Author: David

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

IT may still be wrestling with the notion of cloud computing, but chief financial officers already believe. According to a Google-sponsored study, 96 percent of CFOs believe that "cloud computing provides their business with quantifiable benefits." Almost as good, 94 percent said the cloud will be important to the success of their companies, and just over half of those agreed that cloud computing "offers better value" than traditional approaches to computing, including outsourcing.

Some of the benefits CFOs saw most include significant capital and operational savings, better security (you heard right), and productivity gains that come from the ability to work from any device.

The study surveyed 800 CFOs and other top financial executives at companies with 500 or more employees in both the United States and Europe. Even with the obvious caveat that a cloud study sponsored and released by Google — a top service provider — could hardly come to an anticloud conclusion, the study still provides notable data points…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Sean Drew.

It has certainly been an interesting few weeks for cloud-based storage companies, with Dropbox facing security questions after an embarrassing breach and Box securing a new round of funding that values the company at over a billion dollars. These two contrasting headlines prove that while the cloud storage industry still has some significant questions to answer, it is here to stay and only growing in popularity for businesses.

The Dropbox Fiasco

The Dropbox situation began when users started to get spam through their email addresses associated with the site. Several users reported that Dropbox was the only site that they used that address with, leading many to speculate about a hack…

Grazed from ITBusiness.ca. Author: Jeff Jedras.

Sage North America put cloud computing and a mobility strategy front and centre as it opened its Summit partner conference on Monday, but CEO Pascal Houillon (pictured) warned those that want Sage to move faster into the cloud that its approach will be deliberate.

“Some have accused Sage of moving too slowly on cloud computing,” acknowledged Houillon. “(But) let’s not move to the too fast category.”

Despite that note of caution. Sage executives made several cloud-related announcements and outlined a hybrid cloud strategy that will see Sage’s core platforms focus on key business functions, with additional functionality available through the cloud on a subscription basis, allowing customers to pick just features they want and need. Houillon is also focusing Sage’s research and development focus more tightly, with hybrid cloud offerings being the priority…

Grazed from DailyFinance. Author: Sean Williams.

You know the old saying about how an idea is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Well, cloud computing really is the best thing to happen to the tech sector since Al Gore invented the Internet.

OK, so that’s a joke that’ll never die, but according to estimates from Cisco Systems, global data-center IP traffic is expected to increase by a compound annual growth rate of 33% between now and 2015, with cloud workloads increasing to 57% of all data-center workloads by 2015 from just 21% in 2010. These figures are as real as its gets, and they demonstrate that the movement toward data sharing and storage is huge and rapidly transforming both large and small businesses.

With so much money being invested in virtualization, storage, and data transmission in the cloud, today I want to look at five different ways you can put your money to work in this segment for the long term…

Grazed from CloudTimes.org. Author: Xath Cruz.

SAP’s yearly event for their partners and customers, called Sapphire, served as the launching point for SuccessFactors as a SAP company. SAP has created a new division called Cloud Computing, with SuccessFactors CEO and founder Lars Dalgaard helming the division, overseeing its 5000 employee-strong team, all of which are assigned to help SAP’s cloud strategy.

According to Dalgaard’s update on Successfactors, they currently have 3500 customers, with as many as 15.6 million unique end users. This makes SuccessFactors the largest cloud company, with a userbase 15 times the size of its competitors. SuccessFactors is currently used in 60 different industries spread out across 168 different countries.

According to their stats, the 15 million SuccessFactors users have used the suite to accomplish as many as 29 million performance reviews, complete 45 million learning items, commit 61 million goals, and process 23 million job applicants. While that’s already an impressive performance, there are still plenty of developments announced during the event…

Grazed from Windows IT Pro. Author: K.B. Winstead.

Does your company use a cloud service to store sensitive or confidential data? If so, where does the responsibility lie for keeping that data secure? These are a couple of the questions addressed in a new study released by Thales e-Security. The study, titled "Encryption in the Cloud," also focused on data encryption with cloud solutions and where such encryption is applied.

One of the big surprises in the survey data comes from how many companies are using the cloud for sensitive or confidential data: nearly half, 49 percent, of respondents do so currently, and another third said their companies likely would do so within the next two years. With that amount of sensitive corporate data going to the cloud, data security must be a primary concern — or so you might think.

Another section of the survey, which was conducted by the Ponemon Institute, looked at where companies felt the responsibility fell for keeping safe that data they were sending to the cloud. Here, 44 percent of respondents said they felt the primary responsibility for data security was with the cloud provider, while only 30 percent thought primary responsibility was with the data owner (i.e., the company that’s sending sensitive data to the cloud). Another 24 percent thought there should be a shared responsibility…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dana Gardner.

A fascinating global ocean studies initiative helps best define some of the IT superlatives around big data, cloud computing, and middleware integration capabilities.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and its accompanying Cyberinfrastructure Program aims to provide an unprecedented ability to study the Earth’s oceans and climate using myriad distributed data centers and literally oceans’ worth of data.

The scale and impact of the science’s importance is closely followed by the magnitude of the computer science needed to make that data accessible and actionable by scientists. In a sense, the OOI and its infrastructure program, a major undertaking by the National Science Foundation, are constructing a big data-scale programmable and integratable cloud fabric for oceanography…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The Security, Trust & Assurance Registry (STAR) is an initiative by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) to document security controls offered by cloud computing providers. The registry recently received its biggest vote of confidence, as Amazon AWS, one of the first and biggest cloud providers, joined.

The CSA STAR started slowly in August 2011. Six months after its launch only three cloud providers had joined: Microsoft Office 365, Mimecast and Solutionary. Now nearing its one year anniversary, the CSA STAR now includes a a dozen cloud providers, among them major players like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Box.com…