Author: David

Grazed from The Register. Author: Neil McCallister.

The Fedora Project has announced the beta release of Fedora 19, codenamed "Schrödinger’s Cat", almost exactly six months since the previous version entered beta. The release brings the Fedora project back on track after the much-delayed Fedora 18, which shipped two months later than expected due to lingering bugs.

Among its major new features, Fedora 19 is the first to bundle Red Hat’s OpenShift Origin platform-as-a-service (PaaS) management software, something that was meant to be included in the previous version but was bumped to give the OpenShift devs time to upgrade their code to run on the new version of Ruby on Rails…

Grazed from Scientific Computing. Author: Editorial Staff.

The phrase “Big data” means different things to different people. Some believe that the big data is hype and will fade away with time, but the same was said about cloud computing four years ago. ISC Events, with its 28 years of experience in organizing scientific computing conferences realized early on that high performance computing (HPC), big data and cloud are converging, prompting far-reaching implications that are changing the worlds of science, engineering and manufacturing.

The fourth ISC’13 Cloud Conference will take place in the Marriott Hotel, Heidelberg, Germany from September 23 – 24, 2013, and the inaugural ISC’13 Big Data Conference will be held at the same venue immediately afterward, from September 25 – 26. As the cloud computing model is proving to be the useful match for big data, i.e. providing virtually unlimited resources on demand, many topics and presentations in both conference programs will reflect on that connection…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Darryl Etherington.

San Francisco-based startup Appurify is announcing its $4.5 million Series A round today, funding which will help the company continue to build out its exhaustive and extensive app testing platform, and to expand its sales and marketing teams to help spread the word among mobile developers. Appurify automates the process of wide-scale testing, allowing developers to see how their devices behave on a huge range of gadgets, instead of just on the smaller pool they might be able to get by seeding their beta to friends and contacts.

This is a remarkably different approach from that taken by a company like TestFairy, which I covered earlier today. Where TestFairy is looking at gathering data from a limited number of real world users, Appurify is trying to tackle testing from the perspective of using a battery of lab-controlled tests to throw as much information as possible at the problem. It’s a way to get around fragmentation issues that cost many Android developers users and reviews, and it also helps mobile software encounter a huge range of network conditions, situations and eventualities that would be hard to replicate with traditional testing through simulation, so that apps can be ready to handle any hiccup…

Grazed from HP. Author: Editorial Staff.

Learn how SaaSifying your app can commercially deliver unique software solutions as a service to end user customers. Cloud-based solutions help both ISVs and their customers shorten sales cycles, reduce capital requirements, and expand addressable markets and reach.

Hear from PzFlex how they leveraged the power and elasticity of cloud computing to realize unprecedented performance and flexibility using Cliqr’s CloudCenter platform for seamless application migration and HP’s Public cloud for secure, scalable and low cost computing…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Gilad Parann-Nissany.

During the past month or so, Rich Mogull, analyst and CEO of securosis has published multiple blogs on cloud encryption best practices, specifically in infrastructure clouds. The final blog IaaS Encryption: How to Choose, provides a good opportunity for us to touch and expand on some of the volume storage cloud security points highlighted on Rich’s article:
“Always use external key management. Instance-managed encryption is only acceptable for test/development systems you know will never go into production”

Instance managed encryption means the encryption keys are kept on the virtual disk. In other words, anyone with access to your cloud instance, has access to your encryption keys – hence to your data. In addition, specific cloud operations, such as disk snapshots, will snapshot the encryption keys with it…

Grazed from AppsTechNews. Author: James Bourne.

The acronym ‘BYOD’ has in no small part fuelled the enterprise-related media scene on its own for the past 18 months; and its disruptive potential is tangible. Yet it shares similarities with another hugely hyped technology, cloud computing. Both have moved beyond the embryonic stage – as CloudTech has reported, many cloud computing reports of late have emphasised how the technology is maturing – into more sophisticated discussion.

For cloud, it’s moving on to concepts such as how to deploy multiple clouds, how to alternate vendors, how to get specific ROI from different verticals. For BYOD, it’s analysing more specific security questions, such as managing mobile devices, avoiding data loss, and how to implement human error within an MDM and MAM policy. Symantec, in a report released last month, urged enterprises to take the risks associated with BYOD, as the benefits outweigh the gamble…

Grazed from Expert Review. Author: Gareth Halfacree.

Microsoft has promised that it will add cloud computing capabilities equivalent to three Xbox One systems for every single console sold, allowing developers to tap into remote servers and create more complex games. The Xbox One is built around a semi-custom AMD accelerated processing unit (APU,) a chip that combines graphics and general-purpose processing units. Using a different instruction set architecture – x86, the same as a standard desktop or laptop machine – than the PowerPC-based Xbox 360, it’s difficult to directly compare the relative performance of the two systems, with Microsoft stating the Xbox One will be roughly ten times as powerful as the Xbox 360.

Speaking to Official Xbox Magazine, Microsoft’s Jeff Henshaw has also suggested that each Xbox One console can tap into three times its local power by using an arm of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform – creating a device potentially 40 times as powerful as its predecessor…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Many IT leaders are concerned about how they can compete with cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Often, cloud providers are able to offer capabilities such as storage at a much more favorable price point than internal IT can deliver.

As a result, says Bernard Golden, executive withe Dell’s cloud computing group, says it’s high time IT leaders stop trying to compete with the outside services. In a recent CIO post, he says "the rapid rise of cloud computing means corporate IT may no longer be the cheapest purveyor of application hosting, infrastructure, storage and other services." As he put it, the cloud challenge "threatens to topple [corporate IT’s] position as monopoly supplier of computing to the larger enterprise."…

Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Luke Burns.

Security and privacy are often mentioned in the same breath, but when it comes to cloud computing, security tends to be the dominant subject. But should it be? While there are seemingly endless security threats, cloud providers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable in addressing them. When it comes to privacy, though, cloud vendors have not made the same progress. In fact, it’s more than likely that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies breach the customer’s perception of data privacy regularly.

I’m not referring simply to consumer companies and their problems with privacy, e.g. Facebook sharing personal data with advertisers. Enterprise SaaS companies face their own unique challenges around customer data usage, even though those issues have not received the same level of scrutiny…

Grazed from FutureState. Author: Shannon Adkins.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is revolutionizing the software industry. Roughly a decade after the first SaaS suites emerged, even giants like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft are jumping on this new paradigm. SaaS is also changing the way software vendors interact with end users. When subscriptions are everything, success depends more on adoption and retention — and less on acquisition.

My colleagues and I work with both SaaS vendors and end users on a daily basis and can say from firsthand experience that inactive users quickly become lost customers. That’s a scary prospect, but it also represents the potential in the SaaS market that’s waiting to be unlocked. First, vendors will have to redefine implementation. The old “sell, train, support” model just isn’t working. What’s needed is a more proactive approach that treats clients like partners, focuses on adoption and includes them in the development process…