Category: News

Grazed from BBC. Author: Editorial Staff.

Users could cut 30% off their bills for on-demand computer services by working out what sort of chip is on the servers they are renting, research suggests. On-demand, or cloud, services are built around what are advertised as clusters of generic computer servers.

But analysis reveals that some clusters are 40% faster than supposedly identical groups of machines. The statistics were gathered by working out which processors were used in the hardware behind the cloud service…

Grazed from Talkincloud. Author: Joe Panatierri.

As Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and SAP (NYSE: SAP) continue to expand their cloud computing platforms, entrenched rival Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) CEO Marc Benioff insists all the competitive moves further validate his company’s cloud strategy. Moreover, Benioff believes a new generation of executives is calling the shots in Corporate America, opening the door even wider for Salesforce.com.

“What I’ve always said is we need that validation [from rivals],” said Benioff last week during CloudForce New York…

Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications. Author: Fred Donovon.

Removing barriers to cloud computing could more than double spending on cloud services in Europe, from €35.2 billion currently to €77.8 billion by 2020, according to a study by IDC on behalf of the European Union (EU).

IDC identified five main barriers to cloud adoption in the EU:

• uncertainty about legal jurisdiction and location of data in the cloud
• concern about the level of cloud security and assessing the trustworthiness of suppliers
• uncertainty about the business case of adopting the cloud model
• fear of lock-in with proprietary systems
• insufficient local support…

Grazed from Application Development Trends. Author: Jeffrey Shwartz.

IBM emphasized Platform as a Service (PaaS) as the next frontier for enterprise cloud computing at its annual Cloud Innovation Forum in New York last week.

IBM spent much of the one-day event, attended by 100 customers and 200 other stakeholders including business partners, talking up PaaS. The company’s PaaS offering, called SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS), is available in pre-release form for customers of IBM’s existing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering, SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) and it will be generally available later this quarter…

Grazed from All Things Digital. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Worldwide spending on information technology will break through the $3.7 trillion level in 2013, propelled in large part by an increase in spending on big-data technology and on cloud computing, according to the latest prediction by the research firm Gartner.

Gartner made its latest prediction at its annual Symposium and ITxpo in Orlando today. If that number feels a little familiar, it’s not your imagination. It was just this April when Gartner said IT spending in 2012 would be exactly that same figure: $3.7 trillion. Turns out it was $3.6 trillion. So what’s a $100 billion between friends?…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

David Meyer will leave Cisco after 15 years to become CTO and chief scientist at Brocade, overseeing the companies SDN efforts with service providers. Brocade is bulking up its software-defined networking and cloud computing strategies at the expense of rival Cisco Systems.

Brocade has hired David Meyer, a 15-year veteran at Cisco who had been a Distinguished Engineer with the networking giant focused on SDNs and the OpenFlow protocol, to head its service provider business as its CTO and chief scientist…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Once again Amazon has experienced significant problems at its big US East data center. The snafu has taken down Foursquare, Reddit, Heroku and other popular websites.

Here we go again. Problems with Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service have brought down Foursquare, Reddit, Heroku, and other popular websites. Once again, Amazon’s U.S. East data center in Virginia is ground zero for these issues, just as it was last June when there were two significant outages…

Grazed from Windows IT Pro. Author: John Howie.

The rise of public cloud computing and its adoption by enterprises of all sizes is presenting challenges to professionals who are charged with the security of the organization’s data. One major issue is that individual departments and even employees can purchase public cloud services — often by using a corporate credit card — without the knowledge or oversight of the IT department. Such purchases can lead to significant governance challenges, introduce unknown risks, and even prevent the organization from meeting its statutory and regulatory compliance obligations.

Public cloud computing is desirable for many reasons, including increased IT agility, reduced time to roll out a new product or service, access to the latest technology not available inside the enterprise — and even a strategy to work around restrictions put in place by the IT departments, such as a limit to the size of email attachments or the types of files that can be sent or received through the email system. For these reasons, many IT departments are considering deploying private clouds, which departments can access and use instead of public clouds. Examples on record include State Street Bank (which expects to see significant savings as well as improve operational efficiency and security of customer data), engineering and construction firm Bechtel Corporation, and chemical company Sinochem Group. However, private clouds aren’t inherently more secure than public clouds and can even be far less secure. In this article, I’ll discuss some pitfalls and make recommendations for securing private clouds…

Grazed from Ping Identity. Author: PR Announcement.

Ping Identity®, The Cloud Identity Security Leader™, today announced that is has joined Box and PhoneFactor to host a special local edition of the Cloud Identity Summit in Washington, D.C. The third of a six-city tour, the Washington, D.C. event will take place on Thursday, November 1, offering IT managers and security professionals the opportunity to explore the role of identity as the new perimeter. Experts from leading practitioners and vendors in identity security will discuss the ways cloud computing, mobile devices and social networking challenge common identity management.

Attendees will hear how cloud identity security can help organizations leverage the Cloud to attract and retain customers, engage with business partners and dramatically improve employee productivity. The Washington, D.C. edition will feature a complete lineup of Cloud identity best practices and insights, including:…

Grazed from Financial Review. Author: Mark Garnett.

Companies are moving their information technology functions to the cloud in increasing volumes – largely driven by the perceived cost benefits. The growth is significant, with Forrester Research predicting that cloud computing will expand from $41 billion in 2011 to about $241 billion in 2020.

The trend means organisations need to consider the legal, privacy and security implications of the change. “Cloud computing” refers to IT storage and processing that is located outside a user or organisation’s local IT infrastructure. This means that traditional IT services, such as the provision of email and the storage of company records or financial systems, are provided over the internet, with services often provided by a third-party company…