a couple of new services and features unveiled on-stage last week and summarized as follows:

Grazed from FedScoop. Author: Greg Otto.

People who use cloud computing on a regular basis are familiar with the suite of “as-a-service” options: Infrastructure-as-a-service, Software-as-a-service, Platform-as-a-service. IBM is ready to introduce another: Watson-as-a-service. IBM announced last week it has moved its cognitive computing system into the cloud to form the Watson Discovery Advisor, allowing researchers, academics and anyone else trying to leverage big data the ability to test programs and hypotheses at speeds never before seen.

Since Watson is built to understand the nuance of natural language, this new service allows researchers to process millions of data points that would normally be impossible for humans to handle. This ability can reduce project timelines from years to weeks or days. “We’re entering an extraordinary age of data-driven discovery,” said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president for IBM Watson Group, in a release…