Grazed from BusinessCloudNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

German software giant SAP announced plans to open its first Canadian datacentre, which is being built in Toronto, one of Canada’s largest cities. SAP Canada’s managing director Bob Elliot said the move will help the company accommodate Canadian customers looking for in-country SAP cloud solutions.

“We’re seeing a growing demand for cloud based solutions from our Canadian customers. They want to take a step into the cloud, but they’re still nervous about this new way of doing things,” Elliot said. “Our customers here range from government agencies to healthcare and financial services companies and almost all of them have strict data security requirements. They want the data housed on Canadian soil, because of confidentially issues.”…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

Concerns over privacy and data governance in the cloud have reached a new level in the wake of a Federal court ruling requiring Microsoft to turn data over to the U.S. government that it has been storing for customers in a data center located in Ireland. Because Microsoft is incorporated in the United States, Federal Judge Loretta A. Preska ruled that the U.S. government still has the power to compel Microsoft to turn over data regardless of where it is physically stored. In the wake of recent court rulings, cloud service providers (CSP) had been storing data outside of the United States on behalf of customers that did not want that data to subject to U.S. jurisdiction. The ruling by Judge Preska is clearly a blow to cloud service providers based in the United States that are trying to compete in what has become a global cloud computing market.

But as disturbing as this latest Federal ruling is to cloud service providers, it may prove to be a boon to providers of encryption technologies. IT organizations have long-resisted the use of encryption because it has been difficult to manage and created a lot of processing overhead. But the federal ruling makes it clear that the only way IT organizations can retain control over their data is if they retain control over keys used to encrypt their data…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Kenneth Corbin.

In spite of a nearly four-year-old mandate to prioritize cloud computing technologies within the federal government, that transition has been slow to take shape, with officials continuing to express concerns about how to manage cloud deployments and uncertainty about navigating the maze of commercial providers.

Gerald Chelak, director of the technical service division at the GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, says his agency is “100 percent committed to cloud” but admits that federal CIOs struggle to keep up with what he describes as “cloud service provider sprawl.” When asked in a recent panel discussion how IT workers can keep on top of an ever-expanding galaxy of service providers and products, Chelak quipped, “Spend weekends.”…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

Oracle has this month introduced the Oracle-flavoured Linux 7 open source operating system. Freely distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2), Oracle Linux is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and follows the RHEL7 release, which arrived this June. This distribution of Linux represents what Oracle would like to us to consider as its more open and community focused side, although of course a paid support model is available and widely adopted.

But it’s not just about whether the software is free or not; what matters today is how open it is and how the software itself is architected and used by the developers and users who come into daily contact with it. The company asserts that its latest baby is the “only major enterprise Linux distribution” that publishes all bug fixes and security errata publicly. This openness is hoped to achieve more flexibility than other commercial Linux distributions…

Grazed from SfGate. Author: David Einstein.

After last week’s item about Comcast, I was deluged with responses from readers who, like me, received a letter from the company saying we had to upgrade our cable modems in order to get the most out of our Xfinity Internet service. As I wrote in the column, my old Docsis 2 modem was delivering the Internet at the advertised rate of 25 megabits per second, and when I asked Comcast, I was told I didn’t really have to upgrade to a faster Docsis 3 model.

On Friday, I got a robocall with the same message about the need to upgrade – which I thought was odd until I learned that earlier that day, Comcast had quietly doubled the maximum speed in California for its (and my) Performance Internet plan to 50 Mbps. Knowing that my Docsis 2 modem could only handle speeds up to 38 Mbps, I bought a Docsis 3 model at Target for $70, and now I am getting the faster service…

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

A US provider of cloud computing services has put together a handy guide on all the issues to be addressed and the questions to be answered when planning a migration to the cloud. Along the way, drawing on quotes from multiple sources and experts, the guide makes a compelling case for adopting cloud services and indeed suggests they will soon come to dominate the IT landscape.

Windstream Communications’ ‘2014 Cloud Guide, Insights for a Great Migration’, quotes Joe McKendrick, an independent researcher and speaker on IT trends and markets, saying: “Cloud computing is set to become mainstream computing, period. … The biggest news for cloud computing is that it will not be news. It’s the way we do computing today.”…

Grazed from SysCon Media.  Author: Dana Gardner.

Over the past five years, the impetus for cloud adoption has been primarily about advancing the IT infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) fabric or utility model, and increasingly seeking both applications and discrete IT workload support services from Internet-based providers.  But as adoption of these models has unfolded, it’s become clear that the impacts and implications of cloud commerce are much broader and much more of a benefit to the business as a whole as an innovation engine, even across whole industries.

Recent research shows us that business leaders are now eager to move beyond cost and efficiency gains from cloud to reap far greater rewards, to in essence rewrite the rules of commerce.  Our latest BriefingsDirect discussion therefore explores the expanding impact that cloud computing is having as a strategic business revolution — and not just as an IT efficiency shift…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

IBM announced it has acquired CrossIdeas , a privately held provider of security software that governs user access to applications and data across on-premise and cloud environments. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Under the burden of more government regulations and increasing sophistication of security threats, business leaders are demanding that IT and security executives implement access governance policies and solutions that provide visibility into operational and IT risks. Based in Rome, Italy, CrossIdeas helps organizations seamlessly manage identities and application access by bridging the gap between compliance, business, and IT infrastructure to help reduce the risk of fraud, conflicts of duties, and human error in business processes…

Grazed from VMWare.  Author: Heidi Pate.

The linked infographic distills data behind what’s driving the demand for IT professionals with cloud-related skills and why the hunt is on for top talent. Scroll through the entire image for a final section of lucrative careers and top companies hiring…

To view the infographic and read more from the source visit:  http://blogs.vmware.com/cloudops/2014/08/skyrocketing-cloud-careers.html

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Jyoti Trehan.

Monitoring was the most important requirement when computers were just computers. What I mean by this statement are those times when there were barely any monitors or consoles attached to the computers, when printing was a costly affair and storing, backing up and restoring data was a big challenge! Monitoring was one of the main features that the mainframes provided to bridge the lack of transparently inherent in the erstwhile computer architectures.

The developers and users alike were inquisitive and actively looking for what was stored on the storage devices and how accurate and correct it was. It was hard for users to remember for a long time what exactly they punched on punch cards and how many cards really got read successfully by the card reader…