Category: News

Grazed from The Register. Author: Editorial Staff.

Innovations in mobile and cloud computing, social technology and the use of "big data" present an emerging risk to organisations’ IT security, experts have warned. The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), which is an EU advisory body, said that those technologies would increasingly provide the platform for "most of the innovation expected in the area of IT" and warned that with their emergence would come an associated increased cyber threat.

ENISA warned that the threat stemming from mobile computing comes from the fact that mobile communications take place over "poorly secured … or unsecured channels". It said that the software used for such systems were not the most "mature", and added that devices were vulnerable to being lost or stolen due to their "mobility". The very fact that they are universally popular also enhances the threat of the technology being exposed to hackers, the agency added…

Grazed from i-Programmer. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is one of those topics we all need to know about. However, this book concentrates on the ‘end user’ aspects of using online data storage rather than anything aimed at business or technical users. While it isn’t aimed at developers, it would be a good introduction to these aspects of the topic for any non-techie users or managers you need to work with.

Like all the Easy Steps titles, it is written in straightforward English, with lots of color illustrations. There are 15 short chapters, each covering an aspect of using the cloud or an app that lets you work with personal or ‘desktop’ level data in the cloud…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Bob Lewis.

Hot technology chatter, like most other business discussions, assumes business success comes from brilliant concepts, careful planning, and disciplined execution. I wonder if what actually happens is more of the million-monkeys-at-a-million-keyboards situation: If enough companies throw enough products and services into the marketplace, some will stick, even if the products and services are the result of random tossing, not superior thinking.

Way back in 1999 I proposed a simple set of criteria to bring order to the randomness when it comes to new information technology. According to the proposed model, three filters predict the success or failure of any new technology product:…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

NetSuite said Thursday that it’s bought 28-year-old Retail Anywhere in a deal that’s supposed to deliver the first cloud-based system that unifies POS and e-commerce in a single application.

The company, which is majority owned by Larry Ellison, says it’s bringing brick-and-mortar retail businesses to a global commerce cloud, grafting multiple-customer touchpoints onto its SuiteCommerce platform to deliver an integrated cloud business suite for retailers including POS, web sites, smartphones, tablets and call centers.
Terms were not disclosed…

Grazed from AOL.Defense. Author: Henry Kenyon.

New technology creates new capabilities — and new vulnerabilities. "Moving to the cloud" is the trend du jour, even in the intelligence world, but the recent attacks on the nation’s banking system has raised uncomfortable questions about how to make cloud computing secure.

"The cloud" may seem amorphous, but in reality it consists of a host of modestly capable user terminals connected to a high-powered central server or server farm. The great advantage of the cloud is that individual users can borrow capacity — storage, processing power, even entire applications — from the central server when they need it. The great vulnerability is a successful attack on the central server can compromise everyone on the cloud…

Grazed from eCommerce Times. Author: Jeff Kagan.

We are still early in this cloud revolution, but there are reasons to tread carefully, whether you are an individual saving your personal data and files, or whether you are a company using the cloud to interact with all your employees or customers. There are real benefits and dangers and, you should be aware of them all.

The cloud may be the future, but it’s not a bed of roses. The Amazon Cloud had a meltdown on Christmas Eve, affecting many customers who use the service. Companies that use Amazon as their cloud, their customers and workers were all affected. What should we learn from this high-profile meltdown?…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Mirantis, a cloud consulting firm and one of the few OpenStack brain trusts outside of Rackspace, announced Thursday that it has received $10 million in funding from Intel, Dell and WestSummit Capital. The latter is a global investment firm with ties inside China.

Mirantis’ story is a little different than other startups’ because the three-year-old firm has successfully self-funded its own growth thus far. CEO Adrian Ionel said it could have continued to do so. Rather than a handful of entrepreneurs working in a garage, it’s already a staff of 300 consultants and engineers with a list of pedigree customers building major cloud projects, such as PayPal and AT&T…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Jennifer Marsh.

Although Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop operating system popularity, Linux has become a dominant force in cloud servers and virtual private servers (VPS). Linux is not only a cheaper way to host cloud applications, but it also comes in several distribution flavors.

Customers looking at cloud hosting as a solution can choose from CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian. Each of these distributions offers the same basic functions, but they have different tweaks that some administrators like over other distributions…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

In what would be a major strategy shift Apple is reportedly considering selling a "lower-end" iPhone later this year to meet competition from Android, which has been eating Apple’s lunch with its multiple models. The Wall Street Journal said late Tuesday that the cheaper iPhone, which could impact Apple’s healthy margins unless it attracts the non-iPhone consumer, could look like the classic iPhone but come in a polycarbonate plastic case rather than the iPhone 5’s up-market aluminum housing.

The paper also said "other parts could remain the same or be recycled from older iPhone models." The company recently introduced an iPad mini that’s smaller and cheaper than the standard iPad but there’s only been one iPhone with different storage capacities since the dingus was first introduced…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) will bang the drum for its Cloud OS initiative on January 15. The software giant plans to discuss new management products and services that "deliver against Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision."

When Windows Server 2012 launched in Sept. 2012, Microsoft claimed it was the first true cloud operating system. The company’s Hyper-V hypervisor, System Center management tools, and Windows Azure public cloud also play into the cloud OS strategy — which faces stiff competition from established Linux offerings and emerging open source platforms like OpenStack and CloudStack…