Category: News

December 22, 2012 Off

2012 will go down as the year of cloud computing

By David

Grazed from RGC.  Author: Steve Cerocke.

2012 has been a challenge and a year of recovery and change for Northern Nevada. If you are reading this, then you have survived the end-of-time hype of the Mayan calendar prophecies and probably are resigned to continue your march toward the new year. As you contemplate the beginning of a new calendar, it is a good time to review 2012 and see where past developments portend new opportunities.

One of the biggest local announcements was Apple’s decision to build a data center and office space in the region. While this is great news for our local economy, the real benefits will come from the name recognition and the diversification that this type of industry can bring. Technology-focused businesses like Apple, Intuit and Microsoft attract and develop a new type of workforce that will positively influence the economy, education and our community for years to come…

December 22, 2012 Off

Cloud Jobs: 7 Million In 3 Years, IDC Says

By David
Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Paul McDougall.

Cloud computing, and related areas like virtualization and data management, will create 7 million jobs over the next three years, according to a new study published by Microsoft and IDC. The study also claimed that currently there are 1.7 million open cloud jobs worldwide that organizations are having a tough time filling.

"Despite modest growth in the IT sector overall in the U.S., cloud-ready jobs are increasing as we head into 2013," said Cushing Anderson, a program VP at IDC, in a statement. "With this increase comes the harsh reality that workforces around the world are steps behind when it comes to attaining the skills necessary to thrive in the cloud computing industry."…

December 22, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: ARM Launches Security Joint Venture

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

ARM has just given Intel another reason to chew its lip.  The British mobile chip designer has launched a promised joint venture in mobile security called Trustonic that’s gotten the backing of companies like MasterCard, Sprint, Cisco, Samsung, Nvidia and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.   ARM owns 40% of the new company and its two partners, Gemalto, a security ISV in Amsterdam, and Giesecke & Devrient, a payments house in Munich, each have 30%.

Former ARM VP Ben Cade has been named Trustonic’s CEO. The venture will be headquartered in Cambridge, England, where ARM lives and will have offices around the world…

December 22, 2012 Off

Voltage, PerspecSys Partner for Cloud Data Encryption Solutions

By David

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud applications encryption is coming up again, and this time it’s two companies working together in the hopes of improving the security of cloud apps and the data contained therein. Voltage Security, which is known for its data-centric encryption and key management solutions, and PerspectSys, an enterprise cloud data protection solutions vendor, have combined efforts to create a solution the vendors promise will increase the level of security and application usability when it comes to cloud data protection.

The solution includes Voltage’s Format-Preserving Encryption (FPE) technology, which has been integrated with PerspecSys’ Cloud Data Protection Gateway product. The end solution uses Voltage’s end-to-end encryption and stateless key management technologies and PerspecSys’ cloud data protection platform. The goal is to give enterprises more control over their sensitive data—and protect it before it even leaves the corporation’s environment for processing and storage in the cloud…

December 22, 2012 Off

How cloud computing, tablets will reshape the desktop

By David
Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Dan Sullivan.

IT departments are embracing both cloud computing and mobile devices for their multiple benefits. At first, these two technologies may seem to be fairly independent; mobile technology focuses on driving efficiencies in data centers, while the cloud brings new levels of flexibility and usability to end users. Both technologies are valuable on their own, but enterprise potential is amplified when mobile and cloud are used together.

Some functionalities that tablets lack can be found in cloud computing resources. For starters, most mobile device applications are designed for non-desktop platforms, like Android and iOS, and they tend to have a narrower range of functionality than desktop applications. Though tablets offer more mobility than even ultra-light laptops, they lack the substantial storage and are not designed to compete head to head with workstations or laptops when it comes to compute-intensive operations. There are a number of ways to meld tablets and cloud computing to deliver desktop-like functionality, and offer alternatives to traditional desktop experiences…

December 22, 2012 Off

Amazon Web Services to accommodate big data storage

By David
Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Joab Jackson.

Eyeing the growing market for big data analysis, AWS (Amazon Web Services) has introduced a storage package, called High Storage, that can offer fast access to large amounts of data.  High Storage, an Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) package, is designed to run data intensive analysis jobs, such as seismic analysis, log processing and data warehousing, according to the company. It is built on a parallel file system architecture that allows data to be moved on and off multiple disks at once, speeding throughput times.

"Instances of this family provide proportionally higher storage density per instance, and are ideally suited for applications that benefit from high sequential I/O performance across very large data sets," AWS states in the online marketing literature for this service. The company is pitching the service as a complement to its Elastic MapReduce service, which provides a platform for Hadoop big data analysis. AWS itself is using the High Storage instances to power its Redshift data warehouse service…

December 22, 2012 Off

Red Hat Buys ManageIQ, Gains Hybrid Cloud Tools

By David
Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Red Hat will acquire virtualization environment manager ManageIQ for $104 million to beef up the capabilities of Red Hat Virtualization 3.1, its own virtualization management console.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization generates and manages virtual machines run by the KVM hypervisor found in the Linux kernel. ManageIQ was an early fosterer of management in the multi-hypervisor virtual environment. In this early, 2009 look at the company, ManageIQ CEO and co-founder Joe Fitzgerald talked about management problems in the more dynamic world of virtual machines…

December 22, 2012 Off

Cloud computing: Dare to be boring

By David
Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

Cloud computing is one of the most exciting technologies to come along in a very long while. This is largely due to the race in the marketplace to provide the most innovative cloud features and functions. It’s a race to keep up with the hype; it’s also a race to stay or become relevant. However, could all that excitement be masking the true purpose of cloud computing?

Cloud computing should have the objective to provide a core foundation of infrastructure and business processes on demand, and we should use those resources to drive our business. If cloud computing works correctly, the storage and compute systems it provides, or the applications it serves up, should function like any other utility we use: It should just work, and eventually, we don’t even think much about it. In other words, it should become boring…

December 22, 2012 Off

Cloudy Skies Ahead: 3 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2013

By David
Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Raj Sabhlok.

Cloud computing continues to be one of the most hyped topics in IT. Even Gartner suggests that cloud computing has moved beyond the peak of inflated expectations, with many achieving meaningful success.

I suspect nearly every business or individual uses a cloud application or service today. As consumers, every time we access Gmail or Facebook, we are buying into the cloud paradigm. Businesses have adopted SaaS applications for accounting, expense reporting, email and a “host” of other business applications.

So, it would seem as if cloud computing is fairly mainstream, right? Well, yes and no. Based on my predictions below, I anticipate an even broader adoption of cloud computing in 2013 as companies seek to leverage its inherent benefits

December 21, 2012 Off

Alfresco takes open source content management to the Amazon cloud

By David

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Ted Samson.

Signaling Amazon Web Services’ steady rise toward enterprise acceptance, Alfresco today unveiled three versions of its open source ECM (enterprise content management) platform for AWS, ranging from fully hosted to a hybrid-cloud version. Alfresco joins the ranks of such companies as CloudStack, F5, Eucalyptus, and SAP that have released offerings and support for the Amazon cloud — despite high-profile outages AWS has suffered this past year. The more vendors that hop aboard the AWS wagon, the more difficult it will be for AWS rivals like Oracle, Rackspace, and Microsoft to gain traction.

Alfresco’s ECM, designed for secure collaboration and file-sharing, will be available in three AWS flavors. Customers can opt for the full SaaS application, which Alfresco described as a delivering "simple, business-class collaboration with mobile access and file sharing."…