Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

OpenStack has been finding its way into a variety of verticals for cloud deployments, but most of the deployments are focused, either solely or mostly, on devops. But in the growing cloud telecommunications market, OpenStack has found a new function—specifically, network functions virtualization (NFV), according to Mirantis.

The OpenStack-focused vendor claims to be experiencing very strong growth in the telecommunications sector this year; and Mirantis is boasting a leadership position as the largest OpenStack provider to the sector. The telco sector is growing for Mirantis and other OpenStack vendors, but as important as the $1.6 trillion sector is, it’s also interesting to see new or expanded use cases emerging…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Rob Wright.

When you’re building a multi-national cloud computing platform that involves some of the leading scientific research organizations in Europe, more than a dozen commercial partners and numerous data centers across the global, federated identity management becomes a crucial pillar.

That’s one of the key lessons learned from the Helix Nebula project, also known as the "Science Cloud." The ambitious cloud computing project was first announced in March 2012 by the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), the European Space Agency, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory…

Grazed from Google. Author: PR Announcement.

Google has renamed its Enterprise division as ‘Google for Work’. The name change reflects both the search giant’s increasing ambitions to win corporate accounts, as well as the changes gripping workplaces. In a blog post, Eric Schmidt wrote: "Work today is very different from 10 years ago. Cloud computing, once a new idea, is abundantly available, and collaboration is possible across offices, cities, countries and continents.

"Ideas can go from prototype to development to launch in a matter of days. Working from a computer, tablet and phone is no longer just a trend – it’s a reality. And millions of companies, large and small, have turned to Google’s products to help them launch, build and transform their businesses, and help their employees work the way they live. In other words, work is already better than it used to be."…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Avnet Technology Solutions, the global IT solutions distribution leader and an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), today announced that it has significantly expanded its cloud offerings in Latin America. As a part of this, Avnet will now provide business partners in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela with products and services from SoftLayer, a cloud infrastructure provider and an IBM company. The addition of SoftLayer to Avnet’s cloud portfolio will help Latin American business partners accelerate the development of their cloud offerings with a scalable, secure base for the delivery of cloud services, spanning IBM’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) solutions.

“We are committed to helping our business partners evolve their cloud capabilities to meet the rapidly changing needs of their customers,” said Sergio Farache, senior vice president and general manager of Avnet Technology Solutions, Latin America and the Caribbean. “Today, Avnet became the first distributor in Latin America to provide our partners with access to SoftLayer’s cloud services, which will position them for success as major global companies look to incorporate cloud computing into their IT strategies. Business partners can rely on the knowledge and expertise of the Avnet team to develop and expand their cloud services skills and capitalize on the significant market opportunities related to the cloud.”…

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…