Author: David

Can Meg Whitman save Hewlett Packard?

The former eBay executive who was hired as H-P chief last September announced the company would lay off about eight percent of its 300,000 workforce over the next two years, one of many changes that are coming to the troubled personal computer maker. Wall Street responded positively to the news, pushing H-P stock (HPQ) up more than five percent early Thursday morning.

The layoffs, which are expected to save H-P $3 billion to $3.5 billion annually, are just one phase of a restructuring designed to deemphasize the relatively low-margin PC and printer business and instead focus on the more promising cloud computing services…

On a sunny day here in Dresden, Germany, experts at the IEEE Technology Time Machine symposium forecasted a heavy shower of cloud computing services and products in the months and years ahead.

Cloud computing is dramatically changing the way IT resources are delivered to customers, the symposium panelists agree.

Peter Magnusson, an engineering director at Google, made perhaps one of the boldest predictions about it at the symposium:

“By 2020, most computing and storage will be in the cloud, and we’ll stop calling it the cloud.”

Magnusson, referred to cloud computing as the “fourth wave” of computing following mainframes, client-servers and the Internet, and is definitely a cloud booster. “The more people use the cloud, the more they like it,” he says. In a soft but clever sales pitch, he updated his presentation with pictures, diagrams, and other data of his 5:30 a.m. run through Dresden this morning, compiled, of course, with Google cloud tools…

Healthcare data security has been around for a long time, but as cloud computing gains more and more traction, healthcare providers as well as healthcare software vendors, would like to use the cloud advantages and migrate healthcare data, or run healthcare software from a cloud infrastructure. In this blog I’ll focus on specific cloud computing healthcare security concerns and how cloud encryption can help meeting regulatory requirements.

The first step to securing healthcare data is to identify the type of healthcare information and the appropriate cloud storage for it. Visual healthcare data is mainly comprised of large media files such as x-ray, radiology, CT scans, and other types of video and imaging. Such files are often stored in distributed storage, such as Amazon Web Services S3 (Simple Storage Service), or Microsoft Azure blobs. Personally Identifiable Information (PII), such as patient records, is often stored in a relational database as structured data…

Spiceworks has launched version 6.0 of its free IT management and helpdesk platform for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs).

Chief among the updates the firm has added is a cloud discovery feature that enables administrators to see which cloud computing services are being operated by users on their network, and take appropriate action if necessary.

Unveiled today at the firm’s SpiceWorld conference in London, Spiceworks 6.0 also adds a number of new features, including the ability to customise the Spiceworks knowledge base, an optional agent to deploy on roaming devices, and a mobile admin user interface for iOS and Android devices…

As the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen reported Wednesday, H-P said it will reallocate the $3 billion to $3.5 billion it says it will save each year from the 27,000 job cuts planned between now and 2014 to Big Data analytics, cloud computing and security infrastructure.

CIOs already purchase such technologies from Oracle, IBM, Amazon Web Services, SAP and, of course, H-P. But earmarking billions of dollars more sends a strong signal that it intends to be the CIOs’ top choice. I’m not predicting H-P will best its rivals here. The company must execute, an area where it’s been weak of late after reporting a 31% profit drop and a 3% revenue decline for its fiscal second quarter. But targeting Big Data, cloud computing and security certainly aims for CIOs’ sweet spots…

There’s no question that the adoption of cloud computing will continue to grow as companies look to increase efficiency and reduce costs. A recent study conducted by Dell and Intel found that an overwhelming majority (78% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and 60% in North America) of IT and business staff plan to "significantly or moderately increase use of cloud" in the next 12 months.

Furthermore, when asked what the most significant driver for adoption of cloud computing were, 64.1% in North America and 63.5% in EMEA said to "reduce spending on infrastructure (ie CapEx)". Improving the IT organisational agility was a very distant second…

Protecting Data at Rest
One of the important concerns on utilizing the public cloud and the SaaS-based service model is about ‘How to protect the data at rest,’ which means organizations are worried about how the data is protected in a public cloud scenario, and when the data centers are physically away from the enterprise.

There are multiple methods organizations can adopt to protect data at rest. Each of the following methods are complimentary in securing the data…

Hewlett-Packard, a stalwart of the previous era, finds it hard to keep up.

It is not alone in that struggle. H.P., along with well-established tech companies like Dell and Cisco Systems, is contending with a faster-than-expected move by consumers and businesses from personal computers and small racks of computer servers toward mobile phones and tablets that are connected to millions of servers, all lashed together in remote supercomputing “clouds.”

The new systems are cheaper and more flexible, which businesses found appealing in a slow-growing economy. As for consumers, they have been dazzled by the new devices and abilities of those devices enabled by the cloud…