Author: David

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Eric Zeman.

Google admitted Monday morning that its cloud-based Google Drive service is experiencing a service disruption. According to a statement made on Google’s service dashboard, "We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly." Reports of trouble accessing Google Drive spread across social networks such as Twitter Monday. Users from around the globe reported trouble connecting to the service, as well as service crashes.

Google Drive is Google’s cloud-based storage and productivity service. It encompasses Google Docs, Sheets and Presentations, in addition to providing document and file storage. Google Drive is accessible from various avenues, including Web browsers, desktop apps and apps for Android and iOS devices. The standalone mobile apps appear to be working more consistently at the moment when compared to the browser-based versions of the service…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: John Omwamba.

The major premise of cloud actionable analytics is having a budget-worthy processor and dedicated staff. The agility of businesses lies in the way they analyze their operations in and out. They have to strategize on ways to improve their productivity while cutting costs. In the past, it took data outsourcing to get a candid view of where the company stood and how it was likely to perform in coming years. This was costly: besides, the equipment was not as minimalist or set for big data projects like they are now. More so, the storage expenditure was not on a pay-as-you go platform as they are now.

This kind of analytics is a significant cloud trend, because, as Gartner predicts, it will help corporate entities presage what is going to happen to them. This is unlike before when a company had to toil using past contexts with a subset of formulae to gain a breakthrough. There are several influences that one can explore regarding actionable analytics on cloud computing and their role in tomorrow’s company:…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

This sentiment was recently expressed in an interview with Motley Fool analyst Tim Byers, who analyzed the zeitgeist coming out of the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) conference and observed that cloud computing and big data were now one in the same phenomena, converging on enterprises of all shapes and sizes.

Byers may have meant that the level of industry interest and innovation in big data parallels that seen in the cloud computing space in recent years. But in many ways, the two are becoming one in the same — cloud resources are needed to support big data storage and projects, and big data is a huge business case for moving to cloud. The innovations and buzz around big data and cloud at SXSW represent a “tipping point,” Byers relates, as it is now apparent that both cloud and big data are huge springboards to innovation…

Grazed from The NGT.  Author: Paul Omorogbe & Seyi Sokoya.

IT’S shaping up as the next big thing — “cloud computing.”  Until recently, we’ve stored our information on hard drives and collaborated with colleagues via attachments and a confusing array of edits, highlights and multiple versions of the same document. In contrast, cloud computing moves all of that information  – emails, documents, presentations, photos, spreadsheets and so on – onto the Internet where it exists in a virtual space which we refer to as ‘the cloud’.

Experts predict the Cloud Computing Market will be worth $150 billion by this year and that by 2014, 60 per cent of server workloads will be spent processing Cloud data.   Most consumers have no idea what Cloud Computing is or how it works. In August 2011, the NPD Group announced research which claimed just 22 per cent of US consumers were familiar with the term, though 76 per cent of respondents reported using some type of Cloud-based service in the past 12 months…

Grazed from Motley Fool.  Author: Tim Beyers.

Big data used to have a specific meaning. Meant to describe cast-offs such as log files, this information was "big" because of the amount of electronic refuse created when processing, say, an e-commerce transaction. Big data used to be an exercise in digital dumpster diving.

Those days are gone. At the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference, "big data" became a proxy for social data compiled by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. A synonym for capturing sentiment, but on a grand scale. Every company had to become a "big data" company, panelists enthused…

Grazed from Business Insider.  Author: Julie Bort.

A bunch of big enterprise companies are lining up to buy a cloud computing company called SoftLayer Technologies, Reuters’ Nadia Damouni reports.  IBM and EMC are reportedly in talks right now to buy the company in a deal that could be worth more than $2 billion. The sales process is being handled by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse.

Dallas, Texas-based SoftLayer is privately held, with the majority of shares owned by GI Partners. It has reportedly turned down other suitors before, like AT&T.  SoftLayer is a cloud-computing and Web-hosting provider with about 25,000 customers, mostly small and mid-sized customers, making it the world’s largest privately held website hoster, Damouni reports…

Grazed from AdvanceWeb. Author: Sharlene George.

Cloud computing and storage is an undeniable migration path and IT strategy. Overall spending on cloud technology is expected to reach an estimated $150 billion annually by 2014, according to a recent Gartner Group study. And within healthcare, 35 percent of health IT professionals surveyed said their organization was implementing or maintaining cloud computing in 2012, up from 30 percent in 2011, according to a new survey by Vernon Hills, Ill., technology vendor CDW.

However, not every software application in healthcare is a candidate for moving to the cloud. And many old myths about cloud computing and cloud storage continue to confuse both covered entities (CEs) and business associates (BAs). The HIPAA omnibus rule, released in January 2013, basically incorporates the HITECH Act security provisions into HIPAA, confirming the security and privacy requirements in the utilization of technology in healthcare. Below are five key changes under the HIPAA Omnibus Rule:…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Chris Kenealy.

I have always admired the haughtiness of most people when it comes to making everything more human. It truly is a testament to our own sense of entitlement that we must make nonhuman concepts and objects, and change them so we can take an interest in them. We even have a word for this practice called personification. This is the act of giving an animal a human voice in cliche children’s films, and making our early 1990s computers a little too creepy when they said hello and goodbye to you.

Now, I am not saying that making something more human-like is inherently wrong. Sure, we need some things that are familiar to us so we can get that little spark of infatuation and learn a little more about whatever it is that reminds you of you. Of course, the need for the calming of human familiarity could be our undoing in the future when we make strong and artificially intelligent robots with human faces. With a friendly face we will feel comfortable that the robots are like us because of their familiar demeanor…

Grazed from Telecompaper. Author: PR Announcement.

HP has launched its cloud computing platform in Brazil. Called Enterprise Cloud Services – Virtual Private Cloud (ECS/VPC), the new platform has been tested since early 2013 and now enters commercial operation with the proposal to deliver a differentiated offering to corporate clients.

According to HP, the service is the first hybrid cloud in the country, enabling customers to create public and private cloud services, according to their needs. The service includes IaaS and PaaS solutions for the service model. The ECS/VPC is supported by HP’s two data centres in Brazil, located in the cities of Barueri and Sao Bernardo do Campo, in the Greater Sao Paulo area. The platform is part of the global cloud service from HP that is currently being offered in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia.

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

Amazon Web Services has included virtual private clouds into its EC2 instances in a move that may render the marketing pitches of a lot of hardware companies moot. At the very least, AWS threw a virtual curveball to its physical data center rivals.

In a blog post, AWS outlined that ever EC2 customer will have advanced networking and features included in its Virtual Private Cloud service. Earlier: Amazon dominates cloud infrastructure market – but new challengers emerging | Amazon to set up new EC2 customers on private cloud…