Category: News

Grazed from Forbes. Author: David Amerland.

In the world of cloud computing, your IT department needs to be agile. CIOs must become responsive to the needs of the business. The alternative is disruption—the bad kind. David Amerland explains… Even relatively small changes can have a significant impact on the way your enterprise works. But transitioning to the cloud is far from a small change: Its impact is considerable and disruptive, but in a good way. Disruption is good—at least, home-grown disruption is. The challenge requires adaptation, which plays to our Darwinistic notions of how businesses evolve, strive to survive, and come out stronger.

More Knowledgeable, Skilled, Responsive Staff

As an enterprise transitions from a traditional business model to an agile cloud-based corporation, the most obvious change involves the part IT plays. Traditionally limited to a very specific role within the organization, IT was the department that would be forgotten about until a problem cropped up…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

The migration of services delivered through cloud-based resources is causing tectonic shifts across the IT vendor landscape and one area of the market that’s been unsure about what it means has been channel resellers. But the channel is finally finding its groove in the cloud, according to a new study.

IT industry trade group CompTIA annually surveys its members asking how channel vendors are embracing the cloud computing trend. Four years ago, only four in 10 surveyed said they were involved in cloud computing services. Last year, that number jumped to 85%. This year, all 400 vendors said they offer cloud computing services…

Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Christina Larson.

There are few $100 billion industries in China that foreign investors and service providers aren’t rushing to compete for a slice of. But a new report by the Washington-based Center for Research Intelligence and Analysis (CRIA) highlights how China’s fast-expanding cloud-computing sector could contain land mines.

Cloud computing is growing quickly in China, thanks to heavy government support. The country’s overall cloud-computing value chain is expected to be worth at least $122 billion by 2015, according to the China Software Industry Association. The same benefits driving the adoption of cloud computing in the U.S. and elsewhere—including easy data storage and low maintenance costs—are behind its gradual adoption in China, especially in select government agencies and finance, petrochemicals, and health-care sectors. There’s still a lot of room for expansion, though. China has the world’s largest population of Internet users, and by the end of the year there will be 500 million smartphones, which utilize software and applications based in the cloud, online in China…

Grazed from UBMTech.  Author: Event Announcement.

Join thousands of IT professionals at New York’s largest IT event, INTEROP New York 2013, to be held at The Javits Center on September 30 – October 04, 2013.   Discover the most important innovations and strategies to drive your organization’s success, including: BYOD security, the latest cloud and virtualization technologies, SDN, the Internet of Things, Apple in the enterprise & more.

Interop Conference sessions help you find the actionable solutions to your current IT headaches and plan for future developments. Three days of sessions highlight the latest advancements in networking, virtualization, cloud computing, mobility, data centers and more…

Grazed from SiliconRepublic. Author: Editorial Staff.

More and more businesses are adopting cloud computing as part of their IT infrastructure, according to a new infographic that provides a snapshot of cloud computing usage. The infographic published by livehive on Visual.ly reveals the most used cloud platforms, the average number of cloud services companies use, and the top 3 software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.

Also noted is that security concerns surrounding cloud computing have decreased nearly 10pc in one year: from 55pc of businesses worried about cloud security in 2012 to 46pc of businesses concerned about the security of cloud in 2013…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Jason Hoffman, who co-founded the only cloud that runs SmartOS, an open source version of Solaris, is stepping down at Joyent after 10 years as CTO. In a blog posted Monday evening entitled "The Next Chapter", he wrote: "I’ve loved the process of building Joyent into what it is today, as any respectable founder wishes, you look for people better than yourself who can go execute and you let them do that. The company is in great shape, with a brilliant management team and a change-the-world technology vision in very capable hands with Bryan Cantrill."

Cantrill is senior VP of engineering at Joyent and a former Sun Microsystems engineer. He authored the Dtrace analytics probe for Sun Microsystem storage appliances, which was later adapted for use in Solaris. SmartOS at Joyent also uses Dtrace to insure reliable uptime and performance in its cloud servers. Cantrill was a winner of the Wall Street Journal’s top Technology Innovation award in 2006…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Richard Chirgwin.

It’s more likely that the NSA has devoted its efforts to key capture and side-channel attacks rather than brute-forcing its way through ciphertext en masse – but it’s also true that our crypto maths won’t last foreverm which draws attention to projects like this one (PDF), which is looking at protection of multi-party computation (MPC) activities.

According to Phys.org: “The idea behind Multi-Party Computation is that it should enable two or more people to compute any function of their choosing on their secret inputs, without revealing their inputs to either party. One example is an election; voters want their vote to be counted but they do not want their vote made public.”…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

According to the Washington Post, "Google is racing to encrypt the torrents of information that flow among its data centers around the world in a bid to thwart snooping by the NSA and the intelligence agencies of foreign governments." A series of revelations by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden shows that the United States, the United Kingdom, and perhaps other governments routinely spy on a broad range of Internet services, not in the targeted ways most people were led to believe.

With this response, Google sends the message that it won’t make it easy for governments to quietly conduct mass-spying efforts, but instead will force the government to explicitly acknowledge its spying, such as through court orders. This also indicates that Google, like other cloud computing providers, views the NSA scandal as a potential market killer. They are all in damage control mode, pushing out new privacy technology aimed at protecting data…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Cetrom Information Technology, Inc. (Cetrom), a cloud computing pioneer and leader in custom cloud management for global SMBs, today announced it has been recognized for the third successive year as a member of the 2013 CRN Next-Gen 250. The annual list highlights up-and-coming solution providers that are new to the market, and take a smart and different approach to solution selling and integration.

Cetrom’s custom cloud management and support services offer comprehensive technology solutions for accounting and CPA firms, associations and nonprofits, law offices, and travel management agencies. Because of the technology company’s unique white-glove approach to each customer’s needs, every deployed cloud solution directly supports the business initiatives and structure of the organization, from a fully outsourced IT department to a complementary technology partner that extends expert in-house teams. Supported by year-over-year investments in leading technologies, Cetrom’s custom Cloud Computing Solutions deliver a reliable, cost-effective, and secure solution for global organizations…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Chris Dukett.

Chargeback and proper pay-per-use computing, long touted as one of the benefits of as-a-service models, has failed to revolutionise the way IT departments engage with their fellow business units thus far. Despite an ability to use the chargeback process that has existed for some time, companies have failed to take advantage of it, and, according to one study, it looks set to be left on the back burner for some time yet.

That study, a piece of research conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by datacentre provider Equinix, entitled Enabling The Virtual Data Center in Asia, revealed that the financial benefits of as-a-service computing were rated the lowest in a survey of 112 IT decision makers conducted across four countries…