Category: News

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

It’s been a good year for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. In November, Fortune Magazine named him its Business Person of the Year for 2012 and now Harvard Business Review taps him the second-best CEO in the universe in an update to its original rankings posted in 2010. Because of HBR’s methodology, Apple CEO Tim Cook was not eligible and his predecessor  Steve Jobs, who passed away last year, was ranked as the top-performing CEO over the past 17 years…

Grazed from TNS. Author: PR Announcement.

Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., has been assigned a patent (8,341,427) developed by Rahul V. Auradkar, Sammamish, Wash., and Roy Peter D’Souza, Bellevue, Wash., for a "trusted cloud computing and services framework." The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A digital escrow pattern is provided for network data services including searchable encryption techniques for data stored in a cloud, distributing trust across multiple entities to avoid a single point of data compromise.

In one embodiment, a key generator, a cryptographic technology provider and a cloud services provider are each provided as separate entities, enabling a publisher of data to publish data confidentially (encrypted) to a cloud services provider, and then expose the encrypted data selectively to subscribers requesting that data based on subscriber identity information encoded in key information generated in response to the subscriber requests, e.g., a role of the subscriber. Appendix A–Additional Non-Limiting Details about Federated Trust Overlays."…

Grazed from SiliconIndia. Author: Editorial Staff.

The year 2012 has certainly been a prolific year for enterprise and cloud computing. With humungous raise in production and revenue, the cloud businesses is really getting itself into its pace which suggests that in 2013, this technology is all set to showcase the tech world its real strength. Even analysts and researchers have predicted that over the next two years, the cloud platform will see a massive doubling in its revenue.

Coming back to 2012, the year not only had to recite tales of success, but also a lot to say on the setbacks. For the past couple of months, we really saw some of the weaknesses in cloud computing which really has caused a bit of concern in the minds of new comers who are willing to shift their applications to the cloud. With that in mind, as compiled by informationweek, here are some of the hails and fails of cloud computing in 2012…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Updated: Oh to be a fly on the wall for the conversations that must be going on between Netflix and Amazon engineers this holiday season.

If you’re not a Netflix subscriber, you may not yet know that issues at Amazon’s US-East data center facility took down Netflix’ streaming service on Christmas Eve — arguably the worst possible time. Starting at 1:50 p.m. PST, as GigaOM’s Janko Roettgers reported, Amazon’s US east facility reported issues with its Elastic Load Balancing service that carried over into Christmas morning.  Interestingly, Amazon Prime Instant Video streaming service, which competes head-on with Netflix and which also runs on AWS, appeared to be unaffected by the US East snafus…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Question: Just how much mission-critical work do financial services firms and companies in other heavily regulated industries put on the public cloud?  Answer: It depends on whom you ask.   IT execs in financial services — including Chris Perretta, CIO and executive vice president of State Street – say they absolutely do not allow the use of Amazon Web Services at all.  Period. (For my purposes, public cloud for now pretty much means AWS). They deal not only with their own top-secret data but with that of clients, which makes a move into a cloud they don’t control a career-limiting decision…

Grazed from Sci-Tech-Today. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

Demand for "cloud -ready" IT workers will grow by 26 percent each year through 2015. So says a new Microsoft -sponsored IDC white paper. If that estimate bears out, that means there could be as many as 7 million cloud-related jobs in the world. That said, IT hiring managers report that the biggest reason they failed to fill an existing 1.7 million open cloud-related positions in 2012 is because job seekers lack the training and certification needed to work in a cloud-enabled world.

The IT sector is seeing only modest growth of IT jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average growth in IT employment sits between 1.1 percent and 2.7 percent per year through 2020. But within the larger IT sector, cloud jobs are gaining major momentum — and the IDC study suggests an urgent need to retrain existing IT professionals and encourage students to pursue cloud-related IT trainings and certifications…

Grazed from ChannelNomics. Author: Chris Gonsalves.

If there’s one thing that could slow the inexorable rush to cloud computing, it’s the dearth of talent trained and certified in the ways of the cloud. A new Microsoft Corp.-sponsored report from analyst firm IDC says 1.7 million cloud-related IT jobs went unfilled in 2012 and the number of available cloud positions will swell 26 percent per year to about seven million by 2015.

This puts the United States’ pace of cloud jobs growth well ahead of general IT employment, which is expected to continue its tepid climb of less than 3 percent through 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The gap — coupled with the state of the IT workforce, which remains unprepared to handle advanced cloud jobs — is putting a renewed focus on retraining tech workers and pushing students to focus on cloud skills and certifications…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

When we started talking about cloud computing five years ago, it meant one thing: Services such as Amazon or Salesforce that customers could self-provision over the Internet and pay as they go.

That’s what we call the "public cloud" today, as opposed to the "private cloud," which refers to the application of public cloud technologies and practices to one’s own data center. And guess what? The public cloud was where the action was in 2012 — and it’s where much of the action is going to be in 2013. According to IDC, businesses will spend $40 billion on the public cloud this year, rising to nearly $100 billion in 2016…

Grazed from WorksManagement.co.uk.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Businesses remain sceptical over cloud services, especially public cloud computing, and while they see the benefits of adoption, perceived risks are causing concern.  That’s chief among findings just release by global IT professionals organisation ISACA, which conducted research among 4,500 senior IT people across 83 countries.

Commenting its 2012 IT Risk/Reward Barometer report, Marc Vael, international vice president of ISACA, says: "What is apparent from this study is the perception of control. Private cloud scores better than both public and hybrid cloud, when asked if the benefit outweighs the risk, yet take up is still relatively low."…

Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Alexei Oreskovic and Alistair Barr.

When Amazon.com Inc CEO Jeff Bezos got word of a project at Google Inc to scan and digitize product catalogs a decade ago, the seeds of a burgeoning rivalry were planted.   The news was a "wake-up" call to Bezos, an early investor in Google. He saw it as a warning that the Web search engine could encroach upon his online retail empire, according to a former Amazon executive.

"He realized that scanning catalogs was interesting for Google, but the real win for Google would be to get all the books scanned and digitized" and then sell electronic editions, the former executive said.  Thus began a rivalry that will escalate in 2013 as the two companies’ areas of rivalry grow, spanning online advertising and retail to mobile gadgets and cloud computing…