When Consumers Go To The Cloud, Businesses Should Watch Out
For four hours last week, a flawed authentication update allowed anyone the ability to access the data of any user of the cloud storage service Dropbox.
The error could have caused a massive privacy breach. As it turned out, the company was notified and fixed the error before widespread knowledge allowed the vulnerability to be exploited by malicious actors.
Protecting Your Company From Breaches At Your Third-Party Vendor
Cloud Computing: Just When You Thought It Was Safe
Amazon crashes and clouds burn. On April 21, Amazon.com had problems with one or more of its shared-services data centers — in other words, its cloud was grounded. And this wasn’t the first time.
How Telcos Can Contend With Cloud-Based Computing
“We’re going to move the center of our digital life to the cloud,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said recently when launching iCloud and joining the mushroom of cloud services driving the next big step in the growth of the digital economy.
IBM announces memory breakthrough
IBM has announced a breakthrough in computer memory technology, which may lead to the development of solid-state chips that can store as much data as NAND flash technology but with 100 times the performance and vastly greater lifespan.
Currently, NAND flash memory products, such as SSDs, have write rates as high as 2Gbit/sec .
Should Cloud Providers Also Be Internet Providers?
When I got my first smartphone, the original black and white Danger Sidekick, the data plan cost me something like $40 a month for unlimited data plus something like 200 anytime minutes. These days an unlimited data plan will cost you more like $30 a month, not including voice minutes. But the original Sidekick couldn’t play music or movies. You couldn’t download additional apps (the app catalog came along in later models). All you could do was browse the Web with its scaled down browser, use AOL Instant Messenger and e-mail. I suppose it was easy to offer an "unlimited" data plan, when it was hard to actually download much…
All cloud roads lead to applications
Last week’s Structure conference in San Francisco was fascinating to me on several levels. The conference centered much more on the business and market dynamics of cloud than pure technology and services, so there was significantly more coherence to the talks as a whole than in previous years.
Microsoft Says It Will Give Your Data to the U.S. Government, Even If It’s Not in the U.S.
Microsoft has admitted that it will hand over data to the U.S. government, if properly requested, even if that data is stored somewhere other than the U.S.
The issue, according to ZDNet’s Zack Whittaker, is that because Microsoft is a U.S. company it has to comply with the Patriot Act, and that means handing over data that may be offshore. The same rules would apply to Amazon Web Services and any other U.S. based cloud provider that has servers overseas…
Cloud Presses IT Pros to Show Value in New Ways
You gotta love the headline on the Federal Computer Week piece, "How cloud computing messes with your team." It covers an IDC report that looks at how the move to cloud offerings will affect the government IT work force. Lots of IT folks, not just in government, are worried about what the cloud will mean for their jobs.
The Service Catalog: Demystifying the Cloud
Here’s a straightforward way to accelerate the adoption of cloud services: Create standardized service offerings and make them transparent to users.
That’s the idea behind the new Service Catalog Usage Model from the Open Data Center Alliance. This document—one of eight Alliance usage models released recently—spells out the requirements for a standard, comprehensive catalog mechanism that will allow users to select and assess service offerings.