Category: News

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Runa A. Sandvik.

Rich Mogull, CEO at information security research and advisory firm Securosis, was working on a piece of code to accompany his presentation at the upcoming RSA Conference when he accidentally published the credentials for his AWS account-Amazon’s cloud computing service-online. A mistake that would later cost him $500.

In a blog post titled "My $500 Cloud Security Screwup", Mogull writes that he only learned about the issue when he received an email from Amazon’s AWS team one evening. The email said that both his access and secret key were publicly available on GitHub, a web-based hosting service for software development projects. In addition, the AWS team had reason to believe someone used the credentials to set up a number of unauthorized servers in the Amazon cloud…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Editorial Staff.

Computing requirements can fluctuate dramatically from workload to workload. Some applications need to crunch through data, while others perform more-mundane functions such as serving customer-facing web pages. Only the demands of each workload should dictate its underlying infrastructure. Therefore, the flexibility to choose and easily manage exactly the right combination of components is critical. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to IT infrastructure. Choice matters.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the economics associated with the cloud can best be maximized through a hybrid design incorporating bare metal. Combining dedicated servers with your cloud instances can both reduce the costs of crunching data and improve performance. This may also reduce compliance and security concerns with single-tenant components in the background for your sensitive databases and multitenant cloud instances for your customer-facing front end…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Lenin VJ Nair.

In the past, think about how companies used to do business. Manpower was one entity that simply needed to be fetched as per necessity from wherever it is available. Whichever industry you work on?automotive, technology, construction, media?you needed to gather critical expertise to work for an organization in your area. Organizations also needed to expand, set up operations in the third world to find personnel that could work for optimum wages in order to maximize profit.

The advent of the Internet was one real relief for professionals as it first introduced the idea of work from anywhere. Today, the technology, especially that of distributed computing we now know as the cloud, has advanced so much that everything, from applications to professional talent, can be coordinated from the cloud…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM today announced that its inventors received a record-setting 6,809 patents in 2013 — the 21(st) consecutive year the company topped the annual list of U.S. patent leaders. IBM’s 2013 patent results represent a diverse range of inventions poised to enable significant innovations that will position the company to compete and lead in strategic areas–such as IBM’s Watson, cloud computing, Big Data and analytics.

These inventions will also advance the new era of cognitive systems where machines will learn, reason and interact with people in more natural ways. "We take pride in being recognized as the U.S. patent leader, but patents are only one gauge of innovation. Equally significant is the impact that our patented inventions have when they are used to enable solutions that help clients and societies solve problems," said Bernie Meyerson, IBM Fellow and VP of Innovation…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

VMware (VMW) has snagged two Citrix (CTXS) employees who have had their heads in the clouds. Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president and general manager of End User Computing at VMware, announced in a blog post that VMware had hired Bob Schultz, formerly group vice president and general manager of Desktop and Applications at Citrix, and Sumit Dhawan, formerly group vice president and general manager of Enterprise Mobility at Citrix.

Both Schultz and Dhawan easily can be considered two of the top minds involved in cloud computing at Citrix, so it’s a big deal for VMware, as well as for Citrix. And just when Citrix and VMware seemed to be playing so nice together, too. Citrix even attended VMworld last year?something that would have been thought highly improbable not all that long ago…

Graze from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), a trusted leader in high performance computing and big data and an SAP global technology partner, today announced plans to develop an in-memory appliance based on the SAP HANA® platform, working in collaboration with SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), the market leader in enterprise software and software-related services. Using the scalable shared memory architecture of SGI’s next-generation UV™ system together with SAP HANA, the new in-memory appliance from SGI will be designed to streamline database management for single large node environments, which require extremely high capacity and scale to meet the needs of in-memory databases.

Today’s enterprises are experiencing rapid increases in database size, precipitating an immediate need for superior performance and accelerated transaction times to manage and analyze big data more efficiently and cost effectively. The new SGI computing system is expected to help enable businesses and government agencies running high volume databases and multi-tenant environments to leverage high performance…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

For some people, the Supreme Court case involving the TV streaming service Aereo and the major broadcast networks could have major implications for cloud computing. But it won’t. I’ve received a lot of calls from reporters asking what the case means to the cloud. They associate the Aereo service to the cloud because Internet distribution is involved, and to many people the Internet, websites, and even email equal the cloud. Of course they do not.

Let’s be clear: In this case, the medium is not the message. The fact that Aereo uses the Internet to stream local broadcasts so that people not in the broadcast area (or without a TV) is incidental to the issue at hand, which is whether Aereo is violating the broadcasters’ copyright on the programming it redistributes without their permission…

Grazed from TechRadar. Author: Désiré Athow.

The cloud has had a transformational impact on businesses of all sizes – from small and midsized businesses (SMBs) to large enterprises – and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. According to analyst house Gartner, the use of cloud computing is still growing and will become the bulk of new IT spend by 2016, a year that the company predicts will see hybrid cloud overtake private cloud, with nearly half of large enterprises having deployments by the end of 2017.

Despite its high uptake, the most suitable route into the cloud is not always so clear cut for many organisations moving on from the tried and tested client-server model. To shed light on the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing’s three main service delivery models – software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) – we spoke to Mike Kavis, VP and Principal Architect for Cloud Technology Partners and author of ‘Architecting the cloud’…

Grazed from ITNews. Author: Brett Winerford.

Australia’s new Privacy Act will come into effect during a period of tremendous turbulence in the technology sector, owing to a surge in subscriptions to cloud computing services. Most of the initial resistance by CIOs to the use of cloud services is dissipating as the weight of opinion swings in favour of the model, spurred on by the availability of onshore clouds.

Organisations looking to public cloud computing services that are hosted offshore will need to consider Australia’s amended Privacy Act in detail. The new Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) deal with transborder data flow slightly differently to the current legislation. From March 12, if data is disclosed offshore to a third party provider, your organisation can be held vicariously liable for any breach by that third party. If there is a breach at your cloud computing provider, it is treated as your breach…