Grazed from Infosec Island.  Author: Kevin Jackson.

 A recent article Inc.com article claimed that the percentage of U.S. small businesses using cloud computing is expected to more than double during the next six years, from 37 percent to nearly 80 percent (http://www.inc.com/graham-winfrey/why-the-cloud-will-transform-small-business-by-2020.html).

This forecast was gleaned from a just released Emergent Research and Intuit study. This statement is also very scary in that it also highlights the growing importance of the cybersecurity threat to the nation’s economic livelihood.  Jeremy Grant, an adviser at the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, says in the past two years he has seen "a relatively sharp increase in hackers and adversaries targeting small businesses."…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Earlier this year the channel was set abuzz by the announcement from Ingram Micro that it was entering the cloud service provider space with three new Ingram Micro-branded and hosted cloud solutions: Ingram Micro Hosted Exchange, Ingram Micro Virtual Private Servers (VPS) and Ingram Micro Web Hosting.

I recently spoke with Renee Bergeron, vice president of Managed Services & Cloud Computing at Ingram Micro, to get a better understanding of what these new additions mean for Ingram Micro and its channel partners…

Grazed from BizJournals.  Author: Mike W. Thomas.

Rackspace Hosting’s stock jumped Thursday, Aug. 14, on news that hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb had purchased a multi-million dollar stake in the cloud-computing company.  Loeb’s Third Point LLC had purchased shares valued at $244 million by the end of June, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Bloomberg reports.

Rackspace recently announced a renewed focus on providing support-based cloud services to the market amid swirling speculation about a possible buyout of the company…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/blog/2014/08/billionaire-s-investment-makes-rackspace-stock.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bizj_sanantonio+%28San+Antonio+Business+Journal%29

Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author:  Archana Venkatraman.

Actor Michael J. Fox’s charity for Parkinson’s disease is seeking to improve the treatment for Parkinson’s through a research project that involves wearable technologies, big data analytics and public cloud computing.

Parkinson’s is a neurodegenerative brain disease that affects about five million people worldwide. While it usually affects people in their 60s, it can come earlier. There is a wide range of motor and non-motor symptoms associated with the disease…

Grazed from AlliedResearch.  Author: Editorial Staff.

According to the latest report by Allied Market Research titled, "Global Hadoop-as-a-Service (HaaS/HDaaS) Market (Deployment Type, End User, Geography) – Industry Analysis, Trends, Share, Opportunities and Forecast, 2013- 2020", the global HaaS market is expected to reach $16.1 billion by 2020, registering a CAGR of 70.8% from 2014 to 2020. In the current business scenario, HaaS market is majorly constricted to North America. Amazon Elastic Map Reduce was the most prominent service, accounting to nearly 85% of the global market revenue in 2013.

HaaS made a grand ingress in the big data analytic market in last couple of years. The advent of this novel technology is highly appreciated among the data scientists and among the SMEs. The market has doubled itself in 2013 (from 2012) and is now gaining prominence among conventional Hadoop users…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: CJ Arlotta.

Nasuni’s vision of pairing on-premise hardware with cloud storage has gained more support from investors. The Natick, Massachusetts-based storage services provider this week said it has raised an additional $10 million in Series C financing, bringing the round’s total to $30 million.

Previous investors Flybridge Capital Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners participated in this extension of Nasuni’s Series C funding round. A "strategic investor" also contributed funds…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview.  Author:  Dennis Schwartz.

When it comes to cloud computing, Microsoft’s goal is clear: Redmond is "in it to win."  That was the main message from Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich at his keynote address during the TechMentor conference on the Microsoft campus.

He emphasized that growing use of the Microsoft Azure cloud service, rapidly expanding features and a price war is putting the squeeze on cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS)…

Grazed from Baseline.  Author: Dennis McCafferty.

Remember when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison famously dismissed the cloud as "complete gibberish"? Or the days when you’d mention cloud computing in casual conversation with a non-techy friend or family member, and they’d have absolutely no clue what you were talking about? Clearly, those days are in the past, as the cloud is now a mainstream technology that is considered essential for business.

Ninety-four percent of organizations surveyed are using cloud computing, and 58 percent have a hybrid (public and private) cloud strategy in place, according to the annual "2014 State of the Cloud Report" from RightScale. Given all the interest about this technology, there’s been a lot of other research released about cloud investments and trends…

Grazed from FederalTimes.  Author: Andy Medici.

The Defense Department will soon be moving some of its data into the cloud as part of a series of pilot projects, acting chief information officer Terry Halvorsen said Aug. 13.  He said at the 2014 Federal Forum in Washington, D.C., that he expects DoD to announce five pilots by Sept. 1 that will expand its efforts to move data into the cloud and has promised his staff a steak dinner when they finalize the pilots.

“I think you will see us announce that fairly quickly going forward,” Halvorsen said.  The Defense Department will start with level three data — sensitive information that is not for the public — and then move on to level four. But the focus will be in what he called semi-private clouds, such as government-only clouds available in the private sector…

Read more from the source @ http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20140813/IT/308130012/DoD-release-cloud-computing-pilots-by-September?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|Departments|p

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Juniper Networks is rolling out a new line of Ethernet switches aimed at helping enterprises deal with the increasing demand for better and faster access to cloud services and applications such as unified communications and virtual desktop infrastructures.

Juniper’s new EX4600 switches, announced Aug. 13, are open and scalable, and offer high performance in a small and cost-effective form factor, according to company officials. The switches also leverage Juniper’s Open Converged Framework (OCF), an approach to networking introduced by the company in June that calls for using open, published interfaces to enable the convergence of wired and wireless networks from different vendors…