Cloud News, Resources and Information
A recent Microsoft study predicts that nearly 14 million new jobs will be created worldwide by 2015 as a result of growing cloud computing adoption. Whether you believe that number or not, (and InformationWeek‘s Rob Preston says it’s clearly inflated,) there’s no doubt that cloud is reshaping the IT department as we know it.
While cloud computing promises to stimulate the job market, it could be a buzz kill for your marketability as an IT professional. "There’s no question cloud computing is generating a whole new breed of job seeker," says Jeff Kaplan, founder and managing director of THINKstrategies, an IT strategic consulting firm. "What this new world is about is fundamentally different than the old IT world."…
Within two months, Hewlett-Packard will offer a large and powerful cloud computing service similar to Amazon Web Services, but with more business-oriented features, according the head of the project.
“We’re not just building a cloud for infrastructure,” said Zorawar “Biri” Singh, senior vice president and general manager of H.P.’s cloud services. “Amazon has the lead there. We have to build a platform layer, with a lot of third-party services.” Among the first software applications available as part of the Hewlett-Packard cloud, he said, will be both structured and unstructured databases, and data analytics as a service…
The division of Sony that suffered a cyberattack last year, which led to a major PlayStation network outage and sensitive customer data being compromised, has dropped Amazon Web Services for at least a portion of its cloud hosting and computing in favor of an OpenStack platform hosted by Rackspace.
Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) — which manages popular games such as "Grand Theft Auto IV" and "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare" — made the move away from AWS after a series of highly publicized performance issues, according to an email from a public relations firm representing Rackspace…
Telefónica, in collaboration with Cisco and VCE, has launched a regional advanced cloud hosting service in Latin America for the corporate market segment. According to Cisco Systems, the service is called Virtual Hosting 2.0, the first tailored cloud computing service offered regionally supported by the VCETm Vblock platform, the strongest in the market in terms of integrated virtualization, server, storage, networking and security technologies with end-to-end support.
The service will be offered from five interconnected data centers in Latin America, with integrated management and provision. These data centers are in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru, and from there they can also provide service to the rest of Latin American countries where Telefónica operates…
Cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services is heralding the era of utility supercomputing, whereby massive computational resources and storage requirements can be accessed on demand.
Speaking at the launch of Intel’s Xeon E5 processor family in London this week, AWS technology evangelist in residence, Dr. Matt Wood, said that cloud computing was a utility service like electricity and gas, in that it allows consumers and businesses to pay for consumption of a service on demand…
There’s a fundamental blind spot many organizations experience when adopting clouds. This blind spot is the failure to properly govern the people, processes and management systems that deploy applications and data to the cloud. The impact goes well beyond basic risk management, and actually extends into successful cloud adoption and realizing the full cost and agility benefits from cloud initiatives.
Cloud Risks at your Doorstep
For many business units, the desire to rush into the cloud seems irresistible, and publicly available, credit card-accessible cloud services add fuel to this fire. However, reckless on-ramping to cloud computing doesn’t sit well with corporate IT. IT managers know there are very real and dangerous consequences when data gets exposed, services go down, regulations get violated, backup plans are overlooked and a myriad of other IT safeguards get ignored. Insufficient control over who can provision a workload to the cloud, where it can be deployed, for how long and at what cost or capacity is a recipe for disaster…
IBM designed the Secure Enterprise Desktop technology for businesses that want to secure employee-owned devices while making sure that all the company’s data is backed up to a corporate or IBM-operated datacentre. Bring your own device (BYOD) is an thorny topic for IT managers under pressure to allow corporate use of devices owned by employees.
IBM’s Secure Enterprise Desktop technology was shown to ZDNet UK at CeBIT in Hanover on Wednesday. It uses a USB stick with its own HTTPS stack, bootloader and proprietary code to create a secure connection between a partitioned drive on the client computer and a remotely located server. IBM was hoping to find businesses at the show to test the prototype and ultimately buy the service…
Industry analyst firm Gartner Inc. has positioned Savvis, a CenturyLink company (NYSE: CTL) and global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, in the Leaders quadrant in both the Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting and the Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service.
The cloud-focused reports can be accessed at http://www.savvis.com/en-US/Advantages/Pages/gartner-magic-quadrant-leader.aspx.
"Many of the world’s largest and most well-known companies rely on Savvis’ enterprise-class cloud solutions, and we believe these Magic Quadrant recognitions speak loudly to the reasons our clients see us as a global cloud leader," said Bill Fathers, president of Savvis. "Our focus on cloud will continue as demonstrated by our recently accelerated investment in our cloud offerings. We deliver cloud-based solutions that improve business agility and reduce costs."…
Cloud computing is changing the way that midsize enterprises do business, says John Engates. In a recent interview on BBC News, Mr. Engates described some of the ways in which small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) have used this technology to their advantage. Some of the key benefits of the technology include enabling midsize businesses to compete effectively with even bigger businesses, thanks to the ability to harness increased computer power. This, he says, has both industrial and economic benefits…
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) recently released a report last February 22 that stated cloud computing may be restrained in the European region. This is as the European Union (EU) data protection laws threaten to curtail the cloud once it is approved.
European commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding authored the proposed data protection law and was criticized for it. The law entitled BSA Global Computing Cloud Scorecard suggested that companies with more than 250 staffs should have a data protection officer within the company. This suggestion was received negatively as it appeared too rigid…