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…

Grazed from AP. Author: Chidanand Rajghatta.

Cloud storage and computing, bruited as the electronic world’s big advance that enabled storage of your videos, music, photos, and other heavy data in remote servers, has come under a cloud. Turns out the of secure remote servers, including iCloud pioneered by Apple Inc., may be a pie in the sky after all; a hacker has broken into the iCloud system and siphoned off private photos of actresses that are now being slobbered over on social media by lascivious celebrity stalkers.

The anonymous hacker posted nude photos of 100s of Hollywood celebrities that were claimed to have come from their iCloud accounts using an iCloud security vulnerability. Victims of the hacking include actress Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst and Mary Elizabeth Winstead…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: Jim Boulton.

Every minute, 2 million searches are made, half a billion links are shared and 48 hours of footage are uploaded. That is a lot of data. And yet, in terms of how much is being produced worldwide, it barely scratches the surface. That is Big Data. Big Data is the term used to describe data sets that are so large and complex that it takes a phenomenal amount of processing power to interrogate them. So why do it?

Fourteen seconds before the 2011 earthquake in Japan, every bullet train and every factory came to a halt. Many lives were saved thanks to the Quake-Catcher Network. This network is made up of thousands of laptops with free software running in the background. The software makes use of the built-in sensors designed to protect the hard drive if the laptop is dropped. If there is an earthquake, all the sensors go off at the same time. By continuously aggregating and processing the data produced by all the sensors, it is possible to brace for impact before the earthquake strikes…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

As organizations get more comfortable using cloud services, there is a corresponding increase in the number of services that not only take an existing process and deliver it via the cloud, but that also take advantage of the fact that business processes are now exposed to derive some insights from the data contained within them.

An interesting example of this is from cloud procurement vendor Procurify. Procurify is a cloud-based procurement software solution that is used to manage both direct and indirect company spending. By exposing these procurement processes, Procurify can deliver some additional value, giving control and visibility of where company money is going in real-time, using simple-to-generate reports and analytics…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Editorial Staff.

Citrix and Google have extended their relationship with the unveiling of a new Receiver for Chrome, which the companies say offers improved user experience. A Chromebook is a laptop running Chrome OS as its operating system. The devices are designed to be used primarily while connected to the Internet, with most applications and data residing in the cloud.

Citrix Receiver is a client software that provides access to XenDesktop and XenApp installations. With this download, users can access applications, desktops and data from any device, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and Macs. According to market research firm Gartner, by 2017, sales of Chromebooks are set to nearly triple to reach 14.4 million units…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Karl Flinders.

In the on-premise versus in the cloud debate it is always the subject of security that swings people in favour of on-premise. People feel safer if their software is on their own premises, but does that mean it is safer. Everybody is connected to the internet so bricks and mortar is no protection. You could argue that if it is on your own premises you have better control of physical security. Anyway the point of this post is to highlight research from analyst firm Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC), which states that: "Cloud [is] more secure than on-premise IT"

"Rapid development in cloud-based security, including physical security within the data centres, means that, for many firms, it is more effective and cost efficient to locate IT systems in the cloud than on on-premise equipment. CIOs and CISOs should consider the cloud for many of their IT systems, while for SMEs and local government PAC recommends that it should be the default architecture," said PAC…

Grazed from Computing. Author: Sooraj Shah.

Microsoft is continuing its fight against a US federal court order that demanded that the software giant hand over email data held in a data centre overseas to US federal authorities. The company has said that it would not release any information as it waits for the case to make its way through the appeals process, according to WindowsITPro.

The judge is now asking both Microsoft and federal prosecutors to advise her how to proceed by 5 September – this Friday. A Microsoft spokesperson said that the company "will not be turning over the email and plans to appeal". "Everyone agrees this case can and will proceed to the appeals court. This is simply about finding the appropriate procedure for that to happen," the spokesperson added…