Month: September 2015

Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft Corp joined Amazon.com Inc and Intel Corp in tweaking the way it reports results, a move that will help the software giant show off its growing cloud and mobile businesses.  Since taking over as chief in early 2014, Satya Nadella has led Microsoft’s efforts to focus on software and cloud services as demand for its Windows operating system slows.

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Tom Nolle.

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Katherine Noyes.

For all the talk about cloud computing, it’s a rare enterprise that doesn’t still use at least some on-premises software. With that reality in mind, Oracle on Monday rolled out two new services designed to help companies integrate the diverse pieces of those mixed environments.

Oracle SOA Cloud Service and Oracle API Manager Cloud Service are both new additions to Oracle Cloud Platform for Integration, the database giant’s suite of services aimed at helping users integrate on-premises and cloud applications. Built on Oracle’s SOA Suite, which taps the concepts of service-oriented architecture, Oracle SOA Cloud Service provides easy provisioning, simplified management, automated upgrades and the ability to easily scale out, Oracle said…

Grazed from CBR. Author: James Nunns.

Ubuntu has been selected by Microsoft as its first Linux-based Azure offering. Microsoft’s cloud offering will run its Hadoop-based Big Data service offering, HDInsight, on Ubuntu and Hortonworks. Microsoft’s decision is backed by 20% of virtual machines on Azure being Linux, and VM Depot has more than 1,000 Linux images, most of these being Ubuntu.

The goal for the companies is to help enable hybrid cloud computing, it aims to achieve this by increasing the choice of on-premise or on-cloud computing for customers. T.K. Ranga Rengarajan,corporate vp, Data Platforms, Microsoft, said: "The general availability of Azure HDInsight on Ubuntu Linux, which includes a service level agreement guarantee of 99.9% uptime and full technical support for the entire stack with the choice of running Hadoop workloads on Hortonworks Data Platform in Azure HDInsight using Ubuntu or Windows." HDInsight on Ubuntu helps to make it easier to move on-premise Hadoop deployments to the cloud, while it also aims to bring together customers running the Hortonworks Data Platform on premise, in their data centres.

Grazed from CIO. Author: Mary Branscombe.

Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, the comprehensive hacking of Sony, and on-going legal battles over whether email stored in the cloud belongs to the people sending it or the service hosting it, more and more cloud services have moved to encrypt data. Some are going even further, offering Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) options, where the user holds the encryption keys for their own cloud data.

Google Compute Engine started offering a preview service for encrypting both data and compute with your own keys this summer, and Amazon offers both soft key management and the much pricier (and slower to set up) Cloud HSM service for EC2 and S3 instances, where your keys live in dedicated Hardware Security Modules in Amazon’s cloud. Adobe Creative Cloud now supports customer-managed data encryption keys to protect content synced to Creative Cloud accounts…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Chris Doig.

For the past six years, the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) San Diego chapter has hosted the annual one-day Cloud Computing Conference in San Diego. This year is no exception, and the seventh conference is being held on Oct. 29 at the Town and Country Resort and Convention Center in San Diego. This time around the conference has expanded beyond its cloud computing roots to include big data, Internet of Things (IoT), innovative technology and hands-on cloud coding labs.

From my perspective, it has always been interesting to hear speakers like Peter Coffee, VP and Head of Platform Research at Salesforce. Peter has been the opening speaker for the past few years and, as a senior executive of a major Silicon Valley company, he brings a very interesting perspective on the leading edge of innovation. To quote Matt Stamper, VP of Services at redIT: “Peter is an amazing speaker and technical evangelist. His insight into the industry and how computing services continue to evolve is thought provoking. I’ve had the opportunity to hear Peter speak on cloud (networked) computing and have benefited from each discussion.”…

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

In 2010 research firm Gartner placed cloud computing at the “peak of inflated expectations” in its famous hype cycle. How quickly things have changed! Companies that held off embracing cloud now find themselves at a competitive disadvantage as those that were early adopters become mature users of cloud services and start to get some strategic benefits, beyond those initially identified for cloud.

That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Harvard Business Review Cloud: Driving a Faster, More Connected Business. “As cloud services have matured and adoption has increased, research has consistently shown that using cloud has enabled companies to act more quickly and to collaborate more easily,” it says…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: James Henderson.

Many organisations are slow to adopt Cloud computing due to confusion around the financial impact of its implementation and management. “Despite the hype, the uptake of cloud computing as a solution has not been as rapid as first anticipated, in part because of the confusion created around the financial benefits,” says Sanil Solanki, research director, Gartner.

“While it’s said to be cheaper than on-premises, Cloud gets push-back from the finance function because it increases operating expenditure (opex) costs. “IT departments let finance take the lead on this decision, and this stalemate is rarely broken.” Solanki claims that while using cloud computing does increase opex costs, CIOs and IT decision makers should consider other financial factors before making a decision…

Grazed from DigitalNewsAsia. Author: JY Pook.

CLOUD computing is great … theoretically at least. With the cloud, we get to extend our IT platform beyond our on-premises infrastructure, and we get to access applications, data and storage over the Internet, as and when we need it. Highly scalable, lower cost and no hassle. It is no wonder that we are seeing almost everything being offered over the cloud. Some call this the trend of ‘Whatever as-a Service (XaaS).’

Similar to how Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) platforms have become viable options that are fully or partly supplementing in-house databases these days, many business intelligence (BI) and analytics users are also turning to cloud data warehousing technologies, blurring the lines between where data is stored and where it is being analysed…