Author: David

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Lori Kozlowski.

Making a dent in the Internet and generally doing stuff before everyone else makes you a pioneer. A term often reserved for the curious prospectors and miners, who settled the West.

Cloud computing has become a red-hot field in recent years, as the idea of “the cloud” has matured. One Los Angeles-based company has quietly seen steady and astronomical success in this sector, as they attempted web-only approaches to the Internet long before the notion became popular.

Cornerstone On Demand provides workplace solutions and talent management software (essentially software that helps companies with training, recruiting, and performance). They began doing this far before the term “talent management” became common…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

European cloud adoption has happened slower than in the U.S., but there are signs that it’s about to rapidly accelerate. At Structure:Europe, cloud luminaries will talk about how they see this change unfolding and what’s motivating it. Hint: It’s not just about saving money.

There’s a ton of cloud opportunity in Europe — the question is how fast it will come to fruition and what’s driving it…

Grazed from Business Solutions. Author: Andrew Hay.

Customers have always looked to their vendors, be they VARs, MSPs or ISVs, to distill the challenges of migrating to a computing architecture. This continues to be true with regards to cloud – perhaps one of the most misunderstood and confusing architectures to arrive since the introduction of the personal computer to replace aging mainframe technology.

Extending security beyond traditional on-premises perimeter controls, adhering to regulatory compliance mandates and revising policies and procedures to encompass a platform owned by a third-party (not to mention shared with other customers) are but a few of the concerns customers wrestle with when thinking about making the jump to cloud…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Gery Menegaz.

Anyone reading about the Cloud has heard the common dangerous assumption that the Patriot Act gives the government unprecedented access to your data. The misconception is that the level of access that the government has in the cloud is beyond what they would have if the data were hosted elsewhere.

Recently the European Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding, “spearheaded and vigorously advocated for the Commission’s proposals to update and modernize the privacy framework in Europe through a detailed new Regulation.”…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Rick Watson.

All avid computer users have enjoyed the benefits and conveniences of cloud computing, either knowingly or unknowingly. Most of us rarely understand what is happening behind the screens, especially when lost in interesting movie or music, or even when perusing the information about your competitors. As a result, the privacy and security of the information in cloud is sometimes assured. What of other times? Is it assumed?

Most of us overlook privacy warning and security procedures when utilizing the ever-dazzling gadgets, most of which expose us to an elevated echelon when it comes to compromises. A certain tech-user had his digital life taken over and destroyed over a span of minutes, with the perpetrators committing vilifying broadcasts in his identity. What started as a simple breach to an email ID boiled down remote erasure of data on multiple gadgets…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Despite the appeal of using public cloud, some IT admins are concerned about turning over all their production applications to a third party or losing their substantial investment in on-premises infrastructure. In such cases, a hybrid environment can capitalize on the benefits of both public and private cloud.

But hybrid cloud isn’t perfect; it still includes a few security obstacles. As you analyze the business and technical hurdles of maintaining a hybrid cloud, keep these five security issues in mind…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Robert L. Mitchell.

Would you entrust your mainframe to the cloud? Perhaps not for production, but IBM is hoping to gain customers for its cloud-based disaster recovery services by offering support for virtual mainframes. Currently, IBM offers cloud-based backup and disaster recovery services for the AIX, Windows and Linux platforms.

"We’re moving away from just backup to a replication environment in the cloud for all critical servers" — including the mainframe, said Rich Cocchiara, distinguished engineer and chief technology officer for Business Continuity Recovery Services, during a recent one-on-one meeting at Computerworld’s offices. "What cloud is doing is bringing the price down," perhaps to the point where more organizations may be willing to give up building or owning their own backup data centers. Instead of paying the capital expense of creating a backup data center, IT pays for access to virtual machines, as well as for the data backups and storage of the information…

Grazed from Military and Aerospace Electonics. Author: Editorial Staff.

U.S. Army researchers are attempting to apply tactical cloud computing to battlefield command and control (C2) by enabling warfighters to access crucial C2 and intelligence services with a wide variety of military computers of variable link capacities located anywhere on the battlefield.

The Army Communications Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. issued a broad agency announcement (BAA W15P7T12RA216) entitled Command and Control Applications For the Decisive Edge, which includes a topic called Command & Control Tactical Cloud Computing Environment.

The tactical cloud computing project, sponsored by the CERDEC Command, Power & Integration (CP&I) Directorate, seeks to enable warfighters on the forward edge of the battlefield to use cloud computing to access important situational awareness information using data radios, wearable computers, rugged laptop computers, and other rugged mobile computing devices…