Author: David

Grazed from NPR. Author: Wendy Kaufman.

The cloud’s vast computing power is making it easier and less expensive for companies and clinicians to discover new drugs and medical treatments. Analyzing data that used to take years and tens of millions of dollars can now be done for a fraction of that amount.

Most of us know Amazon as the world’s largest online retailer. But its cloud computing business is booming too. Companies can rent massive computer resources by the hour, and the cost is relatively little. The ability to analyze vast amounts of data in this way is changing lots of industries — including health care…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Rich Miller.

Corporate data centers are the front line in an escalating battle between electronic attackers and defenders, and must be vigilant about defending their perimeter, cybersecurity guru Winn Schwartau told industry managers in his keynote address this morning at the Data Center World Fall 2012 conference. That’s especially true for leading cloud computing data centers, he said.

“I maintain that cloud computing is critical infrastructure, and we have not taken appropriate steps to protect it,” said Schwartau, who called out a leading cloud provider for its downtime and architecture…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Walter Bailey.

Cloud computing uptake by businesses has shifted the general model of organizational information complexes. Business enterprises have a lot of data to store and use. Even as they shift to the cloud, there are major dangers around security. In most cases, breaches to cloud-stored files happen because of insider conspiracy, malpractice, and malice. This article looks at four common insider threats to cloud computing and ways for organizations to avoid them. All this is intended at making the cloud shift worthwhile for businesses.

Malicious administrators

Cloud computing as a process is governed, managed, and maintained by site administrators. By default, they hold the key to managing all the data, files, and privileged company resources and files. Sometimes, relationships with employers don’t work. As a revenge, or for other reasons, administrators may end up spreading, or allowing privileged information to leak at the expense of the business enterprise involved…

Grazed from UCS. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cisco Systems Inc. is enhancing its cloud channel program with the aim of helping solution providers capitalize. Cisco is looking at two sides of the cloud computing market: public cloud services that partners offer to end user customers and service provider and on-premises private clouds to which solution providers sell hardware. When these two cloud models are combined, Cisco believes that it will present a $25 billion market opportunity.

Support and resources are offered to qualified solution providers by Cloud Builder Specialization to differentiate themselves to the sales of Cisco. Through hardware sales, it is suggested that these solution providers will excel in building and supporting what is traditionally private cloud infrastructure. By offering more support in developing and certifying systems, sales and marketing support to these partners, Cisco aims to widen the margins and rebates through the VIP program…

Grazed from ExtremeTech. Author: Joel Hruska.

The cloud is everywhere these days. Like its real-life namesakes, the concept and implementation of cloud computing is vague, fluffy, and hard to define. Larry Ellison had a point when he declared that cloud computing has been redefined “to include everything that we already do… It’s complete gibberish.”

If the definition of cloud computing is vague, the need to protect the rights of people who use cloud computing services is clear and pressing. We’ve compiled a list of five basic freedoms that are essential if the rights of the individual are to be protected against individual hackers as well as competing government and commercial interests. Each of these rights/freedoms is tied to real-world events that have threatened it…

Grazed from The Wall Street Journal. Author: Steve D. Jones.

After once dismissing cloud computing as “gibberish,” Oracle Corp. ORCL +0.64%Chief Executive Larry Ellison announced three new features for its cloud service at a customer conference in San Francisco.

Oracle will add infrastructure as a service to the Oracle Public Cloud, putting the enterprise software company in competition with pioneers Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.63% and Google Inc. GOOG +0.59% The Redwood Shores-based company also announced it will begin building and operating cloud services inside client data centers and a new version of its Exadata database machine with built in memory so it won’t have to rely on external storage…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: John Omwamba.

The cloud is expanding everyday and no longer looks like the shapeless puffy fleece that was until recently. The post-millennium years have seen cloud computing tighten to the bursting point since many entrepreneurs have been trying to rent space on their own. There are many ways to approach the topic but the easiest is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)—the network in layman’s language. Everything that happens on the web has to pass through the many channels going to and fro the data centers.

This is why when approaching security in cloud computing, one has to begin at the IaaS platform. Unlike other services, like SaaS, the user has no frustrating role to play here. Everything happens courtesy of the hosting platform that takes care of all safety concerns. This is because the center has machines that hold intact the data from various webmasters and intranets in order to keep the business running. The problem with this service is associating it exclusively with running a data center. In reality, this is only the starting phase of securing the platform. There are many other ways that hosting networks can do to improve the cloud…

Grazed from BusinessCloud9. Author: Stuart Lauchlan.

Last week’s formal announcement of the European Commission’s Cloud Computing strategy confirmed one thing: the Eurocrats in Brussels are leaning towards ‘a European Cloud’ in a big way and intend to achieve it through a combination of legislation, unification and standardisation. That has two immediate implications as national European government strategies – described by the Commission as not enough to achieve full potential of the Cloud – work out where they sit in this new push, while non-EU providers and governments, most notably in the US, must decide whether Brussels actions will lead to more open or more closed markets.

So what has the reaction been on both sides of the Pond to the forthcoming European Cloud? “The Cloud Industry Forum is keen to support positive credible action that encourages the adoption of Cloud Services and in that spirit the notion of aligning European member activity under a common ‘framework’ is sensible if it covers the truly practical issues that can impact adoption,” comments Andy Burton, chair of the CIF…

Grazed from Resource Nation. Author: Jessica Sanders.

As a small business owner, there is no question that cloud computing offers a variety of features that not only make the business run smoother, but make your life easier. While, first and foremost, it allows you to be more mobile, it also provides more extensive access for businesses who have many users for one program and is often more cost effective.

However, that doesn’t mean each and every program you run should be on the cloud – though it’s not unheard of; there are a few select programs that, when available in the cloud, can truly be used to their full potential…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Klint Finley.

Sacha Labourey wasn’t interested in cloud computing when he resigned as co-general manager of the JBoss division at open source software giant Red Hat in 2009. “I didn’t think it was anything special,” he says. “I thought cloud was just a bunch of servers running in a data center somewhere.” But within a year, he had a complete change of heart — so much so that he co-founded CloudBees, a cloud service for building Java applications.

“I wanted to help developers, and eventually, I realized the best way to do that to take the complexity out of fitting all the little pieces of the development stack together,” he says. He realized that cloud computing could be more than just a bunch of servers. It could be a way of making life easier for developers…