Category: News

Grazed from CFO.  Author: Alissa Ponchione.

Seeing an opportunity to make workflow more efficient, residents and physicians-in-training at Oregon Health & Science University started using cloud-computing service Google Drive to keep everyone up to date on patient information. After a faculty member discovered the staff was using the cloud service, the university launched an investigation, and it found that Drive documents held health data from 3,044 of its patients.

Although Google Drive is password protected and has security measures in place, the university did not have a contract agreement with the cloud provider to use or store OHSU patient health information. By disclosing patient information in the cloud, the university violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which requires doctors to keep patient information private and secure…

Grazed from SiliconHills.  Author: Editorial Staff.

All of Rackspace’s customers will be hybrid cloud customers in the future, said Gerardo Dada, the company’s product marketing leader.  San Antonio-based Rackspace, which calls itself the Open Cloud company and co-founded with NASA the Open Stack operating system, has seen its cloud computing business skyrocket in the past few years.

The cloud lets customers operate a “network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.”  Rackspace faces competition in the hybrid cloud market from Amazon Web Services, the number one leader, and other players such as Microsoft, HP Cloud and IBM’s SoftLayer…

Grazed from Piston.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud software is changing the way IT departments run. IT is no longer the “owner” of technology in the enterprise. As Rick Vanover put it, “the ‘server admin’ we have known over the years is a job description that is seriously at risk.” With cloud software providing an increasingly self-serve computing environment, the IT department will have to change. Thoran Rodrigues writes in Tech Republic about how this is going to happen.

Rodrigues points to a fundamental shift in corporate IT from capital intensive data center build-outs to cloud-based software hosting. Whether the cloud is running as a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, or a public cloud, the truth remains that the IT department no longer has iron control over all computing in the enterprise…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Ethan Banks.

While outsourcing applications or infrastructure to the public cloud relieves IT of some operational burdens, IT still has to monitor that infrastructure. Companies often overlook the complexity of troubleshooting a cloud app integrated with local infrastructure. If there’s a performance problem, is it the cloud provider? A congested link on the Internet path between the application and the consumer? A problem on the LAN?

How does one find the root cause without the provider and IT department pointing fingers at each other? This is the problem that ThousandEyes wants to address. ThousandEyes was founded in January 2010 to address the challenge of network performance management in the cloud era. I saw a presentation from ThousandEyes at Network Field Day 6, and have also played with a trial version of the service…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

IBM, the original inventor of virtualization in computing, has patented a method of moving virtual machines around dynamically to ensure each has the amount of network bandwidth that it needs. The technique can be used to load balance large conglomerations of virtual machines from a bandwidth perspective, instead of server CPU and memory perspective.

By shifting virtual machines that need more access to network bandwidth away from virtual machines that are already making heavy use of it, the virtual environment is used in a more efficient and intelligent way, approximating fuller use of all resources. In effect, IBM has announced that Patent #8,352,953, its method for "dynamically provisioning virtual machines," has solved what Netflix defined on Amazon Web Services as the "noisy neighbor" problem…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

Legacy enterprise software vendors are caught in a deflationary pricing cycle, but there are multiple nuances worth noting. In a research report on pricing model disparities, Cowen & Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher found:

• Data management tools such as Hadoop and NoSQL can save customers 70 percent to 80 percent relative to data warehousing tools from Teradata and Oracle.
• SaaS apps such as Salesforce and Workday can save you money in the early years relative to an on-premise deployment from Oracle or SAP, but you could wind up paying more out over the duration of a deal. The outcomes range from 50 percent savings to spending more on SaaS vs. on premise.
• Box is more expensive than on premise options in many cases, but collaboration customers are willing to pay up to access files remotely from mobile devices…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Aaron Patrick.

In today’s IT landscape the benefits of cloud computing – flexibility, lower costs, higher productivity – are well understood. However, now that the term “cloud computing” is everywhere, companies need to work proactively to ensure they have put their business in the best possible position to succeed now and in the future.

A huge component of this success will be dependent on where your organization’s cloud infrastructure is housed. The data center that your cloud calls home will have certain capabilities and features that may be the difference in whether your cloud keeps pace or falls behind. Uptimes, network bandwidth and security are some of the most important aspects of the data center infrastructure that companies must take into account…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

At InterConnect 2013 IBM unveiled new systems and solutions that address these needs by helping clients and managed service providers (MSPs) build private and hybrid clouds to get the most out of Big Data, social, and mobile workloads. These include PureSystems, Power Systems, Smarter Storage Systems, System x, and Technical Computing offerings that provide the flexibility clients need to quickly deploy clouds.

Clients are looking to leverage public clouds while still maintaining control of them. This is causing organizations to embrace private and hybrid clouds where they can more easily manage in-house resources as they adopt external cloud services…

Grazed from GSN Magazine. Author: Dale R. Gardner.

Hybrid-Cloud computing, the combination of private, community and public Cloud infrastructures, delivers advantages. But it also introduces risks, particularly around privileged users and trusted insider threats. Agencies already routinely develop plan of action and milestones (POAMs) to address audit findings on shared administrative accounts, weak and default passwords, and other privileged risks. And regulations mandating tighter privileged user controls have also emerged.

Most recently, an updated release of NIST Special Publication 800-53 brought new requirements. More are found in Presidential CAP goals and long-standing programs, such as HSPD-12 and OMB 11-11, which reinforce the requirement for PIV card controlled logical access to systems, particularly for privileged accounts…