Category: News

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

For small to mid-size businesses, the cloud represents opportunities to level the playing field with larger companies with tremendous IT assets. Cloud computing is a natural solution for smaller businesses that can’t make the investments in rooms full of servers, development teams, and data center infrastructure.

Are SMBs jumping on the opportunity yet? Two recent surveys suggest they are embracing cloud for both end-user applications at a rapid clip. And they love the productivity potential cloud-based applications offer. But it’s still uncertain how deeply they are employing cloud solutions for more enterprisey applications.

In a survey of 323 SMBs just released by Spiceworks, a social business site, and sponsored by storage management vendor EMC, 62% report they are using some type of cloud application, up from 48% at the beginning of the year and 28% a year ago. Most of this growth is coming in online file-sharing services (such as Dropbox), but haven’t moved into online productivity offerings in a big way just yet…

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

Apple has quietly offered to buy publicly held AuthenTec Inc for roughly $356 million, according to an SEC filing discovered last Friday.

Fourteen-year-old AuthenTec does sensor-based fingerprint authentication, encryption and identity management for mobile devices.

Two weeks ago AuthenTec signed up Samsung, which Apple is suing for patent infringement, to use its VPN widgetry in its new Android-based Galaxy smartphones and tablets. There was speculation the alliance provoked Apple to act…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Hadoop is one of those hot topics in cloud computing right now, and if industry experts are to be believed, there will be a huge channel opportunity in Hadoop going forward — particularly related to big data in the cloud. Now, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HP) and Cloudera are partnering to simplify the management of Hadoop Cluster environments while also speeding up deployments.

The two companies plan to jointly develop a set of open standards-based reference architectures for simplifying management and accelerating deployment of Hadoop Cluster environments. That should come in handy for Cloudera and HP partners that are helping customers deal with Big Data in the cloud using Hadoop. With the growth and adoption on an upward curve, the channel can use tools that make it easier to get Hadoop solutions up and running faster and with minimal fuss.

Under the terms of the agreement, Cloudera Enterprise and future products from Cloudera will be available from HP or bundled in HP AppSystem for Apache Hadoop…

Grazed from RestaurantNews.com. Author: PR Announcement.

ManageXpress, a cloud computing business enterprise that includes the following modules: accounting, sales, inventory, help desk, hotel and a restaurant, all fully integrated.

The restaurant system supports most types of sales such as walk-in, catering, room service, airline catering and more. It is fully integrated with other optional modules: accounting, customers, vendors, inventory, hotel management module and help desk.

All restaurant sales will be automatically recorded in the daily general ledger. Your balance sheet and income statement will be ready to be generated on a daily basis…

Grazed from FierceBioIT. Author: Ryan McBride.

As promised, Illumina ($ILMN) has hit the market with a cloud computing system for genomics data, building off its leadership in DNA sequencing to grab a piece of the growing bioinformatics side of the genomics game. And the San Diego-based company wants to make the decision to use to its BaseSpace computing product an easy one: Customers get 1 terabyte of free storage and variant analysis and sequence alignment for all data from the company’s sequencers at no cost.

Computer science has grown in importance to understanding decoded genomes. Illumina has helped drive down the cost of decoding the 3 billion bases of human DNA, rapidly closing in on $1,000 per genome, putting the technology within reach for hospitals and labs that might not have bothered 5 years or so ago when that price tag was in the millions. But labs can spend many times more than the cost of sequencing a genome to interpret the huge amounts of information from decoding DNA, with powerful computers and software analytics consuming much of that additional cost. BaseSpace also puts the data in the cloud, enabling people in different locations to share the information more easily than shipping it from one place to another…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: David Canellos.

In a lot of ways, changes in enterprise technology have mirrored consumer technology trends over the last few years. Just look at mobility, social apps, and cloud computing as examples. And whether you view the crossover as advantageous, overly risky, or merely inevitable, it’s certain that enterprise IT security must adapt quickly to the new challenges presented, including overcoming cloud data security, cloud data residency, and cloud compliance issues.

A series of recent articles and industry analyst reports I have read shows the clear trend that business-critical apps like CRM, storage, and collaboration – enterprise IT’s mainstays – are now moving towards cloud and mobile, despite inherent risks. In the case of mobile, workers are simply more productive and comfortable using their smartphones, laptops, and tablets to access company information of all types from a variety of locations. Similarly with the cloud, the benefits are simply too compelling for the business organizations inside of the enterprise. And rather than burying their heads in the sand, enterprise IT managers need to adapt security practices accordingly, or ban the use of personal devices and cloud altogether – an unlikely choice given recent trends…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

A Nexus of converging forces — social, mobile, cloud and information — is building upon and transforming user behavior while creating new business opportunities, according to Gartner, Inc.

Although these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own, together they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders. As such, the Nexus of Forces is the basis of the technology platform of the future.

"In the Nexus of Forces, information is the context for delivering enhanced social and mobile experiences," said Chris Howard, managing vice president at Gartner. "Mobile devices are a platform for effective social networking and new ways of work. Social links people to their work and each other in new and unexpected ways. Cloud enables delivery of information and functionality to users and systems. These forces of the Nexus are intertwined to create a user-driven ecosystem of modern computing."…

Grazed from Financial Times. Author: Raymond Barrett.

US dominance of the global cloud computing sector is being threatened by an increase in protectionist regulations overseas coupled with state aid programs that are funding potential competitors, a congressman, a sector analyst, and the president of a sector trade organization told PaRR.

The cloud computing industry, which involves providing IT services over the Internet, is expected to rise in value from USD 41bn in 2011 to nearly USD 250bn by 2020.

However, mandates requiring that data generated within a country be stored on servers in that country are anticompetitive and should be combated by the US government, according to Daniel Castro, senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Netflix has a gift for anybody who needs to ensure their cloud-hosted applications keep running even if some of the virtual servers on which they’re running die. It’s called a Chaos Monkey — but don’t worry, this monkey is very tameable and is now open source.

The video rental and streaming giant is one of the world’s biggest consumer of cloud computing resources — it hosts the majority of its infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services cloud — and Netflix developed Chaos Monkey as a method for ensuring that its system is capable of healing itself or continuing to run should instances fail. “Over the last year,” Netflix cloud engineers Cory Bennett and Ariel Tseitlin wrote in a blog post announcing the open source version, “Chaos Monkey has terminated over 65,000 instances running in our production and testing environments. Most of the time nobody notices, but we continue to find surprises caused by Chaos Monkey which allows us to isolate and resolve them so they don’t happen again.”…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Thomas J. Trappler.

When contracting for cloud-computing services, one challenge is that there may be more parties involved than your company and the cloud vendor. The vendor might outsource some of the services covered in the contract, or it could end up under different ownership after a merger or acquisition. On the client end, you might choose to work with a cloud broker. Because the introduction of third parties can increase risk, it’s essential for potential cloud clients to identify third parties before adopting a cloud service, thoroughly understand their roles and ensure that their responsibilities are effectively addressed in the contract.
Outsourcing

You need to know whether your cloud-computing vendor is itself outsourcing to another cloud-computing vendor. For example, a SaaS vendor, such as Dropbox, could be running its service in the data center of a third-party IaaS vendor, such as Amazon Web Services. This can increase the complexity of a cloud-computing contract, especially in determining which vendor is responsible for which action. To mitigate risk, the contract should obligate the cloud vendor to do the following:…