Author: David

Grazed from Computer Weekly.  Author: Cliff Saran.

In the past week I’ve met IBM and Google and asked them about cloud security.  Sure, data is mirrored, replicated and always available…

No my question concerns data jurisdiction and the ability for governments to subpoena hosting and cloud providers to provide law and anti-terrorism agencies with customers’ data.

Google UK cites the Safe Harbour agreement that exists between the UK and US, that allows UK data to be stored in the US. But who’s stopping the US Department of Homeland Security from taking that data under the Patriot Act.
 

Grazed from Computer Weekly.  Author: Jim Norton.

In many organisations public, private or third sector, it is no longer "business as usual".

The almost unprecedented scale of public sector budget cuts, necessary to bring government finances back towards balance, feed through to all areas of the economy.

Whether it is the need to cope with slashed revenues or to cut costs in the face of intense competition, radical change will be required. It is often no longer sufficient to shave a few percentage points off budgets across the board, new approaches will be required along the lines of: "work smarter, not harder".

What can BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, bring to this challenge?

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Ryan Lawler.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Joab Jackson.

Microsoft is updating the next version of its System Center IT infrastructure and server management suite so it can manage virtual machines in the cloud. It is also adding controls that will allow departmental IT chiefs to manage their own system resources, the company announced Tuesday.

Both additions to System Center 2012 suite, slated for release later this year, are necessary to help central IT departments keep pace with the requests of individual departments within their organisations.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Nancy Gohring.

Unisys is packaging together existing and a few new consulting and management services in order to help enterprises better manage various cloud implementations.

Enterprises today may run applications in a wide variety of environments, including internal data centres, private clouds, hosted data centres and public clouds. Each environment has its own business and operating models, with different deployment and management tools, said John Treadway, director of cloud services and solutions at Unisys.

Grazed from Experian QAS.  Author: Neil Hill.

Businesses need to pay attention to their customer data management strategies when they come to build the foundations of their operations.

This is the view of Dave Palm, vice president of organisation engagement at dunnhumby, who said that companies should be looking to build a "customer-centric strategy".

He told the Customer Retail Experience website that part of their plans should be dedicated to ensuring clear accountability exists within the organisation on the topics of customer data management, strategy and evaluation.

Grazed from Government Computer News.  Author: Kevin McCaney.

About six or seven years ago, a couple of us in the GCN offices Photoshopped a picture of a co-worker who was sitting in front of a laptop PC with his hands outstretched and a starry look in his eyes. We gave him some kind of mystical headgear, a robe and had lightning bolts shooting from his fingertips to the laptop. In the faux caption for the faux picture, he marveled at the “5 terabits/sec” speed of his new “system,” which also gave him complete mind control over his co-workers, who were flanking him with spirals for eyes.

Grazed from MIT Technology Review.  Author: Kate Greene.

The Internet is made of photons that zip through fiber-optic cables and flow through devices like switches, modulators, and amplifiers. But those standard devices would be inadequate for superfast quantum computing or communications—experimental approaches that exploit the peculiar properties of particles at the quantum scale to carry out complex calculations incredibly quickly or to prevent anyone from eavesdropping on messages. 

Grazed from Computer Weekly.  Author:  Adrian Bridgwater.

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Michael Vizard.

On the face of it, building a cloud computing architecture on which multiple applications can dynamically scale using a common pool of IT infrastructure should be a pretty straight-forward proposition. But in reality, IT organizations are struggling with cloud computing decisions ranging from simply deciding what applications should run in these environments, how to secure the data in these clouds and even finding the right tools to manage the overall environment.