Author: David

Grazed from ComputerWorld UK.  Author: Matthew Finnegan.

The number of High Court legal disputes over the theft of data from businesses has reached a record high, according to a report, with the popularity of cloud storage services making it easier for confidential data to be taken.  The number of legal disputes taken to the High Court grew by 58 percent last year, according to commercial law firm EMW, with 167 cases during 2012, up from 106 in 2011 and 45 in 2010.

The majority of these cases are said to have been businesses launching civil claims against former employees, aiming to prevent them from using confidential data taken from company databases.  Mark Finn, principal at EMW, believes that part of the reason for the increase in businesses taking action against employees is that it is has become even easier for staff to move information outside the business, thanks to the popularity of cloud storage systems such as DropBox…

Grazed from BizTech2.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Adobe announced a new version of Adobe Creative Cloud that enables creative teams to purchase membership of a single desktop application like Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, InDesign CC or any other of the entire collection of CC desktop applications. With this new move, Adobe now offers two team plans for Creative Cloud: the complete option that delivers 14 Adobe desktop applications and sophisticated, cross-device collaboration and publishing capabilities; or the new single app plan that includes access to one desktop application along with 20GB of storage and the ability to showcase work on Behance, the world’s leading creative community.

Grazed from Wall Street Cheat Sheet.  Author: Victor Mora.

With shares of Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) trading around $49, is CRM an OUTPERFORM, WAIT AND SEE or STAY AWAY? Let’s analyze the stock with the relevant sections of our CHEAT SHEET investing framework:

T = Trends for a Stock’s Movement

Salesforce is a provider of enterprise cloud computing and social enterprise solutions. The company provides a customer and collaboration relationship management applications through the Internet or cloud. Salesforce delivers its service through Internet browsers and mobile devices and markets its social enterprise applications and platforms to businesses on a subscription basis. Cloud computing — the use of Internet-based computing, storage, and connectivity technology to deliver a variety of different services — has generated a lot of buzz in recent years…

Grazed from ARN.  Author: Nermin Bajric.

Unified identity services provider, Centrify, has boosted its product suite by signing its first specialist Cloud computing partner, Paradyne.  The partnership, which will be formally launched at Microsoft’s TechEd conference later this week, will see Paradyne’s Cloud expertise applied to Centrify’s portfolio.

Earlier this year, Centrify extend its product set from the datacentre to the Cloud through Centrify for Mobile 2013 and Centrify for SaaS 2013.  The integrated capabilities are designed to deliver secure, enterprise-class mobility with integrated application single sign-on (SSO) for security and productivity…

Grazed from PRWeb.   Author: PR Announcement.

Awesome Cloud Services, the company that delivers hosted IT infrastructure solutions enabling channel partners to offer cloud services to their clients, created an infographic illustrating the future growth of cloud computing. The infographic also showcases the opportunity for technology providers to generate new revenue by providing cloud services to their clients as part of the Awesome Cloud Services partnership program.

The infographic is interesting in that it not only outlines the growth rate of cloud services by segment but also predicts growth. For example, by 2014, 60% of server workload will be virtualized meaning more businesses will be utilizing cloud services. Of all the cloud computing revenues, about 50% comes from the US and currently, 40% of the customer relationship management (CRM) systems sold globally are cloud-based…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

No offense to the others — they’ve been great — but this week’s Structure Show podcast might be favorite one yet. Barb Darrow and I spoke with computer wunderkind Chris Kemp, who’s currently co-founder and CEO of cloud computing startup Nebula, about his time as CIO and CTO at NASA, and the crazy things he saw and did there. Oh, and he has some thoughts on OpenStack — which his team at NASA helped create — as well.  Here are some highlights. But if you’re into cloud computing or even space exploration, you really should listen to the whole thing. Seriously.

On the complexity of walking into NASA, as a twenty-something, having worked primarily with normal IT systems: “Literally every technology that has ever been sold has been bought by NASA, and NASA has invented a lot of technology that has never been sold. So it’s really difficult to communicate just how diverse and federated and interesting the infrastructure is at NASA.”…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: John Savageau.

Normally, when we think of technical-related training, images of rooms loaded with switches, routers, and servers might come to mind.    Cloud computing is different.  In reality, cloud computing is not a technology, but rather a framework employing a variety of technologies – most notably virtualization, to solve business problems or enable opportunities.  From our own practice, the majority of cloud training students represent non-technical careers and positions. Our training does follow the CompTIA Cloud Essentials course criterion, and is not a technical course, so the non-technical student trend should not come as any big surprise. 

What does come as a surprise is how enthusiastically our students dig into the topic.  Whether business unit managers, accounting and finance, sales staff, or executives, all students come into class convinced they need to know about cloud computing as an essential part of their future career progression, or even at times to ensure their career survival…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author:  Chris Preimesberger.

The significance of secure data sharing could not be more important within the overall IT industry. Security remains the single most important question mark that still causes doubt about cloud computing, especially in regulated verticals such as financials, government and science.   For an increasing number of enterprises, private clouds and new-generation security are the best ways to handle data- and file-sharing.

A recent survey Palmer Research and eWEEK publisher QuinStreet’s reported that 65 percent of respondents currently use or plan to use a private cloud deployment model for internal purposes or for application inside value chains. Thirty-six percent of respondents say they are now running a private cloud, with 29 percent planning to use a private cloud. Those are big numbers at this early stage, and there are good reasons for them…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud computing means more than cheaper and better-run IT resources. It means new ways of doing business, many of which have yet to be discovered. But some solid examples of cloud-enabled transformation are now surfacing.  Recently, research firm Saugatuck Technology reached out to 53 very senior IT and business leaders using social media tools to gauge how important and impactful cloud (and related technologies such as mobile, social, big data, advanced analytics and sensors) are in driving business innovation.

In a part quantitative, part qualitative study, executives provided views on technologies paving the way for business innovation. About 75% of the respondents are CIOs or CTOs, and more than two-thirds in companies with greater than $1 billion in revenue…

Grazed from Mashable.  Author: Christina Warren.

In the past, one of the primary concerns about the cloud was reliability — could you count on it to be available when you need it? Today, most major cloud offerings are at least as reliable as any other solution. Instead, we’ve seen concerns shift to the "security" of data stored on the cloud. (Thanks a lot, NSA.)  Whether or not you can "trust" the cloud often depends completely on what you are doing and what type of service you are using.

When we talk about the cloud, we’re usually talking about a few different things. First and most commonly, we have consumer or business facing cloud-based applications and services. The most popular example here is something like Dropbox or Google Docs. Rather than running an application off of your computer, you run an instance — usually in a web app (but you can do it using mobile too) directly from the Internet…