Category: News

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Microsoft will soon have a range of products to beef up its cloud computing business. According to the guy running the show, however, the most important thing is not what Microsoft is selling, but how it was made. “The big call we made was that my 10,000-person organization focused on one thing – building software that powers Windows Azure,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s executive vice president for cloud and enterprise. Azure is the name of Microsoft’s cloud. “The software for Azure runs on the server, not the other way around.”

That is actually a big deal for a company with a lot of legacy business. All too often, as when Microsoft went into phones and tablets with an approach that stressed its personal computer operating system, the pressure is to make the dominant existing technology the center of the new world, whether or not it belongs there…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Frank Konkel.

Amazon Web Services scored a major victory against IBM in the battle to build the cloud computing infrastructure for the CIA, NSA and the rest of the intelligence community. On Oct. 7, U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Thomas Wheeler ruled in favor of AWS, which had challenged the scope of and need for corrective action taken by the CIA in response to recommendations made by the Government Accountability office in June.

Wheeler’s ruling came just a few hours after the conclusion of oral arguments that were closed to the public. His legal opinion is not yet public record, but the ruling essentially overturns GAO’s sustainment of a bid protest filed by IBM after AWS was awarded a cloud computing contract worth up to $600 million…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Bright Computing, the leading, vendor-independent provider of management solutions for clusters and clouds, announced today general availability of enhanced support for NVIDIA® GPU accelerators in Bright Cluster Manager®. Enhancements include support for the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit version 5.5, the most-recently released version of the NVIDIA CUDA parallel programming platform.

Bright Computing customers can easily provision, monitor and manage systems with NVIDIA GPU accelerators within cluster-management hierarchies. The fully integrated and comprehensive support in Bright Cluster Manager for NVIDIA GPU accelerators includes:…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Backup and recovery software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications provider Backupify has released a new set of open APIs through the Backupify Developer Platform — a move designed to extend the company’s backup technology to SaaS application providers.

Backupify CEO Rob May says the company is working with a group of partners looking to protect customer data through the Backupify Developer Platform. Backup and recovery software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications provider Backupify has released a new set of open APIs through the Backupify Developer Platform — a move designed to extend the company’s backup technology to SaaS application providers…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Robert Lawson.

Cloud computing is quickly stirring up a frenzy of innovation its wide applications and easy access for small to midsize businesses. There is a seemingly endless stream of forms and functions for the technology, and it is one of the most flexible sources for business infrastructure tech. The service can be used in a variety of industries, and it is affordable, powerful and has a variety of capabilities.

According to Fierce Enterprise Communications, a business and technology publication, a study completed by Birst and Dimensional Research that polled several business intelligence (BI) professionals revealed that BI user satisfaction tops 80 percent for this type of technology. Respondents cited the following benefits: faster implementation, lower total cost of ownership and broader user adoption than for installed BI software…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alyssa Wood.

Performance is a big concern around remote application access on mobile devices, but there are ways to deliver apps and data from the cloud without compromising speed. To keep performance on par with traditional desktop applications, Splashtop Inc. uses its enterprise customers’ existing server infrastructure to deliver apps to mobile devices.

The company has only been around for three years, but today has 15 million users across iOS, Mac, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry devices. Its remote app and desktop delivery software also comes in a Software as a Service (SaaS)-based business edition, or users can download a consumer version right to their tablet or smartphone. Splashtop CEO Mark Lee sat down with SearchConsumerization here at the Interop conference to explain the benefits of a hybrid approach to app rendering and why some apps are so difficult to mobilize…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

From AppScale to Zillabytes, a plethora of cloud computing startups have emerged in recent years. There are three ways to go from here: acquisition, IPO or failure. Thus, IT pros considering products from a cloud computing startup should also closely examine the company’s funding, market segment and partner ecosystem before they buy.

Identifying the source of funding for CliQr Technologies Inc. was important for Robert Banks, director of PZFlex, a virtual prototyping company based in Mountain View, Calif. that uses CliQr’s CloudCenter software to manage clouds hosted by Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace Inc…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Asher Ross.

The benefits of the cloud, such as lower costs, scalability and flexibility, are numerous. But while SMEs have enthusiastically embraced the cloud, large companies have been more reluctant to invest in this technology. It’s time for change: the cloud has advantages for the company and also of greater magnitude will see CIOs essential as a way to secure the future of their organizations.

CIOs are increasingly warming to the cloud. A survey in May this year by the analyst firm Research found that 92 percent of CIOs and IT professionals think the cloud is good for business. The same survey also found that only 31 percent of companies that describe their infrastructure is mainly based on the cloud, indicating a rejection among most organizations to take positive steps towards cloud adoption. Seems that if larger the company, the greater the resistance…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Mary K. Pratt.

The CIO at Utah State University, Hawley says he and his team must serve the university’s employees and deliver the tools they need. But he realizes that many of the school’s users are finding outside options, installing unsanctioned applications that they find easier to use. "People always gravitate to the most functional or least-cost solution. And in our ‘freemium’ world, those things are available by the dozen," he says.

Hawley says he suspects that employee use of unauthorized IT tools is particularly prevalent these days, as telecommuting and bring-your-own-device policies become increasingly common. People everywhere are becoming more mobile. Empowered first by company-issued laptops and now by their own smartphones and tablets, employees of all stripes want to do their work from any location at any time with any device, and they’re turning to the cloud to help them do it — using hosted services to share, store and sync work files with just a click…

Grazed from Marketwire. Author: PR Announcement.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) today unveiled the speaker line up and presentations for its upcoming CISO APAC Forum to be held December 17-18 at The Venetian Macau. The announcement was made at a press conference today hosted jointly with Macau SAR Bureau of Telecommunications Regulation (DSRT), Macao Computer Society (MCS) and attended by leaders of CSA Hong Kong and Macau Chapter.

Designed to be a gathering of the world’s leading minds in information security and definitive authorities in cloud computing, the CSA CISO APAC Forum will be the CSA’s first main event in East Asia, having held both the first CSA CISO APAC Forum last November and the inaugural CSA Congress APAC this past May in Singapore. This year’s event will address, through presentations, case studies and first-hand experiences, some of the most controversial and debated topics in cloud security including panels on Cryptography and Privacy as a Business Model; Governmental Cloud Strategy and Experience Sharing; Big Data & Emerging Threats Experiences; Emerging Cyber Threats & Securing the Cloud; and The CISO Report 2013 and CISO Guide by OWASP…