Category: News

Grazed from CIO. Author: Byron Connolly.

The Federal Government should follow other sectors like banking and adopt a ‘cloud first’ policy for all low risk, generic IT services. This was the first of two cloud-related recommendations made by the National Commission of Audit today. The commission said this policy could help reduce IT costs over the next three to five years as cloud computing becomes the default option.

“The Commonwealth Government has been slow to adopt cloud computing. A reliance on bespoke, legacy systems, concerns about security and privacy of placing public data in the cloud, and general risk aversion all impede progress,” the commission said. The second recommendation was to establish a whole-of-government cloud computing provider panel…

Grazed from MeshIP. Author: Danny Palmer.

The “cloudification of services” means that IT has become the backbone for every other part of the enterprise, and the department needs to evolve in order to keep up with the pace of change. That’s what Frank Slootman, president and CEO of ServiceNow, told the audience during his keynote at the platform-as-as-service IT solution provider’s Knowledge 14 conference, taking place at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco.

“We really think IT needs to start thinking differently about itself. Too many of us think of IT as another department like facilities, HR or a general services type department. We don’t see it that way,” he said, using the metaphor that IT needs to be strong enough to be the organization’s backbone as more move their services into the cloud…

Grazed from Utilizer. Author: Elizabeth White.

SOASTA® Inc., on Tuesday announced that Huawei has selected SOASTA to provide continuous integration and robust functional test automation for its business and consumer offerings. Huawei will utilize SOASTA TouchTest and CloudTest for internal testing of Huawei’s apps, ensuring peak performance and user experiences for its PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) ecosystem.

“We chose to work with SOASTA because of its unrivaled leadership in cloud and mobile testing,” said Guoqiang Rong, President of Device Cloud, Huawei. “SOASTA continues to outperform the competition by ensuring top application performance and quality user experiences, allowing our developer base to bring their apps to market quickly…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

It’s hard to tell when a new technology reaches a critical mass that it’s really worth taking a look at and paying attention to. It still may be a little bit early for Cloud Foundry, but all the signs are pointing toward this open source application development platform being one that could impact the cloud computing industry.

Today Cloud Foundry announced some more big-name backers to its open source platform as a service (PaaS). Accenture, BNY Mellon, Capgemini, GE, Ericsson, Intel, NTT and Verizon jumped on board. They already have ActiveState, and CenturyLink, and the Platinum level members including EMC, HP, IBM, Pivotal, Rackspace, SAP and VMware as supporters. That’s an impressive list of corporate partners…

Grazed from EETimes. Author: Rick Merritt.

IBM is applying technology developed for large server clusters to cloud computing systems. The move is another example of how the company is focusing its efforts on the web datacenters that are the fastest growing slice of today’s server market IBM sees a wide array of applications for its distributed job scheduler, now the basis for a U.S. Patent 8,645,745. It described possible uses including trading, retail, online gaming, and medical research services.

"There are a wide variety of job scheduler techniques to optimize resource usage in a cluster, for example by scheduling jobs in parallel," said Eric Barsness, one of the inventors for the IBM patent. "We flipped that model to have multiple job schedulers running in parallel, each managing a subset of jobs," he wrote in an email exchange…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM inventors have developed a method for managing how resources are used and work is done within a cloud by distributing control throughout the interconnected systems, reducing bottlenecks and increasing efficiency. The IBM cloud computing invention, U.S. Patent #8645745: Distributed Job Scheduling In A Multi-Nodal Environment, was originally designed to help manage resources in high performance computing systems used for government and academic research. These systems consist of hundreds or thousands of computing resources that are connected to perform complex tasks where demands for system resources can rise and fall dynamically — similar to the model for cloud computing.

Tracking and prioritizing the many requests for service across these systems, as well as the resources needed to fulfill them — processors, storage, network bandwidth, input-output operations — has typically been performed at one central point, which can cause congestion and slowdowns as demand increases. This invention distributes this function across the various systems in the cloud, each managing the traffic within its own system, but also able to see and borrow resources from other systems to ensure speed and efficiency…

Grazed from Virtual Bridges. Author: Editorial Staff.

You know your business needs to be in the cloud, but how do you do that if you’re not sure what exactly the cloud is? Don’t feel alone! As it turns out, 95% of Americans who say they don’t use the cloud actually do, which speaks to the wide-reaching effects of advancements in cloud computing.

The “cloud” is a broad term whose features have found their way to many of the most popular apps and tools used by personal users and businesses alike. Whether it’s storing and backing up files or communicating and cooperating with users around the globe, the cloud has changed the way we use computers and mobile devices to interact with each other…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

RiverMeadow Software(TM) Inc., developer of the world’s only automated cloud onboarding and workload mobility platform developed specifically for carrier and service provider clouds, today announced a partnership with Cloud Carib, an offshore cloud service provider based in Nassau, Bahamas, to accelerate offshore cloud migrations. Under terms of the agreement, Cloud Carib will resell the RiverMeadow Cloud Migration Software as a Service (SaaS) to its customers, and the companies will work together to offer programs that will help accelerate customer cloud adoption initiatives.

"Through this strategic global partnership with RiverMeadow, we’re able to offer our customers a low risk migration path to cloud, whether it is private, public or hybrid," said Stelios Xeroudakis, Director at Cloud Carib. "Integrating RiverMeadow into Cloud Carib’s cloud platform allows us to remove the traditional business and technical friction points associated with migrating workloads to the cloud so our customers can confidently move forward with their corporate cloud initiatives."…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company delivering a new generation of application performance management (APM), today announced the findings of a global survey of 740 senior IT professionals’ concerns about cloud computing adoption. Download the complete survey report here.

The study, which was conducted by independent research and consulting firm Research In Action , found that the majority of IT professionals (79%) believe that typical service level agreements (SLAs) built around availability are too simplistic and fail to address the risks of moving and managing applications into the cloud. Additionally, 63% of respondents indicated there is a need for more meaningful and granular SLA metrics that are geared towards ensuring the continuous delivery of a high quality end-user experience. When asked which metrics they would most like to see as part of their SLAs with cloud service providers, the top three responses were:…

Grazed TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Late last week, we reported on supposed security flaws found on Amazon Web Services (AWS), HP Public Cloud and GoGrid. The report regarding outdated Microsoft Windows Server deployments surfaced because of a blog posted by security firm Bkav. Now Amazon has come out to dispute the blog’s findings, with its public relations team calling elements of the blog "misleading."

A note to Talkin’ Cloud mentioned Amazon’s (AMZN) shared security responsibility model with customers. According to Amazon, once a customer launches an EC2 instance using Amazon Machine Instance (AMI), the customer is responsible for managing the updates, including updates issued after the build or revision that was specific to that AMI. The AMI in question that put Bkav on the alert was a Windows Server 2003 AMI from 2010, the email noted…