Author: David

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…

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Bert Markgraf.

Many midsize businesses are comfortable putting their email online and using the cloud for storage, but there are barriers to going beyond that. Ready-made cloud computing solutions are expensive, and IT departments are concerned about vendor lock-in. If the purchased system doesn’t meet expectations or if your needs change, do you have to scrap your investment and start over? Open source solutions such as OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus are available, but there have been few high-profile implementations.

network spheresThe eBay Project

Now eBay has announced that it is using OpenStack open source software as the basis for virtual networks that it will use to develop and test applications for its website marketplaces. An article on InfoWorld describes the project. The company is running Nicira Network Virtualization on the OpenStack cloud computing platform to let it start up separate virtual networks for its projects. Its multi-vendor approach led it to implement the already integrated Nicira/OpenStack solution rather than relying on its existing VMware cloud. Cost was also a factor. Jean-Christophe Martin, who is a cloud architect for eBay, says, "Before, we were mostly looking at vendor-provided solutions. I think that right now we are switching to more of an open source strategy."…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

In the era of cloud computing and big data, chief marketing officers can either sink or swim depending on their ability to recognize the importance of the consumer information available to them and ability to capture and put it to use.
marketing

Depending on what research you believe, chief marketing officers are either more powerful than they’ve ever been — or they’re on their way out. Early this year, a Gartner predicted that CMOs will have bigger IT budget power than CIOs by 2017. Naturally, that analysis was quickly bandied about by CMOs…

Grazed from betaNews. Author: Robert X. Cringely.

This is a followup to my recent column about Steve Wozniak’s warning on the perils of cloud computing, especially cloud storage. It might surprise many users to know there are firms that sell cloud storage and do not back it up. They rely on the disk RAID and some redundancy in the cloud to “protect” your data. If something happens to their datacenter, they could probably not recover your data.

Remember MailandNews.com? They did not have a viable business model. They also didn’t back up their servers. One day they had a big crash and relied on the RAID array to recover the data. It took two weeks and still not all of the data was recovered…

Grazed from Time. Author: Tim Bajarin.

Tim Bajarin is the president of Creative Strategies Inc., a technology industry analysis and market intelligence firm in Silicon Valley. He contributes to the “Big Picture” opinion column that appears every Monday on Techland.

We are witnessing the greatest shakeup in the world of computing that has ever taken place.

From a historical perspective, we started out with mainframes, moved on to mini-computers and in the early ’80s entered the era of the personal computer. Over a period of about 50 years, these three kinds of devices defined what computing was all about…