Category: News

Grazed from InfoSecurity. Author: Editorial Staff.

Increased use of cloud computing in Europe could boost the economy by €100 billion and provide a net gain of 2.5 million jobs. But, says Neelie Kroes, "One of the obstacles to making the most of the cloud can be a lack of user trust; particularly about the security of systems (and for both individual users and businesses)."

A study undertaken by Ponemon for Axway demonstrates the depth of corporate concern over the use of public cloud services. The research questioned 621 IT professionals about the use of public cloud services, and found that 89% are unlikely to know if data is lost through the cloud, 80% are concerned about negative consequences from the loss of intellectual property, 69% probably don’t know whether staff are using the public cloud, 66% consider the practice risky, and nearly 50% believe popular cloud-sharing services are unsuitable for business…

Grazed from HuffingtonPost. Author: Phil Simon.

I had the pleasure of attending IBM Pulse yesterday in Las Vegas. Nearly 10,000 customers partners, IBM employees, and media members arrived at the MGM Grand to learn about the most recent advances in cloud computing, Big Data, and a host of other subjects. As with all technology conferences, it was quite a bit to take in. There’s no shortage of smart cookies and interesting exhibits. Here are a few of my personal highlights:

• Sandy Carter, General Manager, IBM Ecosystems and Social Business Evangelism, gave an interesting talk about what to expect in 2014 from the Internet of Things and social media, two subjects usually not far from my mind. The former is a arriving at a particularly fast clip. Sensors embedded in roads and bridges are going to allow for quicker travel and more efficient infrastructure repair. With respect to social media, imagine being able to see if your parents and friends will "like" a dress you’re thinking about buying-before you buy it…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

The fact that mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are becoming cloud devices is nothing new. What is new is that we seem to be nearing the point of feature saturation on those devices. When that happens, the use of the cloud by mobile applications and providers will accelerate.

Smartphones and tablets are getting about as fast as we need them to get, the platforms are more capable, and the apps more sophisticated. My smartphone can download faster than most DSL services can, the user interfaces are easy to deal with now, and the applications equal or exceed those that we can find on a PC. Indeed, were it not for the fact that my smartphone has a 4-inch screen, I would have written this post on it…

Grazed from ActivistPost. Author: Editorial Staff.

The revelations about NSA and its Five Eyes Alliance continue to mount, while a series of high-profile data attacks have compromised the information of hundreds of millions of customers of the planet’s largest companies. Just today, Apple is in the news after an epic security flaw was revealed to have gone undetected for 18 months. It’s one among many.

Despite assurances with each new tech release that the current security is impenetrable, it is instead shown to be populated with surveillance backdoors, and riddled with holes that average hackers can easily exploit. Co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, has gone on record to state that Cloud storage is also compromised. Cloud storage has been sold as a secure way to back up your information online, so as not to fall prey to the inevitable failure of directly connected devices such as a local hard drive. It is also a convenient way to store data where access is available anywhere you travel…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Rohan Pearce.

The rise of big data, cloud computing, mobility and social media — what IDC dubs the ‘third platform’ — represents a big opportunity for Linux and open source more broadly, analyst Sally Parker this morning told the SUSE Open Forum in Sydney. IDC describes the four technologies as representing the ‘third platform’ for IT. The ‘first platform’ was based on mainframes and terminals and the ‘second platform’ is IDC’s term for the era of PCs and classic client/server computing.

Parker, the research director for IDC’s Software and Services Research Groups, told the conference that the latest edition of the analyst firm’s quarterly server shipment tracker confirmed the continuing decline of Unix servers. The 3Q13 edition of the server tracker registered year-on-year revenue drops of 17.8 per cent and 22.5 per cent for mid-range and high-end servers, respectively…

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Before virtualisation and cloud computing became the norm managing software licences was relatively straightforward: you paid for every computer on which you wanted to run the software, or you made sure you did not run it on more machines than permitted by your licence. With the rise of cloud computing and ‘virtual machines’ all that changes. And it does not get any easier.

A white paper on the topic ‘Cloud licensing and software Asset management’ – authored by Peter Björkman, CTO and partner of Snow Software, a developer of software asset management technologies – gives one example. “Organisations using IBM’s enterprise applications are now required to navigate the complexity of its PVU (processor value unit) licensing model. Here, licensing obligations and costs are dependent on the hardware processing power accessed by the application(s) and therefore the total value derived to the organisation from hardware units rather than simply counting the number of users requiring access.”…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

IBM is at it again in the cloud computing space, this time acquiring Boston-based cloud database startup Cloudant. The company, which runs a distributed cloud document store based on the Apache CouchDB technology, was founded in 2008 and has raised about $16 million in venture capital to date.

Cloudant has made a name for itself handling distributed database and even big data processing for a number of large users. Recently, the company announced a new sync feature for Android and iOS apps that aren’t always connected, so consumers can still use apps offline and then sync data when they’re online again…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Dennis Smith.

Cloud computing‘s popularity is on the rise. Service providers like Amazon are providing public cloud hosting at rapidly decreasing prices, while bandwidth capacities are increasing. However, just because it’s virtual doesn’t mean it’s infallible. Cloud computing outages – from a failed component to total service meltdown – are inevitable.

During such events, businesses will lose access to data and resources and suffer downtime, impacting revenues. Recovering from these disasters depends upon the strength of the business’ cloud outage contingency plan. The importance of a contingency/business-continuity plan cannot be emphasized enough…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: David Hill.

What is data protection in the cloud? This isn’t an easy question to answer, since it comes in various forms and the tools and technologies for data protection are extremely numerous and can be used in different combinations. From IT’s perspective, a large number of choices can make cloud more difficult than traditional schemas. Still, we can cut the Gordian knot of cloud complexity with three steps that will help guide further exploration of data protection.

First, we need to understand in general what data protection models the cloud might solve. Second, we need to understand that big decisions related to the cloud and data protection include what is managed internally and what is managed by a third party. Third, we need a rough basis for putting together an inventory that an organization can consider when moving to the cloud. We can then use this foundation as a basis for future discussion of data protection in the cloud…