Author: David

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Whether the move is from mainframes to minicomputers, or from there to personal computers and servers, and now to mobile devices and cloud computing, we are witnessing one grand process of moving machine intelligence closer to the people on the front lines, even as the computing at the center gets more powerful.

Fortunes change with each shift, as purveyors of tech stress technical knowledge when mainframes are the big thing, or talk about their understanding of business processes in the client-server era. What matters in the cloud and mobile era may be the critical importance of design. With all the data being collected, design and the ability to present information well may be the big strategic weapon. It certainly seems to be the way a lot of people are coming after the incumbents. Recently Infor, a collection of revamped business applications companies, unveiled a good-looking set of charts, graphics and lists that inform much of the output and future options on its mobile applications for manufacturing and sales…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is adding a single-tenant, secure hardware cloud appliance to its usual software services to give customers an extra-secure method of storing encryption keys, issuing digital signatures and executing digital rights management in compliance with strict regulations.

AWS CloudHSM uses Safenet’s Luna-SA appliances. AWS is making them available in EC2 only to Virtual Private Cloud customers, who access their virtual servers over virtual private networks and use other security precautions. The appliance is given an IP address within the virtual private cloud and is accessible only to the customer contracting for it, even though Amazon monitors it and ensures that it remains up and running…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Jordan Robertson.

Stuart McClure has simple advice for companies that want to put their data in the cloud: Don’t do it. When it comes to security, the former chief technology officer of McAfee said choosing a safe service can be like "picking a dog with the least fleas."

Yet when McClure needed help running his security startup, Cylance Inc., he didn’t heed his own advice. He said he reluctantly hired a company that handles administrative work such as managing employee 401(k)s over the Internet, even though he described the cloud provider’s initial security plan as an "abysmal mess."…

Grazed from HeraldOnline. Author: Editorial Staff.

Scale Computing, industry leading developers of hyperconverged solutions that seamlessly combine servers, storage and virtualization into a single system, today released results of a market survey conducted by ApplicationContinuity.org. The report showcases why midmarket organizations are embracing on-premise virtualization over the cloud, the driving factors behind this decision, and what alternatives companies are choosing for their mission-critical applications and data.

More than 3,000 IT professionals in the US participated in the recent survey, which investigates the prevalence of choosing local infrastructure or the cloud, the types of applications IT teams are choosing to run on local infrastructures, and key concerns among IT professionals as to how and where data is managed. Despite widespread cloud-marketing by vendors, this study showed that 90 percent of participants responded that it was ‘important or very important’ to keep applications and data within their company-owned infrastructure rather than entrusting it to a cloud provider…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Emma Byrne.

Cloud computing is not as disruptive as many organizations feared. Using a cloud provider has come as naturally to most organizations as using webmail. But for the financial sector, international laws make life—shall we say—challenging. Here’s why.

Behind the scenes, there are heavyweight struggles taking place that center around the “sovereignty” of data. If data are stored across international borders, how can your customers be sure that their sensitive personal information is safe? More importantly—at least from the lawyers’ perspective—who can be sued if it isn’t safe? For organizations in the financial sector, the picture can be murky…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

TraceSecurity has released a cloud-based tool that simulates social engineering to help protect customers from phishing schemes and other advanced persistent threats. The new TraceSecurity Phishing Simulator was designed to mimic real-world social engineering attacks. The cloud-based tool then tracks results to analyze employee actions and determine if the organization is at risk to social engineering attacks. One of the biggest threats to organizations, as well as people in general, is socially engineered attacks, but with this tool, TraceSecurity aims to help organizations identify their vulnerabilities within minutes.

"Deploying a simulated phishing attack against groups of employees not only tests their willingness to click on an unsolicited email, but also determines if they are apt to download potentially harmful code onto company resources," said Jim Stickley, TraceSecurity CTO, in a prepared statement. "Malicious messages often contain malware that, when activated, can easily infect an entire network, which is why we developed Phishing Simulator. We believe every organization should, at a minimum, test a few employees and see how they do."…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the findings of its 2013 Enterprise End User Report, "Linux Adoption: Third Annual Survey of World’s Largest Enterprise Linux Users." The study conducted in partnership with Yeoman Technology Group tracks the growth of Linux use in large enterprises and identifies key trends that inform Linux operating system priorities.

Key findings from this year’s report show the world’s largest enterprises are increasing their investments in Linux for the third consecutive year. Industry reports for the most recent quarter (4Q12) show that while overall server revenue is only growing at 3.1 percent year-over-year; Linux experienced 12.7 percent year-over-year growth for the quarter while Windows only increased 3.2 percent and UNIX was down 24.1 percent1. The Enterprise End User Report helps to inform the industry about what is driving this adoption and how market growth is shaping up for the future…

Grazed from ABCNews. Author: Jake Sturmer.

Security experts warn cloud computing in Australia is becoming an increasingly appealing target for hackers as businesses rapidly take up the technology. Tapping the online cloud is fast becoming the service mode of choice for many big Australian businesses, with nearly half of them using the technology. Instead of cables and computers crowding company offices, reams of information floats online.

Advocates say it is a more efficient and cost-effective way to manage data. Analysts Frost & Sullivan estimate the Australian industry was worth $842 million in 2012 and is expected to grow to $3.15 billion in 2016. F&S information and communications technology vice president Andrew Milroy says Australia is leading cloud adoption in the Asia-Pacific region…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Joe Hewitson.

Computing resources have been a quickly changing and ever-improving facet of modern business for many years. Innovations stream at breakneck pace. The rise of cloud computing has, in recent years, combined PaaS and SaaS (Platform and Software as a service) to provide a unified solution for IT groups looking for a more distributed computing resource strategy. As the data fed into these cloud platforms and applications continues to increase, the infrastructure supporting its growth will need to expand. This foundational need is exactly why many IT professionals in organizations of all sizes, including midsize companies, have begun pushing their computing infrastructure into the cloud.

Growth of IaaS

Gartner Inc., the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, has recently released a projected growth analysis of public cloud computing and its services. As reported by Forbes, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) stands out as the fastest-growing sector. Forecast with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just over 41 percent through 2016, the increase in demand for computing resources in the public cloud shows no sign of slowing down. The need for agile computing resources and scalable infrastructure has clearly caused a shift in focus for IT professionals. Playing catch up to the other two major services of the cloud, this IaaS growth proves to be a great illustration of the importance of the cloud in today’s business…

Grazed from GizMag. Author: Will Shanklin.

In the past few years, "the cloud" has revolutionized consumer tech – nearly as much as the mobile devices that it often accompanies. But how much has it changed us? Has cloud computing lived up to the tremendous hype that it promised a few short years ago? Let’s revisit 2011’s favorite buzzword, two years later.

Sneaking up on us

A couple of years ago, the tech world was abuzz about the cloud. Cloud storage service Dropbox was growing in profit and popularity. Spotify finally hit the U.S. Even Steve Jobs used his last Apple keynote to introduce iCloud. Sometime between then and now, the cloud went from being the next big thing to being something that’s so closely intertwined with computing – and our lives – that we often forget about it…