Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Ian Clatworthy.

Dell works with a number of specialist industries, and it’s often a niche industry that drives innovation or at least indicates where we should concentrate our efforts in product development. Regardless of industry, the need to embrace cloud computing has been an overriding truth among businesses of all sizes. It’s unrealistic to think that all businesses will have the same needs. Maybe, some years from now, providing cloud services to businesses will be much simpler because adaptation will reach market saturation levels, but right now, businesses are only placing what they need to in the cloud.

The change in cloud adoption rate

Cloud computing obviously offers many benefits to businesses who are conscious of the need to improve their bottom line. Low initial spend and ease of growth are quite revolutionary in the world of IT. Just a few years ago, it was impossible to imagine that one could deploy and install software for and IT setup of a small office of 20 administrative staff in just one day. Today, businesses are able to do that for a staff of 200 employees or more, simply by connecting a room of thin clients to an Internet connection. As new businesses avoid time-consuming and costly IT setups, cloud adaptation will increase at an almost exponential rate…

Grazed from InfoSecurity. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has established the CSA Security Trust & Assurance Registry (STAR) Attestation, a specification for rigorous third-party assessments of cloud providers. The CSA developed it in conjunction with the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), and is aimed at CPAs who are conducting Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 engagements with the CSA’s Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM).

“The AICPA is pleased to collaborate with CSA on STAR Attestation, which brings together best practices for Security Organization Control reporting,” said Amy Pawlicki, AICPA director of business reporting, assurance and advisory services, in a statement. Security is of paramount importance in cloud computing, and the complementary frameworks put forth by AICPA and the CSA provide a comprehensive foundation for practitioners to follow in performing engagements in this space.”…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

FuturePlus Systems today announced the shipping of its latest tool to help Data Centers and Cloud Computing Server validation engineers find elusive and unexplained memory failures. DDR3 memory is pervasive and used in nearly all cloud server systems today. This identified problem occurs when the memory controller under command of the software causes an ACTIVATE command to a single row address repetitively.

If the physically adjacent rows have not been ACTIVATED or refreshed recently the charge from the over ACTIVATED row leaks into the dormant adjacent rows and causes corruption. This failure mechanism has been coined ‘Row Hammer’ as a row of memory cells are being ‘hammered’ with ACTIVATE commands. Current understanding is that the charge leakage does not damage the physical memory cell which makes repeated memory tests to try to find the failing device useless…

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud. Author: Thanh Lam.

I develop technical training course content for IBM Lab Services and Training cloud computing curriculum. In the beginning level courses, I assume attendees have no previous background in cloud computing. It helps to talk about simple things that students can memorize and use as the base to learn more complex concepts of cloud computing. I have found the following four concepts helpful to know when thinking about cloud computing:

1. Web based: A key selling point of cloud computing is its ability to provide services in the form of user interfaces for broader user bases. The Internet provides so many tools to present what the cloud has to offer. These offerings are mostly services for the use of the resources in the virtualization environment. Depending on the demands of the users, the web-based interface may be a graphical user interface that can be accessed from a web browser. Other users may prefer to use different application programming interfaces (APIs) to communicate directly with resource components or a resource manager. You need to be sure that the user interface or API is available from the cloud service offerings…

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Score another one for Seattle. On Tuesday, Oracle kicked off its new cloud computing technology center in Seattle. On hand were several recruiting executives; initially designed for 100 cloud engineers, the facility is expected to hire a lot more and serve as an education and training facility as well.

“We expect this to be a big deal,” said Prashant Ketkar, the head of products for Oracle’s public cloud business. “We intend to hire more and more.” This is the biggest move by an established software applications company into Seattle, an important development if Seattle is to continue as the center of the cloud computing industry…

Grazed from IJETAE. Author: Gurudayal Singh Bhandari and Abhishek Chauhan.

By integrating multiple private and public cloud services, hybrid clouds can effectively provide dynamic scalability of service and data migration. Security plays a vital during the transmission of data from the sender to the receiver in any environment. The challenge in privacy preserving Back-Propagation Neural Network Learning is avoiding the attack of personal data privacy.

Due to the enlargement of distributed computing environment. In such distributed scenarios, privacy concerns often become a big concern. Secure computation provides a solution to this problem. With the invention of new technologies, Computing, it has been more convenient than ever for users across the Internet, who may not even know each other, whether it is data mining, in databases or in any networks, resolving privacy problems has become very important…

To read the article from the source, visit http://www.ijetae.com/files/Volume4Issue7/IJETAE_0714_114.pdf

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Lisa Eadiciccio

Jan Curn, co-founder and CTO at photogprahy software platform VirtualRig Studio, has been using Dropbox since 2009. After using the service for about five years, Curn has come across one of the most terrifying, stomach-churning scenarios one could imagine when relying on cloud storage.

More than 8,000 of his personal files had mysteriously disappeared. To be exact, 8,343 of his files were missing. Curn detailed his experience on Medium, complete with his entire correspondence with Dropbox discussing the problem. In his post, Curn writes that he had decided to use Dropbox’s Selective Sync feature when the hard drive in his laptop was running low on space…

Grazed from HeraldSun. Author: Rod Chester.

No, not “will you marry me?”. That’s another story. This is the story of “It’s in the cloud”. Cloud computing is something most people do but often with little comprehension of what they are actually doing. When the US government started to get confused about the term “cloud computing” and what it meant, it ordered the National Institute of Standards and Technology to define it.

It came up with this: “cloud computing can and does mean different things to different people.” Well, that clears things up then, in a cloudy way. “Cloud computing” is something we say everyday. A lot. In fact, there are about 48 million times someone has said it on the web, according to Google…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Mark Cravotta.

The public cloud computing model is rapidly becoming the world’s most prolific IT deployment architecture, yet it leaves many promises unfulfilled. While offering scale, flexibility, and potential cost savings, the public cloud often lacks the isolation, computing power, and control advantages of bare metal servers.

Recent feedback suggests that people who adopted public cloud solutions for their elasticity and convenience are now lamenting their "simple" solution’s complexity. To deploy enterprise solutions with the public cloud, one must consider redundancies as a safety net for outages and other disasters, as well as more intricate network architecture for true interoperability…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Cloud computing providers Microsoft and AmazonWeb Services are opening up their pools of virtual servers to climate researchers via two new grant programs announced on Tuesday. Microsoft is offering a year’s worth of Azure cloud resources (180,000 computing hours and 20 terabytes of storage) to 20 recipients submitting proposals related to food resilience. According to a Microsoft Research blog post announcing the grants, “The overarching goal is to encourage data providers, scientists, farmers, food producers and the public to discover the food supply’s key vulnerabilities and inherent resiliency.” Proposals are due Sept. 15, 2014.

The food resilience grants will focus on a handful of USDA datasets, and are part of a broader mission Microsoft says it’s pursuing to address the issue. These efforts include “workshops, webinars, and ‘appathons’ to demonstrate the value of open access data and to promote the development of tools for understanding these datasets,” and the addition of additional datasets over the next year…