Author: David

July 30, 2012 Off

Cloud contracts – check your SLAs

By David

Grazed from CSO. Author: Puneet Kukreja.

As the world of cloud computing grows and becomes part of organisational growth strategies, procurement of cloud computing services has also reached front of mind.

Information security is a key pain-point for organisations looking to take up and rapidly consume cloud services, and with good reason. Leading cloud services providers—namely Rackspace, Google Apps and Microsoft Azure have had their fair share of outages in the past 18 months with Amazon EC2 being the latest, an outage that lasted over 45 hours.

Now traditionally, contracts have been the realm of procurement, accounting, legal or sourcing functions. Technologists and, more specifically, information security professionals kept a safe distance from them primarily because they are boring and mind numbing. But with cloud services consumption on the rise and organisations’ data assets and computing capability being rapidly cloud sourced, concern for service levels—data security, data leakage, data access, scalability, and security compliance to policies and standards—have been magnified…

July 30, 2012 Off

Reversing CoIT: A Private Cloud for the Small Business & Home User

By David

Contributed Article. Author: Amir Husain, President & CEO, VDIworks

Reversing CoIT: A Private Cloud for the Small Business & Home User

Look through the pages of a tech magazine, and you can’t miss the new buzz-word; The Consumerization of IT (CoIT). It refers to the fact that users are now exposed to new, cool technology at an individual level before their employer has had an opportunity to adopt the same. In a nutshell, the information worker’s raised expectations of corporate IT result from his own experiences as a consumer. And IT departments have to keep up! This phenomenon was particularly pronounced with the adoption of mobile devices like the iPhone, which were initially not thought of as "enterprise capable". It turned out that whatever IT departments thought about the product, consumers loved it. They brought it to work with them. They liked the experience so much that they started clamouring for the ability to check their work email on it. And before you could say "Blackberry Enterprise Server", IT departments figured out ways in which to integrate iPhones, iPads and Android devices into the overall corporate infrastructure. How, is a story for another day, but in this article, I want to look at the flip side of the CoIT phenomenon.

July 30, 2012 Off

U.S. military begins moving its information technology infrastructure to secure cloud computing

By David

Grazed from Military and Aerospace Technologies. Author: John Keller.

U.S. military leaders have begun moving U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) military information technology (IT) resources to secure cloud computing. DOD this month announced a plan to move the department’s network applications from what officials call "application silos" to a cloud-computing approach.

“This strategy will align with all department-wide military IT initiatives, federal data center consolidation and military cloud computing efforts," says Teri Takai, the DOD’s chief information officer.

The DOD’s new cloud-computing strategy establishes the Joint Information Environment (JIE) enterprise with seamless access to information regardless of computing device or location, DOD officials say. The DOD Enterprise Cloud Environment is a key component of the JIE…

July 28, 2012 Off

The data center you dream of is in the cloud

By David

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Last week, Amazon Web Services’ High I/O Quadruple Extra Large instance in Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) made its debut. It provides 2TB of local SSD-backed storage with 60.5GB of RAM running on eight virtual cores. Most enterprises can’t afford such high-performance data center equipment, and the cloud providers are hoping that the capacity, formerly only dreamed of, might draw faster cloud adoption.

Many organizations look to public cloud providers to provide access to commodity hardware and software, but it’s clear the state-of-the-art computing and storage services offered well exceed what’s considered "commodity." Of course, there are higher rates for accessing the fast stuff…

July 28, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Why data should be our guiding light on public policy

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

With the advent of open data and new, powerful methods for analyzing it, we’re learning a lot that could challenge longstanding beliefs on public policy. Politicians, social workers and other civil servants have always had data, of course; they just never had as much and could never do with it what they can today. They should listen to what the computers tell them.

What’s possible

Recent HIV research from Brown University is a great example of what’s possible. Researchers formulated a computer model based on numerous factors relating to drug use, sexual activity and the medical aspects of HIV infection. To ensure it was accurate, they calibrated the model until it could accurately reproduce known HIV infection rates in New York City from 1992 until 2002. They ran the model thousands of times on a supercomputer…

July 28, 2012 Off

How Cloud Computing Is Changing the Way We Use Internet Technology

By David

Grazed from Noozhawk. Author: Editorial Staff.

A website loads at a crawling pace or it has completely crashed. Everyone’s been there — some are even ready to throw their monitor out the window.

But worse than frustrating, a company is losing revenue each second that the site’s down. Servers can handle only a finite amount of simultaneous users. Michael Crandell of RightScale calls them “success disasters.”

“Exactly at the moment you are succeeding and throngs of people are using your service, it becomes slow and inoperable. That’s the irony, and that’s the terrible side of it,” he said. “So what needs to happen is you need to have the software architecture and hardware to expand resources really quickly so you can keep serving customers.”…

July 28, 2012 Off

Cloud, mobile, HANA help SAP boost Q2 revenue

By David

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

SAP’s revenue for the second quarter grew 18 percent over the same quarter last year to AA!3.9 billion (US$4.9 billion) following record software revenue of over AA!1 billion, it reported on Tuesday.

The business software company in Walldorf, Germany, said all regions posted double-digit software revenue gains, while demand for SAP’s new offerings continued to grow.

SAP said it benefited in the cloud market from its February acquisition of cloud software company SuccessFactors, leading to a 112 percent increase year-on-year in 12 month new and upsell subscription billings for SuccessFactors on a stand-alone basis. Cloud revenue was AA!69 million in the quarter…

July 28, 2012 Off

How a Private Cloud Help Applied Materials Save Suffering Engineers

By David

Grazed from CIO. Author: Stephanie Overby.

When you’re a global, engineering-driven firm in a competitive industry, the last thing you want is a group of 2,200 ticked-off designers. But that’s what Applied Materials’ CIO faced a few years ago.

The $10.5 billion maker of semiconductors and solar power cell equipment had moved to a fully integrated product lifecycle environment to streamline its engineering operations.

But users said the new 3-D computer-aided design (CAD) systems made their jobs harder. They emailed the CEO about data integrity issues, complained about long load times, and some left the company altogether, calling out poor software performance in their exit interviews. According to one design leader, engineers were losing 30 percent of their productivity…

July 28, 2012 Off

Logicworks: The Cloud Your Way (Public, Private, Hybrid, And…)

By David

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Logicworks, a top 100 cloud services provider, is branding around a new tagline dubbed “the cloud your way.” The concept: Whether customers need a private, public or hybrid cloud, Logicworks stands ready to help — even if you want to extend your applications into third-party clouds like Google Compute Engine.

That’s the message from CEO Kenneth Ziegler. “We grew up as a hosting company but our focus has always been on service and being a trusted advisor,” said Ziegler. Hence, the company offers guidance as customers seek to navigate multiple clouds.

Yes, traditional hosting services are a big piece of Logicworks’ business. But the organization is also working closely with media companies, software companies and other types of organizations that demand highly available cloud technologies. Whether you have a private cloud running Citrix XenServer or VMware, you can burst over onto Logicworks’ public cloud. “We’re hypervisor agnostic. We’ll even manage your infrastructure.” (Call it managed services meet cloud services.)…

July 28, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Xamarin Gets $12 Million A Round

By David

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

Remember Mono, Novell’s open source .NET-for-Linux project?

Well, after they were fired last year in the Novell acquisition, Miguel De Icaza and Nat Friedman, the guys responsible for Mono started Xamarin and got perpetual rights to Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android.

Now they’ve got a $12 million A round from Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners and Floodgate on the strength of their 7,500 paying customers and reported 150,000 developers.

Xamarin’s focused on mobile apps with Visual Studio and C# and will use the money to scale adoption.