Category: News

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Sonja Lelii.

Hewlett-Packard Co. today moved its HP Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) out of public beta and into general availability as it tries to take on market leaders Amazon S3 and Google.

HP sells its cloud services to providers and claims it is best suited for Web content, backup and archiving, storage tiering, disaster recovery and "big data." HP’s service-level agreement (SLA) promises 99.95% uptime, and it will pay service credits if it falls below that number.

HP’s strategy is similar to EMC’s with its Atmos cloud object storage platform, which providers can use to build cloud services around. But HP’s most formidable competition will come from Amazon’s established cloud services…

Grazed from AccountingToday. Author: Michael Cohn.

The how-to guide, “10 Steps to a Digital Practice in the Cloud: New Levels of CPA Firm Workflow Efficiency,” is written by John Higgins and Bryan Smith, a pair of CPAs who also hold the Certified Information Technology Professional credential.

Firms need to have a comprehensive technology plan, according to Higgins, because “it’s very easy to invest in the wrong solutions at the wrong time.” That can be expensive, both in terms of dollars and staff time lost, he added.

“The accounting profession has developed a good understanding of the concept of cloud computing, but not its value proposition,” Higgins said. “Firms often have difficulty seeing the strategic value of technology.”…

Grazed from Cloud Tweaks. Author: Rick Watson.

Large scale industrialization of data centers are just but a minor indicator of the extent to which cloud computing has become entrenched across the globe. Most individuals are not aware of the impact of cloud computing on their life, considering that they are not specifically concerned about the intricacies of the tech world. However, soon, most people will demand to know topography of networks they are on, primarily because most human beings are subject to the bandwagon effect. As soon as issues are raised, everyone suddenly gets a voice, resulting to a chain reaction of views and arguments. People will always be human, but it is important for trust issues to be addressed before the bandwagon effect takes over.

Trust is a weight issue, attached to the physical aspect of human beings through a complex network of senses. Business runs on trust. You of course trust that you are alive, however much you have no idea how it feels to be dead. Forgive my digression, but I seek to outline the importance of trust in every aspect of lives, especially with relation to cloud computing…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Paula Rooney.

Like Citrix, Red Hat once hoped to establish its own platform as the de facto standard for open cloud computing.

And like Citrix, the Linux giant backed off that dream in light of the community’s demands for multi-vendor backed open cloud platforms. Citrix donated its CloudStack code to the Apache Software Foundation and Red Hat (which had already donated Deltacloud to the Apache Software Foundation) opted to back the rival OpenStack platform, and reposition its CloudForms Iaas as a hybrid cloud management platform.

In that vein, Red Hat now pushes its homegrown Deltacloud API as one of a number of open APIs that ought to be supported in an open cloud era. In a blog posted August 3, Red Hat announced the completion of Deltacloud 1.0 API and said that it can be used, like CloudForms, as a tool by enterprises for creating a hybrid cloud platform…

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

VMware is going to go up against Amazon, Microsoft, Google and presumably Rackspace with its own public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service developed as Project Zephyr according to CRN, which thinks it could create some channel conflict for vCloud service providers that will have to compete with VMware.

The story is unconfirmed but the book quotes "sources with knowledge of the matter" saying that VMware has been quietly beta testing Zephyr for the last few months on Cisco USC servers and EMC Avamar storage at a big data center space in Nevada.

Apparently it’s afraid if it waits much longer it’ll be closed out. Market share will depend a lot on how aggressive its pricing is.

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

Oracle has managed to squeeze a few more bucks out of SAP for its admitted copyright infringement a few years ago.

Oracle won a handsome $1.3 billion from a jury in 2010, but the judge thought that was over the top and cut it down to $272 million. Instead Oracle opted for a new trial, which was scheduled to start August 27.

However, last Thursday – "to save the time and expense of this new trial" – the pair came to a settlement agreement that guarantees Oracle $306 million in damages plus attorneys’ fees or at least $426 million while it goes off and appeals to try to get the whole $1.3 billion…

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

Apple is in talks to acquire Pinterest rival, The Fancy, according to Business Insider. The fast-growing social e-commerce site is backed by Twitter creator and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

The 20-man start-up calls itself "part store, blog, magazine, and wishlist" and actually has things for sale. Business Insider says it is "much farther along in linking its users to transactions" than Pinterest and takes 10% of any purchases…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

OpenStack, the open source "cloud operating system," has stirred community excitement and attracted a vendor following, including Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, and Red Hat. But until now one thing has been lacking: A high-profile corporate customer willing to talk about its OpenStack implementation.

Today, eBay is announcing that it’s using OpenStack to manage a high-volume dev, test, and experimentation environment where apps are created for eBay Marketplaces. According to Jean-Christophe Martin, Cloud Architect for eBay, the current OpenStack implementation is small, but eBay is looking at extending that footprint as the open source project matures…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

The story of the breach of former Gizmodo staffer Mat Honan’s iCloud account took an interesting turn Sunday with news that the attacker was able to call Apple and convince a customer service employee that he was Honan. While hardly the breach of the century, the situation does highlight a couple hard truths about cloud security when it comes to consumer applications.

1. You’re giving up control. This is a good mantra to keep in mind when considering the use of cloud services. The problem isn’t so much security technology as it is about process, policy and, perhaps, business model. Cloud-storage Dropbox, for example, has experienced a couple of high-profile breaches and security issues owing to the company’s seemingly lax policies about how user information is stored and who has access to it. Then, there’s LinkedIn and its questionable password practices.

With iCloud, the problem seems to be the business model: tying hardware devices to cloud software might be a recipe for disaster. If someone steals Google or Twitter account information, the damage is largely limited to those services and whatever is accessible from them. When someone gets access to iCloud info, it’s lights out on your phone, tablet and laptop, too. At least temporarily, you’re giving control over your physical property — not just your digital life — to a hacker…