Category: News

Grazed from IT Pro Portal. Author: Jamie Hinks.

Hong Kong has become the latest jurisdiction to implement its own cloud platform that will host government services utilised by a range of bureaus and departments. GovCloud will be housed in local data centres and initially be used to develop electronic record keeping as well as collaborative working systems that will be shared by internal bureaus and departments.

"With robust and fully resilient infrastructure, GovCloud provides a stable and reliable environment for bureaux and departments to develop and host their e-government services, stated a spokesperson for the Office of the Government Chief Information Office [OGCIO]. "Through adopting cloud computing technologies, GovCloud brings about the benefits of cost saving, time saving and enhanced agility in meeting the growing demand of bureaux and departments on IT resources. This will expedite development and delivery of e-government services."…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

If you were to do a Google search for "government and cloud computing" you’d likely be bombarded with stories of NSA spying, how it?s made businesses nervous about cloud adoption and why it could cost the major cloud vendors dearly in terms of dollars and perception.

Because of this, you’d be likely to miss the other government cloud story that’s evolving right under our collective noses: that cloud-based file sharing is the perfect tool for the smaller government bodies and before long, the smaller entities will be far superior in terms of technical efficiency…

Grazed frin ITWorld. Author: James Niccolai.

If it’s not the NSA or Google it’s someone else. These days it seems there’s always somebody scanning your data, looking to make a profit or to learn something about you. What if you could set up your own social network or e-commerce site that didn’t require putting your information in someone else’s data center? That’s the idea behind Pixeom’s palm-size cloud in a box, a $125 device (or $99 if you’re among its first backers on Kickstarter) that aims to make it easy to set up your own social network, file exchange and e-commerce site at home without using public cloud services.

You take the plastic device home, plug it into your Ethernet network and access it from a PC using the device’s IP address or, for the less technical, from a mobile app. It comes with three applications installed — one for hosting online discussions, one for file sharing and one for setting up a digital storefront…

Grazed from ArsTechnica. Author: Dan Goodin.

LinkedIn is suing a gang of hackers who used Amazon’s cloud computing service to circumvent security measures and copy data from hundreds of thousands of member profiles each day. "Since May 2013, unknown persons and/or entities employing various automated software programs (often referred to as ‘bots’) have registered thousands of fake LinkedIn member accounts and have extracted and copied data from many member profile pages," company attorneys alleged in a complaint filed this week in US District Court in Northern California.

"This practice, known as ‘scraping,’ is explicitly barred by LinkedIn’s User Agreement, which prohibits access to LinkedIn ‘through scraping, spidering, crawling, or other technology or software used to access data without the express written consent of LinkedIn or its Members.’"…

Grazed from BusinessCloudNews. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

Enterprise Linux distributors Red Hat and CentOS are partnering to accelerate open source innovations in cloud computing, virtualisation and software defined networking. The partnership will see Red Hat taking an active role in the ten year old CentOS (Community Enterprise Operating System) project, which is essentially a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compiled with open source code; Red Hat will hire and dedicate new developers to work full-time on the project.

The two companies are collaborating to develop one open source Linux OS that will focus on driving support for Open Stack (another darling of Red Hat and the Linux community) and other open source projects, SDN, and optimised for cloud (high concurrency, multitenancy, etc.) and virtualisation…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lucien Wynn.

Cloud computing is very much in vogue, as more and more businesses make use of cloud technologies. A major benefit of cloud computing is the cost savings it can deliver, along with the fact that cloud services can be easy to implement and are often scalable. An element of cloud computing which has gained traction in recent years is that of Software as a Service (SaaS). At its most basic level, SaaS is the provision of software hosted on the cloud, usually charged on a subscription basis (rather than as a one-off license fee). A major benefit of this for businesses is the fact that they only need to pay for what they use, so if their software requirements increase or indeed fall over time, they can adjust their subscription accordingly.

Although Software as a Service has existed in various forms for many years now (Salesforce.com, often cited as one of the first SaaS providers, was founded in 1999), it has only really entered the mainstream in the last few years. And its rise looks set to continue, with Gartner predicting that the global SaaS market could be worth over $22 billion by 2015, almost double what it was in 2011 ($12.3 billion). Evidence of the widespread use of SaaS is provided by North Bridge Venture Partners? annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey which shows that 63% of the organisations surveyed use SaaS…

Grazed from InformationAge. Author: Ben Rossi.

Analyst and research firm Forrester predicted in November 2013 that 10 trends would dominate the information technology landscape in 2014. Amongst them was the belief that IT will become an agile service broker and if it doesn?t it will simply fade away. This trend is occurring because many of the leading IT organisations are moving away from what it describes as being aligned IT in favour of empowered business technology practices.

This transformation will include some significant modifications to the software development lifecycle. Changes will also occur in the realms of managing and developing IT architecture, as well as impacting on solutions development in order to deliver mobile, cloud and big data solutions more readily than today…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Mike Vizard.

When it comes to cloud computing, it?s actually some of the basic things, such as how to efficiently get data in an out of the cloud, that tend to hang up IT organizations more than complex issues, such as data governance. To make it easier to move files in and out of the cloud, Green Button has unfurled GreenButton WarpDrive, which leverages the GridFTP technology, which was developed under the auspices of the Open Grid Forum.

GreenButton CEO Scott Houston says GridFTP enables a file that needs to be transferred to be broken up in to multiple segments that can be sent in parallel. Once sent, the file can then be reconstituted on the receiving end by the cloud service provider. Initially available for the Microsoft Azure Cloud, Houston says GreenButton also plans to make this capability available for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and any cloud service that supports the OpenStack cloud management framework…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Gregory Fisher.

If you have been following news in the tech industry at all lately, then you should probably be aware that Microsoft just released the latest version of Windows on October 18th, and may well already have a copy of it up and running on your machine. While some early adopters already had the buggy ?preview? version of 8.1 running on their machines, only now is the new operating system officially available in its finalized form, and so far the reviews have been positive.

One of the things that reviewers are praising about the new system is the heavy integration of the cloud into the very workings of this new Windows. As a feature, it?s incredibly useful for everyone from casual users to big businesses, and as an indication of the direction that things are heading it?s very telling and very interesting…