Author: David

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Former SoftLayer and Terremark Chief Marketing Officer Simon West is now an advisor to independenceIT, the desktop as a service (DaaS) upstart, Talkin’ Cloud has confirmed. West and former Terremark CFO Jose Segrera are helping independenceIT to accelerate its DaaS strategy — which leans on MSPs and other channel partners serving the SMB market.

Segrera invested in independenceIT and joined the company’s board last week. He and West are working closely with the core independenceIT team — CEO Jim Lippie, President Seth Bostock and CTO Charles Buck — to make sure the company continues to innovate amid growing DaaS and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) chatter from Amazon Workspaces, VMware Horizon and Desktone, Citrix Xen Desktop, dinCloud and upstarts like Toshiba hosted Virutal Desktop Service, among others…

Grazed from DataMation. Author: Jeff Vance.

With any new hot trend comes a truckload of missteps, bad ideas and outright failures. I should probably create a template for this sort of article, one in which I could pull out a term like “cloud” or “BYOD” and simply plug in “social media” or “Big Data.” When the trend in question either falls by the wayside or passes into the mainstream, it seems like we all forget the lessons faster than PR firms create new buzzwords.

Of course, vendors within trendy news spaces also tend to think they’re in uncharted waters. But in fact there’s actually plenty of history available to learn from. Cloud concepts have been around at least since the 1960s (check out Douglas Parkhill’s 1966 book, The Challenge of the Computer Utility, if you don’t believe me), but plenty of cloud startups ignored history in favor of buzz. And it’s not like gaining insights from piles of data is some new thing that was previously as rare as detecting neutrinos from deep space. Here are five history lessons we should have already learned, but seem to be doomed to keep repeating:…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Cloud broker Cloud Sherpas took a shot at Microsoft (MSFT) recently for its Scroogled marketing campaign that targeted Google (GOOG) by claiming in a blog post that "Microsoft customers are the real victims." Cloud Sherpas Solutions Engineer Derik VanVleet led his company’s attack, writing a blog post around the idea of Microsoft scanning personal files.

"Even so, Microsoft still touts that Google scans your email, but what if Microsoft was scanning the files on your PC?" he said in the blog post. "And what if it was using your personal files on your computer to serve you ads? A little too personal and lacking in privacy? Well, that is exactly what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8.1, Smart Search and Hero Ads."…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: PR Announcement.

14th International Cloud Expo to take place June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City. SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, the 14th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, co-located with 5th International Big Data Expo and 3rd International Software-Defined Networking Expo, will take place June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.

The International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world’s leading Cloud-focused event and is held two times a year, in New York and Silicon Valley.

The three-day event will offer a vast selection of technical and strategic breakout sessions, General Sessions, Industry Keynotes, and "Power Panels" from a rock star conference faculty chosen from among the leading industry players in the cloud computing and Big Data worlds. The bustling Expo Floor will include two busy Demo Theaters so that as a delegate you can kick the tires of solutions and offerings, and discuss one-on-one with all the leading Cloud and Big Data players what they are offering and how to make use of it in your particular situation…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Joe Masters Emison.

This is the third part in a series of articles about creating my own IaaS performance benchmarking project. In the first part, I explained the methodology I’m using to test instance types across major IaaS providers. In the second part, I ran benchmarks across every instance type in every U.S. region run by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the most widely used IaaS provider. In this part, I look specifically at the new C3 family of instances that AWS launched at its re:Invent conference, and update my AWS charts accordingly.

Amazon Web Services has been around long enough to want to deprecate/retire some of its instance types, as seen both by the excellent M3 family (replacing the M1 instance types) and now the new C3 family (replacing the C1 instances). As AWS giveth, however, AWS also (to some extent) taketh away: While these new families are far superior than the old ones in terms of price/performance, they also eliminate an option that the old instance types had: instance-backed storage…

Grazed from TheNextWeb. Author: Ian Gotts.

It seems like the whole world is moving to the cloud for all IT applications. Whilst this is not true, there is a danger of the herd mentality. This article considers the different aspects that should be taken into account before launching into the clouds. Much of the material is taken from a book by the author of this article called Thinking of… Buying Cloud Computing? Ask the Smart Questions.

The book offers 90 pages of questions that act as a comprehensive list of all the issues that need to be considered. Sadly, it provides no answers – it cannot, as every client situation is different. It is never what may be described as a “fun read”. But what is does do is make sure that all the questions that should be answered are asked. It also gives insights into the impact of every question guiding the reader to the right answer…

Grazzed from CloudTweaks. Author: Jim McCann.

Putting the power of big data into the hands of small businesses can help them to achieve improved results in sales and marketing and in providing the products their customers want most. A number of factors have come together to allow the democratization of big data analytics and to provide a practical option for small business owners and administrators in managing their enterprises more effectively.

Big Data and the Corporate Cloud

One of the most important elements in the new big data paradigm is the increasing availability of cloud storage and applications for smaller business operations. Cloud computing systems allow remote storage of and access to corporate data through secure login technologies. In general practice, the cloud allows staff members to perform work and access data at any time and from anywhere with a secured Internet connection…

Grazed from USA Today. Author: Rajiv Gupta.

The digital universe containing our photos, videos, movies, banking data, health data, tax statements and more is doubling roughly every two years. Securing this data is a concern. The proportion of sensitive data in the digital universe that requires protection is growing faster than the universe itself. What’s more, by 2020 nearly 40% of the information in the digital universe will be touched by cloud computing providers.

As we collectively put more and more business as well as personal data in the cloud, we expect cloud providers to fully secure the data. However, that’s rarely the case today. Hardly a day goes by without headlines about another significant data breach. Cloud providers must adopt a defense-in-depth strategy for data security. This means using layers of security technologies and business practices to make sure that data is protected in multiple ways. A good cloud security plan starts with data encryption but certainly doesn’t end there. In fact, there are five keys to cloud data security…

Grazed from USA Today. Author: Chip Bayers.

When we want to convey uncertainty or confusion, we often lean on words and phrases that make us sound like TV weathercasters — our outlook is hazy, it is obscured by mist, it is lost in the fog. Which makes it curious that vast swaths of the technology world these days are obsessed with marketing themselves as savvy about "cloud computing" — because nothing is cloudier than what the phrase itself means, or which companies are best poised to exploit it.

For example, last week’s enormous Dreamforce conference might have lead you to believe that cloud computing is all about what conference sponsor Salesforce.com provides: "software as a service." Beneath all of CEO Marc Benioff’s antic hype about a "third wave of computing" what the awkwardly-acronymed SaaS is about, in the end, is merely converting the inherently boring business software market from sales to rentals…

Grazed from FutureGov. Author: Medha Basu.

The European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) has recommended that the European Union (EU) develop a unified strategy for government cloud in order to enable member countries to securely deploy government clouds. The report recognises that public sector organisations are increasingly switching to cloud computing, and government clouds can simplify citizen interactions by reducing information processing time, lowering cost of government services and enhancing citizen data security.

However, cloud adoption in the European government sector has been very heterogeneous. ENISA recommends that member states develop a framework to mitigate loss of data control and a regulatory framework to address concerns regarding the physical location of data in the cloud…