Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Rackspace has been in the news lately not for its cloud computing products, but for the fact that it has been investigating the benefits of being acquired. And many suitors have been rumored. But now, two months after the acquisition rumors first started circulating, Rackspace’s board of directors may be investigating another option—going private.

According to a TechCrunch article, a source let it slip that Rackspace is considering pulling itself off of the public stock exchange and instead taking the route back toward being a private company. Apparently the board is taking cues from Michael Dell. That’s not to say it will happen, as there are suitors that would love to get their hands on Rackspace, including—according to the source—Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and IBM (IBM), but the TechCrunch article noted that the idea of pulling the company off the market and going private is gaining "sufficient traction" within the board of directors…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Don Sheppard.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a developer of standards for the U.S. government. According to their website, their mission is: “From the smart electric power grid and electronic health records to atomic clocks, advanced nanomaterials, and computer chips, innumerable products and services rely in some way on technology, measurement, and standards provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Founded in 1901, NIST is a non-regulatory federal agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST’s mission is to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.” One of the initiatives of the NIST Cloud Computing Program is to stimulate the creation of standards for cloud computing. Its mission is:…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Todd R. Weiss.

On topics from algorithms to machine learning to robotics and more, Google publishes lots of research and is sharing the best of its 2013 findings. Google researchers write a lot of papers on topics including computing, data, statistics and more, and share them often with the world’s scientific community to drive innovation and new ideas.

As part of that ongoing effort, Google is now sharing some of the most influential research papers produced by Google researchers in 2013 to expand discussions and observations on a raft of topics being studied around the world. The collection of research papers was announced by Corinna Cortes and Alfred Spector of the Google Research team in a June 30 post on the Google Research Blog…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Syed Raza.

Information governance is a broad, relative as well as a subjective term! If you simply look it up at Wikipedia, you will find the following definition: “Information governance, or IG, is the set of multi-disciplinary structures, policies, procedures, processes and controls implemented to manage information at an enterprise level, supporting an organization’s immediate and future regulatory, legal, risk, environmental and operational requirements”. As part of your everyday work environment, generally less attention is paid to the data adhering to stipulated policies. The real importance of stored data shines when you want to use data as part of your analytics. The importance is even greater during litigation process as the same data can be used as potential evidence!

Emerging Phenomenon

Information governance is an emerging phenomenon and when associated with cloud computing, the complexity increases. Unquestionably, cloud computing is growing leaps due to innumerable benefits especially the cost reduction factor, which is always considered a welcomed gesture in today’s economy…

Grazed from Datapipe. Author: Rob Allen.

The Internet of Things presents some pretty remarkable opportunities for consumers and businesses alike. There’s just one problem: It’s a glutton for bandwidth. To accommodate the rapidly expanding storage and connectivity demands that accompany technological advancements like the IoT, companies may need to turn to cloud solutions, such as Amazon Web Services.

The IoT and system resources

What exactly is the IoT? It’s the name industry experts have given to a growing trend in the technology sphere – to connect more devices to the Internet with sensors and computing power that can send data about objects and activities that were previously off the grid. Your refrigerator, exercise routine, thermostat and vehicle, for example, could all send information to your computer or to organizations running analytics. The data can be used both to enhance the consumer experience – such as notifying you if your normal running path has a roadblock – and to empower enterprises by enabling them to analyze product performance with data from thousands of customers…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Joe McKendrick.

What is the digital enterprise? Joe McKendrick of Forbes says it is "associated with the design, development and delivery of innovative products and services through online channels." In other words, taking what is best about a business and moving it online, transforming it from brick and mortar to bytes and mobile. Private and public cloud computing speeds this process, in effect giving midsize companies access to the fast track. But is a true digital enterprise even possible without the cloud?

Critically Speaking

According to McKendrick’s recent Forbes piece, while the cloud and digital enterprise easily go hand-in-hand, one is not dependent on the other. The article reveals the findings of a Saugatuck Technology survey, which found that 60 percent of businesses are creating new digital products and services while 70 percent are adapting existing services to work within a digital framework. But only 29 percent of respondents said the majority of their business apps and infrastructure reside in the cloud. It is possible, therefore, to chase the digital business model without significant cloud backing…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

The cloud computing market has seen a huge increase in software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) adoption, two popular solutions that midsize firms utilize to achieve the business results they desire. With the right groundwork, growing firms can reach new levels of productivity.

Drivers in the Cloud

A new survey of IT professionals, reported by CloudTweaks and conducted by Gigaom Research and North Bridge Partners, cited the latest trends, including the drivers and inhibitors to cloud use. The fourth annual "Future of Cloud Computing" study revealed several trends: Almost 75 percent of firms are using SaaS, a fivefold increase; more than 50 percent of sales and marketing teams and more than 40 percent of customer service and analytics teams are adopting SaaS; and PaaS, used to prototype and develop new apps, has seen a sixfold increase with adoption at 40 percent. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is also reaching new levels of use: More than 55 percent of firms are employing IaaS to gain more flexibility…

Grazed from Fool. Author: Mukesh Baghel.

Cloud computing has opened up big opportunities for several players, and Workday’s first-quarter results indicate that it is making the most of it. Driven by strong demand for applications such as Workday Recruiting and Workday Financial Management, the company’s revenue has increased at a fast pace. Workday’s Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions have been selected by companies such as Hewlett-Packard, and this can act as a catalyst going forward.

Workday is aggressively investing in its products to land more clients in the face of competition from established players like Oracle. Even though the company posted a 74% year-over-year jump in revenue in the first quarter, its net loss widened due to investments in product development, marketing, and sales. However, the company’s outlook for the second quarter was better than expected, indicating the strong adoption of its solutions…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Jack Clark.

Amazon looks set to open a data center in Germany, allowing European developers to access Bezos & Co’s rentable computer tech with lower latencies. Evidence first gathered by a manager at a Berlin-based startup and subsequently verified by El Reg indicates that Amazon’s next cloud computing data center may be in Frankfurt, Germany. The cloud giant’s other European facility is in Ireland.

The new center will give customers in central and Eastern Europe a more responsive lower-latency option when renting AWS resources, and could assuage some concerns among German companies about who exactly can tap up their data. Germany has some of the strictest information privacy legislation in Europe and its citizens, partly due to the troubled history of the country, have a healthy skepticism for anything that looks remotely like mass data gathering. And, following the revelations by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, these concerns have only grown…

Grazed from Linux.com. Author: Libby Clark.

Cisco earlier this year unveiled its plans to build smarter routers and switches to help manage the massive flows of data expected between Internet-connected devices and the data center. This re-architecting of the Internet to bring computing capabilities to the edge of the network is what the company calls “fog computing” and it could help alleviate the data center strain that Gartner analysts predict will come from 26 billion installed units in the Internet of Things by 2020.

“Tens of billions of ever-smarter edge devices create data (we call it big data now) that it is impossible to move fast enough through the network,” said Michael Enescu, CTO of Open Source Initiatives at Cisco. “We have to deal with this, otherwise it will present huge scale and security issues in the core.”…