Author: David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Diana Kelly.

On Sept. 27, 2012, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and ISACA (formerly the Information Systems Audit and Control Association) released their Cloud Computing Market Maturity study. It offers an important review of the state of cloud computing services, and specifically how information security is affecting cloud computing adoption. Cloud services swept into markets a few years ago promising fast ramp-ups and low prices, but little in the way of security. This isn’t uncommon in the cloud industry: Despite security professionals’ pleas for organizations to build security in, it’s still a reality that excellent business benefits (for example, in the case of wireless networking) trump security — at least during the heady days of early roll-outs. With maturity comes security, but how mature is the cloud market? And what does that mean for those of us who have to manage our data in the cloud?

The joint CSA/ISACA survey addresses the maturity question. Though fairly small in sample size (a total of 252 responses) the distribution of the sample is impressive. The results include responses from managers and organizations from around the globe, and both large and small size organizations responded. One fact to note: 173 of respondents identified themselves "… as a cloud service provider, integrator or consultant …," indicating that the respondents were already at a fairly high level of maturity because of their involvement as providers of (or consultants on) cloud services…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Michael Feldman.

The epic supercomputing event of the year, SC12, will be booting up next week in Salt Lake City, Utah, attracting HPC digerati, vendors, press, and analysts from around the world. And even though the DOE won’t be there in full force this year, big crowds are still expected. This year’s event should deliver plenty of fodder for those looking to keep up on the latest and greatest in the field, especially in the cutting edge areas of accelerators, big data, cloud computing, exascale supercomputing, and green HPC.

In fact if you take a look the SC12 conference schedule, those five topics just mentioned dominate much of the technical program this year. Eye-balling the listed sessions, there are 48 on accelerators (GPUs, Xeon Phi, DSPs and FPGAs), 37 on big data, 32 on cloud computing, 20 on exascale, and 19 on green computing. Of course, there’s also the usual fare of presentations on interconnects, parallel programming, storage technology (although curiously, not much specifically on flash storage), software development tools, and various HPC use cases…

Grazed from The Drum. Author: Steven Lepitak.

“The Cloud is here to stay” proclaims Phil Worms, director of marketing at hosting company iomart Group when talking about data connectivity following the launch of 4G in the UK. “I’ve seen so many terms for the internet over the years, such as The net, Web 2.0 and so forth,” he states when asked what the future holds for the internet and mobile communications.

The Drum is speaking to iomart, the headline sponsor of this year’s Social Buzz Awards, to ascertain the company’s views on how the way that we access; share and store data is impacting on marketing services…

Grazed from The Asahi Shimbun.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. released a midterm management plan that focuses heavily on expanding its cloud computing services abroad while cutting hundreds of billions of yen in costs.

According to the plan released on Nov. 8, the telecommunications giant expects overseas sales to reach $20 billion (1.6 trillion yen) in fiscal 2016, nearly double the $11.6 billion reported for the year through March 2012. The company said it will target prospective growth segments in emerging economies to make up for its sluggish domestic performance, particularly in fiber-optic businesses…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Kevin Kwang.

The telecoms industry will continue to be shaken up by cloud computing in terms of the need to offer relevant software and build up a strong independent software vendor (ISV) ecosystem–both of which traditionally are not telcos’ strong suit.

In addition, these market players will have to enhance their channel partner networks to scale their operations and reach out to more customers. These were just some of the 10 predictions made by IDC Asia-Pacific for the telecoms sector between 2013 and 2016…

Grazed from ARN. Author: Rimin Dutt.

Dell has launched an expanded Cloud client computing portfolio in Australia. The new desktop virtualisation and Cloud client solutions enable workers to use any app on any device, according to the company. Dell’s Desktop Virtualisation Solutions in Australia will address the cost and complexity challenges of virtual desktop adoption.

DVS Simplified and Dell Wyse endpoints are available in Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam. Dell has also announced new support for Citrix HDX 3D technology for thin and zero clients, enabling organisations to virtualise and centrally deliver 3D graphics-intensive applications like CAD/CAM, 3D solids modelling, and HD multimedia…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

The latest round of cloud computing and enterprise software forecasts reflect the growing influence of analytics, legacy systems integration, mobility and security on IT buyer’s decisions. Bain & Company and Gartner have moved beyond aggregate forecasts, and are beginning to forecast by cloud and SaaS adoption stage. SAP is using the Bain adoption model in their vertical market presentations today.

Despite the predictions of the demise of enterprise software, forecasts and sales cycles I’ve been involved with indicate market growth. Mobility and cloud computing are the catalysts of rejuvenation in many enterprise application areas, and are accelerating sales cycles…

Grazed from Network Computing. Author: Brandon Butler.

Joyent may be the biggest cloud provider you haven’t heard of. According to the pure-play infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider — which was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in San Francisco — it is a top 5 vendor of cloud-based virtual machines in the world, a stat that’s backed up by Gartner. That means it’s rubbing elbows with the big names of cloud computing — Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google.

"They’re the most interesting cloud company that few people talk about," says George Reese, CTO of enStratus, a company that consults with enterprises on cloud strategies and helps business deploy applications to the cloud. "When we talk to people we get questions about AWS, Rackspace, HP, and when we mention Joyent, they’re like, ‘Who?’"…

Grazed from InfoSecurity. Author: Editorial Staff.

As more companies turn to the cloud to provide redundancy and back-up services for mission-critical business functions, connectivity and applications, new research has revealed that a full 70% of cloud backup providers do not inform customers of where the data is being physically kept.

According to a report from Icomm Technologies, 70% of data storage/data center providers do not reveal which country, general locality or legal jurisdiction customer data is stored within. It’s an issue that becomes particularly apropos in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which saw a number of critical data centers in the New York City area go down, darkening websites across the US. However, for UK businesses, the issue becomes broader…