Category: News

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

We’ve seen the news reports with carloads of FBI agents, windbreakers and all, rushing into a business to seize paper records and servers. The evidence is analyzed later to prove a crime using computer forensics. However, the more likely use of computer forensics will be requirements around lawsuits: accounting records, emails, transaction data, and so on, all used to tell a story that will benefit either the plaintiff or the defense.

The problem comes when we move data to the public clouds. How do we deal with legal issues, such as lawsuits and law enforcement? For the most part, organizations moving to the cloud have not even considered this issue…

Grazed from RCRWireless. Author: Roberta Prescott.

Cloud computing is gaining momentum, and telecom operators are battling for cloud computing customers. Carriers face fierce competition in this emerging market, and many have to solve several issues before becoming strong competitors. Almost all data center and infrastructure providers have included some kind of cloud service offering in their portfolio, and they have entered this field with the intention of gaining a huge share of this market.

Anderson B. Figueiredo, IDC research and consulting manager, said that large data center providers have made major investments to build their cloud strategy and portfolio. Together, the main vendors have spent U.S.$17 billion is acquisitions over the past 20 months, an amount IDC forecasts will reach U.S.$25 billion over the next 20 months…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The difficulties around cloud security may be improving, but users don’t help themselves if they’re not street smart about their IT usage. That’s according to Informatica senior vice president Juan Carlos Soto, who said that cloud computing shouldn’t “absolve anyone from common sense IT”. “Cloud has tremendous benefits around cost savings and agility, and typically it’s not the absolute short term cost – it’s all the other benefits that go along with it,” Soto told CloudTech, adding: “Despite all those benefits, cloud does not absolve anyone from common sense IT good practices.

“For example, even as an individual user, we should back up our data. As an individual user, we should put passwords on our computers should we leave it somewhere. “Some of that common sense is often ignored by persons when they’re using the cloud because the cloud has delivered, I dare say, above expectations [in] security and reliability up to now…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Eric Griffith.

"What’s the cloud?" "Where is the cloud?" "Are we in the cloud now?!" These are all questions you’ve probably heard or even asked yourself. The term "cloud computing" is everywhere, and we’re here to explain it. In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive. The cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet. It goes back to the days of flowcharts and presentations that would represent the gigantic server-farm infrastructure of the Internet as nothing but a puffy, white cumulonimbus cloud, accepting connections and doling out information as it floats.

What cloud computing is not about is your hard drive. When you store data on, or run programs from the hard drive, that’s called local storage and computing. Everything you need is physically close to you, which means accessing your data is fast and easy (for that one computer, or others on the local network). Working off your hard drive is how the computer industry functioned for decades and some argue it’s still superior to cloud computing, for reasons I’ll explain shortly…

With VMUnify, you can deploy a Unified, Secure, Automated and Scalable Cloud Environment for providing IaaS Services.  In the past few quarters, they have added an impressive list of features to the platform.  Some of those features include: 

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey Nelson.

The basic idea of the Internet of Things (IoT) is inter-connectedness. Where machines with internal sensors are wirelessly connected to the internet and constantly deliver data. For the true power of the IoT to be realized, the utilization of cloud computing is a mandate.

Machine to Machine technology and the Internet of Things is the way the world is going. Already you see things like “smart cities” and “smart sensors” in utilities becoming a common practice, rather than a scene from a 1980s futuristic film. Cloud computing is fundamental to the IoT because of the interconnectedness I mentioned earlier. How? Let’s start with an example…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Katie Fields.

Low on cash, always busy and prone to wonder, first-time entrepreneurs who rely on technology are fighting an uphill battle. Along with the sales, recruiting and administrative responsibilities entrepreneurs shoulder, these human swiss-army knives must also arrange an efficient IT structure. Entrepreneurs in years past had to use the bulk of their start-up capital to buy servers and hire IT professionals, leaving little money left to grow the rest of the business.

An new era in technology has removed a large part of the IT hardware and hiring burden from these eager entrepreneurs. Cloud computing saves business owners from spending capital on expensive hardware and IT staff. It also enables information access from anywhere. Business should use small business credit cards for things that will promote growth. Cloud computing frees up money for new business. For start-ups trying to establish a stable business, cloud computing is a game-changing development…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Sue Poremba.

The term “big data” may be a bit of a misnomer. For some companies, big data is actually huge data. Even small companies now find themselves immersed in massive amounts of data of all sorts, which leads to the problem of storing all of it.

Enter the big data cloud storage solutions, which allow companies to store and access media by the terabyte. Storage by the terabyte may have seemed unfathomable just a few years ago, but according to John Griffith of SolidFire, by today’s standards, terabytes of block storage really isn’t all that much. “Many service providers look at opportunity in hundreds or thousands of terabytes. Between storage hungry database applications and other mission critical systems, terabytes of data can be consumed rather quickly,” Griffith said…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Equinix opened a $60 million SE3 data center in downtown Seattle Thursday to enhance its data center and network communication services to the RightScale cloud management service, and potentially to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and major enterprise customers. AWS and Equinix are already cloud partners in six other locations, and Equinix officials said the close working relationship makes it likely that AWS will use the Seattle facility at some point in the future.

Amazon Web Services currently relies on Equinix facilities to power its Direct Connect service, used by financial services and other privacy-oriented organizations that wish to establish a fiber-optic communications link with an Amazon data center rather than relying on the public Internet…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) today announced the Netflix Cloud Prize, a competition designed to make cloud computing better for everyone. With US$100,000 in available prize money, the Netflix Cloud Prize challenges developers around the world to do their very best to improve the features, usability, quality, reliability and security of computing resources delivered as a service over the Internet, popularly known as cloud computing. Contest submissions will be judged by a panel of experts. All submissions will be available freely to anyone.

"Cloud computing has become a hot topic recently, but the technology is still just emerging," said Neil Hunt , chief product officer at Netflix. "No doubt many of the key ideas that will take it to the next level have yet to be conceived, explored, and developed. The Netflix Cloud Prize is designed to attract and focus the attention of the most innovative minds to create the advances that will take cloud to the next level."…