Author: David

Grazed from SecurityInfoWatch. Author: Steve Van Till.

The cloud computing market is exploding. According to technology research firm Gartner, the market was worth over $100 billion in 2012 and is expected to double within the next four years. With a growing range of "Security-as-a-Service" offerings from access control to video surveillance, recurring revenue business models have grown far beyond their origins in alarm monitoring and now pervade every aspect of our industry.

Vendors responded to this gold rush with product offerings designed to put integrators into the RMR business. They’re also offering to save end users big up-front expenses while reducing total cost of ownership…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Nari Kannan.

The Commonwealth Bank, one of Australia’s leading providers of integrated financial services, has set up a private cloud that runs internal applications as a service. These applications use more than 300 Oracle databases, all of which have been consolidated into on-demand Oracle instances that can be provisioned very quickly by application development teams within a browser interface. This has reduced the lead time for development teams at the Commonwealth Bank provisioning a production quality environment from three months to two minutes.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com R&D leverages cloud computing to vastly speed up release cycles. Major releases come every quarter, but incremental improvements are added in monthly, weekly and even daily builds. The company’s cloud infrastructure helps it maintain a single, unified code base that geographically distributed development teams can use. Those teams are successfully combining agile development and continuous integration/delivery with cloud computing…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Brian Proffitt.

Cloud computing, particularly public software as a service (SaaS), may have an unlooked-for advantage over "shrink-wrapped" software–freedom from the tax man. But that advantage may not last forever.

Many states in the US have particular rules about sales taxes that mostly revolve around the pre-Internet rule of thumb that runs along the lines of "if the business does not have a presence in the state, then they don’t need to pay sales taxes."

This is one of the reasons that (until recently) Amazon could get away with selling goods so cheaply: they didn’t have to pay sales tax because for the most part they weren’t a physical presence most states. As various state lawmakers clued into the fact that there was indeed a lot of untaxed commerce being done within their borders, they began to impose sales tax on Amazon’s sales…

Grazed from TechWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

The growth of diverse mobile devices in the enterprise is forcing IT managers to become more platform-agnostic in the way they manage their mobile applications and platforms, with web apps and cloud computing also driving this change.

This growth has major management implications, says Gartner analyst Phillip Redman. “As smartphones proliferate in the enterprise, companies are struggling to manage policy, security and support. However, enterprise mobile device management software is evolving to offer smartphone (and other device) support across a variety of platforms.”

He adds, “Although some of the vendors and products have been around for a long time, mobile device management (MDM) is a nascent market, and the vendors’ offerings have little consistency. Many come from mobile messaging and security to support MDM, and, worldwide, there are more than 60 companies in this space.”…

Grazed from TechGoondu. Author: Aaron Tan.

Contrary to popular perception, cloud computing does not make companies more susceptible to cyber attacks.

In fact, the dynamic nature of cloud computing architectures makes it more difficult for hackers to break into corporate networks, said Jim Reavis, co-founder of the Cloud Security Alliance. He was speaking at a panel discussion held on the sidelines of the CloudSec 2012 conference last week.

Citing the experience of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Reavis noted that the CIA, which faces advanced persistant threats from foreign governments and other perpetrators, is able to move data across its cloud architecture to mitigate any risk arising out of a cyber attack…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Humayun Shahid.

Prompted by the infamous Mat Honan hack attack, cloud computing has been exposed to severe criticism over the last couple of weeks, pouring in from even those like Steve Wozniak and company. The (needlessly excessive) denigration has, however, served little to diminish the cloud demand prevalent at the end of ventures and individuals alike. Following the footsteps of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and top IT leaders, Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) have started exhibiting complete faith in cloud computing, a recent Google-backed study reveals.

The main research objective was to dig deep into how CFOs typically felt about cloud computing to see if the financial geniuses actually understood the cloud computing philosophy in its entirety. How beneficial would the cloud transition eventually be? To seek answers, Google reached out to about 800 CFOs originating from ventures located within Europe and the United States…

Grazed from Business Weekly. Author: John Seelmeyer.

The word “cloud” appears nowhere on xogenous.net, the Web site of a Carson City company whose growth these days is fueled largely by companies that are moving their computing to the place-that-dares-not-speak-its-name.

The reason to avoid the word? No sense scaring potential clients who already are nervous enough about moving their computing off-site, says Ron Husey, the founder of Xogenous Ltd.

The company’s four-person sales staff has been so successful in calming the fears of executives of small- and mid-sized businesses in northern Nevada that Xogenous today employs a staff of 17 engineers to oversee its data center in Carson City, and it’s looking for more…