Author: David

Grazed from FierceBioIT. Author: Ryan McBride.

As promised, Illumina ($ILMN) has hit the market with a cloud computing system for genomics data, building off its leadership in DNA sequencing to grab a piece of the growing bioinformatics side of the genomics game. And the San Diego-based company wants to make the decision to use to its BaseSpace computing product an easy one: Customers get 1 terabyte of free storage and variant analysis and sequence alignment for all data from the company’s sequencers at no cost.

Computer science has grown in importance to understanding decoded genomes. Illumina has helped drive down the cost of decoding the 3 billion bases of human DNA, rapidly closing in on $1,000 per genome, putting the technology within reach for hospitals and labs that might not have bothered 5 years or so ago when that price tag was in the millions. But labs can spend many times more than the cost of sequencing a genome to interpret the huge amounts of information from decoding DNA, with powerful computers and software analytics consuming much of that additional cost. BaseSpace also puts the data in the cloud, enabling people in different locations to share the information more easily than shipping it from one place to another…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: David Canellos.

In a lot of ways, changes in enterprise technology have mirrored consumer technology trends over the last few years. Just look at mobility, social apps, and cloud computing as examples. And whether you view the crossover as advantageous, overly risky, or merely inevitable, it’s certain that enterprise IT security must adapt quickly to the new challenges presented, including overcoming cloud data security, cloud data residency, and cloud compliance issues.

A series of recent articles and industry analyst reports I have read shows the clear trend that business-critical apps like CRM, storage, and collaboration – enterprise IT’s mainstays – are now moving towards cloud and mobile, despite inherent risks. In the case of mobile, workers are simply more productive and comfortable using their smartphones, laptops, and tablets to access company information of all types from a variety of locations. Similarly with the cloud, the benefits are simply too compelling for the business organizations inside of the enterprise. And rather than burying their heads in the sand, enterprise IT managers need to adapt security practices accordingly, or ban the use of personal devices and cloud altogether – an unlikely choice given recent trends…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

A Nexus of converging forces — social, mobile, cloud and information — is building upon and transforming user behavior while creating new business opportunities, according to Gartner, Inc.

Although these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own, together they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders. As such, the Nexus of Forces is the basis of the technology platform of the future.

"In the Nexus of Forces, information is the context for delivering enhanced social and mobile experiences," said Chris Howard, managing vice president at Gartner. "Mobile devices are a platform for effective social networking and new ways of work. Social links people to their work and each other in new and unexpected ways. Cloud enables delivery of information and functionality to users and systems. These forces of the Nexus are intertwined to create a user-driven ecosystem of modern computing."…

Grazed from Financial Times. Author: Raymond Barrett.

US dominance of the global cloud computing sector is being threatened by an increase in protectionist regulations overseas coupled with state aid programs that are funding potential competitors, a congressman, a sector analyst, and the president of a sector trade organization told PaRR.

The cloud computing industry, which involves providing IT services over the Internet, is expected to rise in value from USD 41bn in 2011 to nearly USD 250bn by 2020.

However, mandates requiring that data generated within a country be stored on servers in that country are anticompetitive and should be combated by the US government, according to Daniel Castro, senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Netflix has a gift for anybody who needs to ensure their cloud-hosted applications keep running even if some of the virtual servers on which they’re running die. It’s called a Chaos Monkey — but don’t worry, this monkey is very tameable and is now open source.

The video rental and streaming giant is one of the world’s biggest consumer of cloud computing resources — it hosts the majority of its infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services cloud — and Netflix developed Chaos Monkey as a method for ensuring that its system is capable of healing itself or continuing to run should instances fail. “Over the last year,” Netflix cloud engineers Cory Bennett and Ariel Tseitlin wrote in a blog post announcing the open source version, “Chaos Monkey has terminated over 65,000 instances running in our production and testing environments. Most of the time nobody notices, but we continue to find surprises caused by Chaos Monkey which allows us to isolate and resolve them so they don’t happen again.”…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Thomas J. Trappler.

When contracting for cloud-computing services, one challenge is that there may be more parties involved than your company and the cloud vendor. The vendor might outsource some of the services covered in the contract, or it could end up under different ownership after a merger or acquisition. On the client end, you might choose to work with a cloud broker. Because the introduction of third parties can increase risk, it’s essential for potential cloud clients to identify third parties before adopting a cloud service, thoroughly understand their roles and ensure that their responsibilities are effectively addressed in the contract.
Outsourcing

You need to know whether your cloud-computing vendor is itself outsourcing to another cloud-computing vendor. For example, a SaaS vendor, such as Dropbox, could be running its service in the data center of a third-party IaaS vendor, such as Amazon Web Services. This can increase the complexity of a cloud-computing contract, especially in determining which vendor is responsible for which action. To mitigate risk, the contract should obligate the cloud vendor to do the following:…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

A week ago VMware said it was buying Nicira for $1.26 billion for its cloudy software-defined network virtualization. Monday morning Oracle said it’s buying Xsigo Systems for its cloudy software-defined network virtualization.

Oracle’s not saying what it’s paying and it’s unclear how much funding the eight-year-old company took in from VCs like Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Greylock Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

Like the Nicira acquisition, Xsigo in Oracle’s hands threatens Cisco and Juniper…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

The public cloud is nearly uniformly an Intel x86 instruction set environment. But when Xerox quietly launched public cloud services aimed toward small and midsize business (SMB) users in early January, it needed to host IBM iSeries (the former AS/400) and IBM Power Systems AIX servers, as well as those from Intel and AMD.

Previously, Xerox’s services unit had carried some of its existing IT services customers forward into its infrastructure-as-a-service that it had been building out over 24 months. By the time of the Jan. 3 announcement, it had five data centers in the United States, one in Telford, United Kingdom; and one in Kuala Lumpur, Malayasia. Its U.S. locations are: Dallas, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Tarrytown, Pa., outside Philadelphia. The latter two are organized as a high availability cluster, with one site backing the other up.

"There’s a lot of midsized businesses on midrange equipment that’s getting fairly old, and they’re looking for alternatives" to buying another round of proprietary servers, said Rob Schilperoort, Xerox’s VP of cloud product management, in an interview…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Eosensa, a leading information security professional services firm, today announced the availability of a new report that provides critical insights to enterprises that are seeking ways to ensure the security and data-privacy protection for their sensitive data being stored and processed in public cloud environments. The report, entitled "Protecting Sensitive Data In The Cloud," is available as a free download from www.eosensa.com . Data Privacy, Compliance, and IT Security professionals will find valuable information in the report that will assist them in designing and implementing the appropriate data protection strategies for their organizations.

As Security, Privacy and Risk professionals work with their business line partners to enable their companies to take advantage of cloud-based SaaS applications, they face a number of significant challenges. Issues such as Data Residency, which specifies that sensitive data needs to remain within specified geographic location, or compliance mandates such as those seen in ITAR, HIPAA and PCI DSS, which require certain data types to be protected in specific ways, make the move to the cloud a complicated proposition in many instances…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

Just 16 months ago, Leo Apotheker, the short-lived CEO of HP [1], proclaimed that HP would be a leader in cloud computing. With little to show in the way of HP cloud products or services, no one was quite sure what Apotheker was talking about.

Flash-forward to today, and HP has not only a real cloud strategy, but also a public cloud IaaS (infrastructure as a service) play, HP Cloud [2], which might eventually rival Amazon Web Services [3]. It also has Zorawar "Biri" Singh, senior vice president and GM of HP Cloud Services, to keep HP Cloud and various other cloud services and solutions on track.

This is not Singh’s first cloud gig — prior to arriving at HP, he served as vice president of Cloud Computing for IBM. In his new position, Singh sees the opportunity to couple HP’s pure-play IaaS cloud with private HP clouds that will "integrate very naturally" with each other. In that hybrid approach, Singh relies on OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system [9], to provide the underpinning for HP’s public and private cloud offerings…