Category: News

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Dean Takahashi.

Adobe is announcing today a set of cloud-based tools for game developers. The tools take advantage of the new cloud-computing trend, where web-connected data centers host subscription-based software. Hosted in the Adobe Creative Cloud service, the tools enable developers to access a centrally located suite of tools for making their titles. The aim is to streamline the game-development process from creation to final deployment.

Adobe says that developers who use its tools can access an audience of 1.3 billion worldwide on PCs and more than 500 million on smartphones and tablets, 20 times the reach of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Rick Blaisdell.

Speaking of Laws and Regulations Governing the Cloud Computing Environment, we cannot ignore the latest cybersecurity bills proposed this year. There have been many cyber bills proposed, but none was as important as the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, supported by the Obama Administration. Cybersecurity is a top administration priority for Obama’s second term. His approach to IT security will influence the U.S cloud computing environment over the next four years.

When it comes to cloud computing, security is top-of-mind for each institution, public and private. In a recent study, defense contractor Lockheed Martin and its Cyber Security Alliance partners acquired feedback from government agencies in an effort to measure attitudes around cloud computing and cybersecurity. 85% of government technology decision makers cite cybersecurity as a high priority, with at least one or more related initiatives underway…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

The enterprise IT market is undergoing a radical shift thanks to cloud computing. On-demand computing has added agility but also increased complexity, and Okta, a startup that helps track who can access what corporate assets, has raised $25 million to bring identity management into the future.

Okta, an almost-four-year-old startup pushing a new type of identity management aimed at cloud-based enterprise applications, has raised $25 million in third-round funding. This round brings the San Francisco-based company to $52 million in total funding. New investor Sequoia Capital led the round with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate also participating…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

AMD’s Opteron 4300 and 3300 processors will combine performance and power efficiency for such environments as cloud computing and Web hosting. Advanced Micro Devices is aiming for cloud providers and smaller businesses with new power-efficient Opteron server chips.

The nine new Opterons, introduced Dec. 4, are based on AMD’s new Piledriver architecture and are being targeted at the midrange and entry-level segments for use in servers that can process high levels of Web-based transactions in such environments as cloud computing, virtualized infrastructures and Web hosting, according to company officials…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Piston Cloud Computing is one of the leading companies in the Open Source OpenStack effort. Piston is now getting some new leadership of its own, appointing industry veteran Jim Morrisroe as CEO.

Piston Cloud was founded by Joshua McKenty, one of the leaders of the open source Nebula platform at NASA, that became the core Nova compute module in OpenStack. McKenty had previously held the role of CEO and will now be the CTO. Morrisroe had previously been the President and General Manager of Zimbra, an open source email startup that was acquired by Yahoo in 2007 and then sold to VMwarefor in 2010…

Grazed from DataCenterJournal. Author: Jeff Clark.

Cloud computing has become a fixture in the IT landscape over recent years. Some debate has even arisen over whether the development of cloud computing counts as evolution or a revolution. Leaving such questions to others (evolution and revolution both signify change, perhaps simply at a different rate or by more or less gradual steps), a brief (and broad) look at the history of the cloud may provide some indicators as to where it’s headed next.

Origins—Maybe

The origins of the cloud are often seen in mainframe computing in the last century. This is a matter also up for some debate, as some cloud proponents like to treat cloud computing as an entirely new phenomenon. Skeptics (or, perhaps, just less excitable types) sometimes see the cloud as nothing new at all, but rather just a rebranding of a computing model that has been around for decades. As with most such arguments, reality is probably somewhere in between. The fundamental model of centralized resources certainly can be traced to mainframe…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

iSoftStone Holdings Limited ("iSoftStone" or "the company," NYSE: ISS), a leading China-based IT services provider, today announced that it has signed an agreement with IBM and the Xiangyang city government to co-build an IBM Central China Cloud Computing Center of Excellence (CCoE) in the city of Xiangyang in China’s Hubei province.

As a sub-center city in Hubei, Xiangyang has become one of China’s largest automotive industry bases in which many manufacturers of vehicles, engines, and other vehicle parts are located. The IBM CCoE, located in Xiangyang and taking all of Central China as its service area, aims to build the first cloud platform to integrate the information needs of the automotive industry supply chain in China…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Robert Shaw.

In 1992, the CME Group launched the first electronic trading platform, which heralded a completely new age for anyone with capital to spare. Electronic trading and money transfers meant a whole new world of opportunity for potential investors.

In essence, the Internet freed wealthy (and even not-so-wealthy) investors to move their money wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, at a negligible cost. The result has been hedge funds, day traders, a huge uptick in emerging market investments, and a veritable explosion of highly complex “financial instruments.” (Plus, grandpa gets to trade stocks at home.)…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: John Omwamba.

Three areas of cloud computing are the crisis points of security breaches. Were it not for Software as a Service (SaaS) programs, there would be no malware. Similarly, but for the openings in the server connections in a network or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), cases of mistrust between proxies would never be an issue. Lastly, were it not for the break in the wall of Platform as a Service (PaaS) as the development platform where hackers can find a field day, there wouldn’t be any security concerns for the cloud community.

Still, the evolving nature of traditional antivirus giants may one day become the saving grace against hardware and cyber crimes that center on mistrust. Though antivirus is like a physical injection, it still qualifies as an all-embracing technology that has legal implications. For example, McAfee, one of the biggest antivirus providers has migrated into the cloud with the aim to certify server networks and a collection of IP sites in a certain domain with particular security details. If the cloud computing providers breach these enforcements, they stand to lose their support by the antivirus companies while their clients may learn that their data stays unguarded…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

InfoWorld’s IT advice columnist Bob Lewis reached out to me last week after my blog post "How AWS can conquer enterprise IT’s resistance to public clouds" with a few ideas. He suggested we should take a page out of the early PC and Web playbooks to help readers understand how to match up the new technology with the old problems. For example, we could use Amazon Web Services — or any cloud computing technology — to address business problems that would be impractical to deploy on traditional IT platforms.

Indeed, cloud computing providers tend to push their technology as the solution to any and all business problems. Unfortunately, there is not a universal fit for cloud computing technology, so you have to be careful to match the business problem you’re looking to solve with the technology that best addresses it. To paraphrase James Carville, the political strategist for former President Bill Clinton, it’s the fit, stupid…