Month: March 2014

March 31, 2014 Off

Dark Clouds Forming For Cloud Computing Companies

By David

Grazed from SeekingAlpha. Author: Michael Blair.

Salesforce.com (CRM) is one of a pile of Cloud computing companies sharing space in a market deeply into "bubble" territory where dark Clouds are forming and we are heading for a storm. The silliness is evident in Cloud storage firm Box Inc. filing for an initial public offering despite massive losses since it started up with its deficit reaching $361 million by January 31, 2014.

Almost half that cumulative deficit came from Box Inc.’s $169 million loss in the fiscal year ended on that date, according to its SEC filings. Profits are not expected any time soon. The lack of profits in current operations is seen as a positive by investors in Cloud companies as I see it – no pesky analysis of price earnings multiples and no easy way to tell when a stock is undervalued, richly valued or overvalued…

March 31, 2014 Off

Pros and Cons Of The New Emerging Technology – Cloud Computing

By David

Grazed from DataBagg. Author: Neeti Patial.

A lot has been said and heard about latest in technology and business-critical data storage; everyone is just talking about none other than cloud computing as it has become the talk of the town these days. Understandably, cloud computing symbolizes a momentous step ahead in how businesses share and store files and data. Even though it does have its own downsides, it seems foreseeable that cloud services in coming future will persist to evolve till the time it will become a norm for businesses. Consequently, the main pros and cons of cloud computing for business that are looking forward to embrace this new technology are as follows:

Pros:

-Cloud computing enables the end-users to easily access their most significant files round the clock and from anywhere. For businesses with a large number of employees either working from home or on the move, cloud services can without doubt resolve many of the access related concerns that they might have been facing so far…

March 31, 2014 Off

The New Microsoft Delivers On The Mobile Cloud

By David

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Maribel Lopez.

CEO Satya Nadella’s first major press conference last week was a return to basics for Microsoft. It focused the vision and the technology, not the glitz and glamour. The pacing and rally cries were replaced with literary quotes. Gates once spoke of a PC on every desk. Nadella talks about the cloud fueling every device and Microsoft cloud software becoming a crucial part of this ecosystem.

In the excitement surrounding Office for the iPad, many people I’ve spoken with have overlooked the key message that Nadella discussed on Thursday. First, Nadella proclaimed that it is a mobile cloud world. “The cloud is how a device becomes your device. And the cloud is how your device becomes part of your life, by connecting to all the people, information and experiences that matter to you…

March 31, 2014 Off

Cloud Computing: Feds To Improve Threat Information Sharing

By David

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: William Jackson.

The government has established an online collaboration called Project Interoperability to help develop tools and technologies for sharing threat information among organizations inside and outside of government. The project, recently launched by the Information Sharing Environment (ISE), a partnership between the defense and intelligence communities, addresses the need to make intelligence useable by many parties to counter increasingly sophisticated threats to national and cyber-security.

The need for better information sharing was one of the primary lessons learned from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Increased dependence on the Internet and the recent emergence — and convergence — of cloud and mobile computing to make systems and data accessible anytime from anywhere have stepped up the need for automated collaboration against attacks…

March 31, 2014 Off

Happy union: Knowledge Management and the cloud?

By David

Grazed from KMWorld. Author: Stephen E. Arnold.

Cloud computing and big data appear to be a new technology marriage made in heaven. For many organizations, the cloud and big data could crack the knowledge management problem. In 2011, the National Institute for Science & Technology (NIST) published a draft definition of cloud computing. The definition articulated several "essential characteristics," service models and deployment models.

The main idea is that most enterprise applications can run in a time-sharing setup with such bells and whistles as collaboration, reports and guaranteed uptime. On-premises systems—despite their security advantages—require specialized staff. To control costs and shift from the hard-to-control expense of on-premise systems, cloud computing offers a managed solution. If the costs are about the same or higher, the efficiencies of outsourcing appear to make sense to many organizations…

March 31, 2014 Off

Aereo’s final Supreme Court plea: Cloud computing could be ruined

By David

Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications. Author: Scott M. Fulton III.

On first reading, it sounds like a stretch. For many legal scholars, it continues sounding like a stretch after the twelfth reading. But given the historically unique confluence of circumstances leading up to next month’s round of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of ABC v. Aereo, it’s impossible to rule it out entirely: Aereo’s argument is that, if the distribution of programming from its cloud-based servers to its subscribers’ devices counts as a "performance"–and thus a potential copyright violation–then any distribution of media from a cloud server to those same devices should also count as "performances."

Aereo is the innovative service, backed by former TV network chief Barry Diller, that uses arrays of patented micro-antennas to capture over-the-air TV signals, and then delivers those signals through cloud servers to Internet-based clients. It’s a subscription service that can deliver (almost) live television to viewers in locales where VHF antennas and coaxial cables can’t reach…

March 31, 2014 Off

Network Virtualization: The Next Step for Cloud Services?

By David

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

Server virtualization is a given for most midsize businesses. Any company running on a shared public cloud stack understands that while their data lives alongside information from other customers, there is no communication and no diffusion of data across hypervisor partitions. The result is a single server taking the place of multiple servers and portioning out resources as needed. While it is easy to argue for cloud computing as the final step in the virtual chain, the emergence of viable network virtualization technologies may be changing this landscape again.

Not So Smart?

Virtualized networks are not new. As a recent Forbes article notes, they are needed to operate multiple guest operating systems (OSs) on most physical servers; but this first-gen network virtualization technology is not particularly bright. Author Kurt Marko describes the infrastructure as "rather dumb devices, really more bridges than switches, and completely isolated from and ignorant of the underlying physical network topology they operate on." New technologies aim to bolster virtual network intelligence using overlay software, tunneling protocols such as VXLAN or NVGRE and software plug-ins that permit hypervisor oversight. In short, network virtualization is getting schooled…

March 31, 2014 Off

Cloud Computing: The Next Hot IT Job – Service Broker

By David

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Andrew Froelich.

If you look at the most popular roles in enterprise IT today compared to a decade ago, you’ll notice that key IT roles have changed dramatically. Today’s hot IT jobs — including security engineers, server virtualization administrators, and mobile developers — were nonexistent or played a far less significant role in the past. We can expect the same to happen in the future. One role starting to develop prominence is what’s known as an "IT service broker."

And if you don’t think your department needs one now, you probably will see the need in the not too distant future. Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014 called out the IT service broker as a position that would be gaining importance in cloud-leveraged organizations. The broker’s responsibilities are to work with public, private, and hybrid cloud service providers to assist in the design, implementation, and support of cloud services…

March 31, 2014 Off

CIOs architect a cloud computing business model, with watchful eye on costs

By David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dina Gerdeman.

As companies gain efficiencies in the cloud, they often look to emulate the same kind of experience in their own operations. Forrester Research Inc.’s James Staten said he’s seen a pattern at companies that use quite a bit of public cloud. Eventually many come to realize that some apps really aren’t a good fit for the public cloud. Perhaps these apps sit 24×7 and rack up high bills, or they require too much monitoring. What often happens next is the company will decide to build internal systems that mirror the public cloud.

"That usually ends up being pretty effective," Staten said. One concept that companies have borrowed from the cloud: charging per user or per department for the various IT services each department needs. This chargeback model charges each department that uses email a certain amount for that email service, for example…

March 31, 2014 Off

Cloud, agile software changing the nature of projects

By David

Grazed from TheAge. Author: Editorial Staff.

Remember when getting a new project off the ground in a large business took months of argument, analysis and testing? And that was only to create the business case, before anyone could persuade the finance department to fund it. If the project involved software development it might then take months or years for the code to actually be written, implemented and tested, and even longer before its effectiveness was known.

By then, it was possible that the reason for starting the project had been rendered redundant by changing business needs. For some businesses, that is still the way projects are managed. But now concepts perfected in the tech start-up industry, such as cloud computing and agile software development, are being adopted by large businesses such as Suncorp Bank and Vodafone Australia to get small projects off the ground in a matter of just days…