Category: News

March 29, 2014 Off

The Growing Adoption of Private and Public Clouds | Part 1

By David

Grazed from CloudComputing Expo.  Author: Sarah Williams.

While technology changes on a regular basis, IT teams have had a standard approach to administration. In recent years, however, there has been a drastic shift in data center administration. One of the biggest shifts is the adoption of private and public clouds. In part one of this series, we will examine private cloud architectures.

Today, companies keep more and more data electronically in lieu of hard copies. Whether they are large multi-layer Photoshop images or files that need to be kept in order to comply with medical or financial regulations, files are getting bigger and there are certainly more of them. Historically, companies would have a series of onsite servers, a backup and retrieval system, miscellaneous supporting hardware, and lots of documented procedures. This would ultimately lead to a never-ending need for new capital expenditures. Above all, one of the biggest issues IT admins wrestle with is managing and adding server space to accommodate all those ever-growing files. Enter the cloud…

March 29, 2014 Off

Hypervisors: The cloud’s potential security Achilles heel

By David

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author:  Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

When some security companies talk about potential threats they tend to, it hypes the danger. When someone who works with cloud technology, like Linux kernel developer and cloud company Nebula‘s senior security software engineer Matthew Garret talks about potential security problems in cloud computing, I sit up and take notice.

Best known for finding ways to get Linux to work with Windows 8’s secure boot, Garret is also both a low-level security and cloud expert. At the Linux Foundation‘s Linux Collabration Summit, Garrett explained that his greatest worry is hypervisors…

March 29, 2014 Off

Learning the Ropes: Cloud Computing Services IaaS and PaaS

By David

Grazed from BusinessBee.  Author: Alexia Chianis.

Cloud computing is no longer reserved for Fortune 500 companies. Its popularity has skyrocketed in among small business owners who are reaching to the Cloud to boost productivity, support their emerging virtual workplace and gain access to the latest computing technology. As a bonus, Cloud services deliver the scalability the small business IT guru craves, and a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing structure that will please number crunchers.

There are many benefits of moving to the Cloud, but if you’re just getting started with Cloud computing you may find the slew of terms that accompany it make your head dizzy. If you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur who wants to sort out what Cloud computing terms are all about, you’ve come to the right place…

March 29, 2014 Off

Adobe: Reaping the Benefit of Cloud Market

By David

Grazed from GuruFocus.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Adobe operates as a diversified software company worldwide. Its digital medical segment provides tools and solutions that enable customers monetize their digital content anywhere. The company’s digital marketing segment provides solutions for optimizing the operation of digital advertising businesses. The print and publishing segment provides products that address diverse market opportunities. One of the company’s flagship products is Adobe Creative Cloud. This is a service that enables consumers to download and install the latest version of their creative products.

Numbers at a Glance

Adobe is redefining the digital marketing sector. In the first quarter, it achieved $1 billion in revenues, with non-GAAP earnings per share of 30 cents. The company’s Adobe Creative Cloud grew to just under $1billion. Adobe exited the quarter with over 1.8 million subscriptions…

March 29, 2014 Off

SEC shuts down cloud computing scam targeting Asians, Hispanics

By David

Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Jonathan Stempel.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday said it has shut down a worldwide pyramid scheme that falsely promised fast gains to tens of thousands of Asian-American, Hispanic and foreign investors from cloud computing services.  A federal judge on Thursday granted the regulator’s request for an asset freeze over entities operating as WCM and WCM777, which are based near Los Angeles and in Hong Kong and run by Ming Xu of Temple City, California.

WCM and WCM777 allegedly raised more than $65 million since March 2013 by promising people they could double their money in 100 days by investing between $399 and $1,999 in cloud services such as website hosting, data storage and software support…

March 29, 2014 Off

A ‘cloud first’ strategy calls for strong security: Five tips to get there

By David

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Nicole Laskowski.

Security is still a major obstacle for IT when it comes to cloud adoption. That was made crystal clear at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council seminar on securing data, availability and reputation in the cloud, which attracted a mix of security, IT, entrepreneurs and business folks. As one attendee succinctly put it, "Why should we trust AWS [Amazon Web Services] when we have no visibility into their other side?"

The Data MillStill, there are plenty of organizations thinking in terms of a "cloud first" strategy, including the federal government. For readers who are looking for guidance on cloud security, here are five quick tips from the seminar’s expert panelists on how to minimize security risks before partnering with AWS or any number of Anything as a Service providers…

March 28, 2014 Off

Long live the cloud!

By David

Grazed from SmartCEO.  Author: Editorial Staff.

“Big Brother” is by no means a new notion, and in fact, George Orwell wrote about this very topic in his famous book “1984” over six decades ago. A recent example surfaced just recently when Edward Snowden disclosed top secret documents to prominent media outlets outing U.S. government Internet surveillance programs.

Another notable example of a privacy infringement was the Target data breach that occurred during the holiday shopping season of 2013. These poignant examples are just two among several that occurred during this past year, and they are enough to create trepidation around the conversation of cloud computing. The NSA spying scandal and the high-profile hacks have left many to wonder if the embrace of these data stores is happening too fast for safety’s sake…

March 28, 2014 Off

14 questions that drive cloud computing strategies in the right direction

By David

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Harvey Koeppel.

Conduct a Google search on the phrase "What is the cloud?" and one of the first answers to pop up is ‘the cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet.’ While that statement is debatable, the bigger question is what questions CIOs should be asking to develop sound cloud computing strategies.

In the first part of this CIO Matters column, IT and business strategy expert Harvey Koeppel discussed the quagmire of technology that is dubbed the cloud and why the technology itself does not translate into cloud computing strategies. Here, he  runs through 14 cloud strategy questions that will lead CIOs to extract more business value from cloud computing…

March 28, 2014 Off

Cloud Mini-Series Part 3: The Costs of Forced Localisation

By David

Grazed from ProjectDisco.org.  Author: Matthias Langenegger.

his post is part of a series on the opportunities and challenges of cloud computing in the developing world. Previous posts covered the following topics:

    Part 1: The transformative potential of the cloud and the different types of cloud services

    Part 2: The economics of the cloud and the protectionist threat

ICTs are generally among the most restricted of all industries when it comes to forced localisation. They suffer from virtually all types of localisation barriers, from local production requirements to local content requirements. With regards to the cloud, the two most relevant localisation barriers are IT infrastructure requirements and data storage requirements (e.g. forced localisation). The use of those two barriers increased significantly in the past few years…

March 28, 2014 Off

1 in 3 businesses swerve cloud due to government snooping

By David

Grazed from SC Magazine.  Author: Steve Gold.

According to Lieberman Software’s report, the bulk of these `cloud defectors’ are opting to store their data in local data centre resources, rather than the cloud, thanks in part to Edward Snowden’s revelations on the NSA and GCHQ over the last 10 months.

Interestingly, the Privileged Identity Management specialist says that – in its 2012 analysis on the same subject – distrust in cloud computing was even higher. And whilst trust in the cloud has risen by 15 per cent over the last year or so, the government surveillance reports in the news have caused trust levels to take a dive again…