Category: News

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Lawrence Garvin.

Here a cloud, there a cloud. Everything today is a cloud service. Except most aren’t. In September 2011, after several years of discussion and 15 drafts, the National Institute of Standards and Technology adopted a real definition of cloud computing. Since then, however, NIST’s definition has been lost in translation due in part to opportunistic vendors and marketers, aided at times by ignorant media.

NIST defined five essential characteristics of cloud services: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. Virtually no "cloud" service offered today meets all five characteristics. NIST further defined three cloud models: software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service. But all three existed in practice long before the term "cloud" ever entered the vernacular…

Grazed from BusinessNewsDaily. Author: Chad Brooks.

Despite the persistent threat of security breaches, most businesses aren’t too concerned about unknown security risks, research shows. A new study by Dell revealed that although security breaches cost U.S. organizations an estimated $25.8 billion annually, many companies fail to effectively recognize and prioritize the next big wave of risk to IT security from unknown threats.

The research shows the majority of IT leaders around the world say they don’t view unknown security threats stemming from trends and technologies like BYOD (bring your own device), mobility, cloud computing and Internet usage as top security concerns. Therefore, these companies aren’t coming up with ways to find and address these potential threats…

Grazed from BusinessCloudNews.  Author: Jonathon Brandon.

Cloud-based ERP provider NetSuite announced Monday that the company has joined the Cloud Industry Forum, an industry body geared towards keeping enterprises and service providers abreast of the latest trends and best practice in the cloud space.

“We’re pleased to announce that NetSuite has become a member of the Cloud Industry Forum. As one of the premier voices of the cloud computing industry in the UK, CIF works hard to improve end-user understanding of the cloud and raise standards in the industry,” said Pete Daffern, President of EMEA and executive vice president of verticals at NetSuite…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Cliff Saran.

David Goodman, CIO of non-government organisation (NGO) International Rescue Corporation (IRC), needs a cloud that is open and flexible and available offline. Goodman is the organisation’s first CIO and he has headed IT for seven years. His objective has been to professionalise IT and provide value at a strategic and tactical level.

As IRC has grown from a multi-million dollar organisation to one with an annual budget of half a billion dollars, IT has had to adapt. "I have all the problems of Unilever, but none of the resources," he says. The scope of IT is typical of a large organisation and covers everything from infrastructure to business applications…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Swiftly putting its recently acquired Softlayer global cloud to use, IBM is moving much of its software portfolio and all of its existing platform services to the Softlayer cloud, where they all can be accessed as services under a common open architecture. "We’re going to bring a lot of IBM middleware over into a cloud environment, so it will be consumable worldwide," said Lance Crosby, CEO of Softlayer, a public cloud company IBM purchased last year for US$2 billion.

IBM will also launch a marketplace where organizations and developers can search for and deploy their IBM applications and services of choice. It will offer a set of IBM software patterns for sets of applications and services that are commonly used in conjunction with one another for some predefined service. The marketplace will have over 2,000 products, including applications available as a service through application programming interfaces (APIs), as well as patterns and IBM services already in operation…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

2014 continues to be a year marked by the accelerating hiring cycles across nearly all cloud computing companies. Signing bonuses of $3K to $5K for senior engineers and system design specialists are becoming common, and the cycles from screening to interviews to offers is shortening.

The job market in the cloud computing industry is leaning in favor of applicants who have a strong IT background in systems integration, legacy IT expertise, business analysis and in many positions, programming as well. One of the most common questions and requests I receive from readers is who the best companies are to work for. I’ve put together the following analysis based on the latest Computer Reseller News list The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2014…

Grazed from Cloud81.  Author: Alan Perkins.

No matter where you stand on the new Cloud technologies, there is no escaping the fact that Cloud Computing has everyone’s attention. For some business executives it is seen as an opportunity to financially restructure their IT expenditure. Some focus only on the risks they perceive of placing their data and systems in the hands of some external third party.  Still others see it as providing the means to focus on their core business and new business ideas without having to worry about whether the computer infrastructure will be able to cope.

While IT teams must ensure that systems are safe and data is secure, it is ironic that by focusing too much on security and availability, many CIOs are exposing themselves, and their employers, to a far greater risk – the risk of missing the opportunities presented by new technologies emerging from Cloud Computing.  The CIOs who will provide the greatest value to their employer will be those who approach Cloud by asking themselves “what can we now achieve that was previously inconceivable?”…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud computing is more than just the latest in a series of attempts to pare down government spending — it’s a gateway to unprecedented innovation in a sector known more for bureaucratic inertia. That’s the view of Dr. Rick Holgate, president of the  American Council for Technology (ACT), an independent advisory group of federal agency CIOs. In his view, cloud is one of three forces of innovation sweeping U.S. federal agencies, along with restructuring and opening up to private industry partnerships.

I recently caught up with Holgate, who is CIO of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, to talk about the disruptive forces that are reshaping the federal government. Cloud computing is the first and foremost of such forces – “bringing about more modern and more flexible, agile ways of delivering services and technology to our customers,” he says. “We’re really thinking different about we build services and build solutions.”…

Grazed from MidSize Insider.  Author: Rick Robinson.

As California faces its worst drought on record, communities, agencies and firms are calling on the latest generation of technology to aid in the effort to conserve precious water. From cloud computing to the Internet of Things (IoT), technologies that were purely speculative just a few years ago are now being implemented, and at the very center of the water awareness revolution is big data analytics.

Natural disasters such as droughts can provide a dramatic and instructive test of emerging technologies since they are often called on to work in new and expanded ways under urgent conditions. The California water crisis is testing not only specific technologies but also the agility of midsize IT operations in adopting new technologies and putting them to work…

Grazed from MidSize Insider.  Author: Doug Bonderud.

Spending predictions favor the cloud. Research firms have been reporting that big numbers are to be expected from cloud computing over the next few years. This increased spending means bigger software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployments, larger infrastructure implementations and greater expectations of uptime. To achieve these goals, midsize companies need more than just a powerful cloud; they need the right network backbone. Can network architecture keep up with cloud demands?

A Very Good Year

According to a February 19 article from Whir, companies across the globe spent just over $145 billion on cloud computing in 2013. Referencing research findings from IHS Technology, the piece notes that 2014 has an even better outlook, with companies expected to spend almost $175 billion this year, a 20 percent year-to-year increase…