Category: News

Grazed from The Foundry. Author: David Inserra.

Last Friday, storms knocked out power for many in the D.C. metro area. Disruptions didn’t end there. Amazon Web Services, a cloud service provider, went down in the storm, taking several major companies’ websites and businesses offline.

Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest, among others, also lost access to e-mail, applications, data, and other business services. While the disruption was brief, bugs in the system caused Amazon servers to spread the problem, leading to delays and disabling of services beyond the affected region.

Cloud computing is the movement of IT capabilities away from individual computers and servers to centralized providers that manage IT resources for their users via the Internet. But if the cloud cannot survive a thunderstorm, can it survive a dedicated cyber or physical attack?…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Gery Menegaz.

In a recent article in Communications World Weekly, a leading Chinese technology news outlet, they noted that Cloud Computing was the fourth IT Industrial Revolution, after Mainframes, PCs, and the Internet. In a related article, KPMG, noted that China is projected to be on par with the U.S. as a future technology innovation leader. And according to the survey that KPMG conducted, the next big breakthrough is predicted to come from Cloud and Mobile.

Communications World Weekly reported accelerated growth patterns and predicts that despite a bumpy ride China’s public cloud computing sector will be a driving innovative force. “A research report shows that in 2012, the cloud computing of China will reach the scale of over 60 billion Yuan in the market and by the end of the ’12th Five-year Plan’ this industrial chain will come to the aggregate of 1 trillion Yuan. This broad market landscape and development space will usher in opportunities for many competitive partners, and also prompt the development of modern information services in China."…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Mike Fratto.

Cisco did a very strange thing June 27: It pushed a firmware update to its Linksys EA4500, EA3500 and EA2700 wireless routers that required router users to create a Cisco Connect Cloud account and changed its privacy policy. The update gave Cisco the rights to collect and retain data. That’s a problem for anyone who cares about privacy and could affect your organization’s governance policy.

There are two troubling aspects to what happened: The first is requiring that end users create a service account before they’re allowed to access the equipment they bought. When the access points shipped there was no such requirement, and when Cisco pushed out the new firmware, some owners were surprised to find they were locked out of the routers.

Brett Wingo, vice president and general manager of Cisco Home Networking, cheekily said in a blog post that the only people affected where those who opted in to automatic updates. ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who owns one of the affected router models, said auto-update was enabled by default. So, pretty much everyone who bought the product was affected. By the way, I turn off auto-updates on everything I own…

Grazed from ERP Cloud News. Author: Editorial Staff.

In an increasingly competitive environment, the benefits of cloud computing are no secret: lower costs, frequent updates and reliable technical support offered on a monthly subscription basis. Most industries are jumping on the bandwagon; while concerns over data security and uptime still exist, the advantages of cloud computing outweigh the setbacks of updating or replacing on-premises enterprise solutions. But when we single out the manufacturing industry, how does a cloud solution really fit into operations?

Cloud Manufacturing

Manufacturers face incredible competition from the global market, and cloud solutions offer a means of differentiation. As this article in SoftwareThinkTank.com shows, a cloud ERP solution can stand as the backbone of a manufacturing organization, providing companies with a way to share the efficiencies inherent in an up-to-date ERP system across all functional areas…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Bob Plankers.

In moving to the cloud, many organizations are opting for private cloud computing environments. This model makes a lot of sense as a method to consolidate IT expenditures and resources, automate tasks and introduce new technologies such as virtualization. Often, this model provides a bridge between legacy systems and new ways of thinking about technology.

Security presents challenges in the public cloud, but you’ve probably already solved many of those challenges in your own data center. Why not use those solutions with centralization and automation to reduce the initial complexity of a cloud project?

Moving to the cloud doesn’t require virtualization

Many enterprise IT shops are moving toward cloud computing while thinking that it’s all about virtualization. In many data centers, a virtualization platform is central to service offerings, but clouds aren’t really defined just by technology. Instead, they involve people, processes, centralization and control. Moving to the cloud promises to consolidate duplicate services within an organization and to automate routine, mindless tasks so that employees are free to work on difficult problems…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Many companies jumped on the software as a service (SaaS) bandwagon because that cloud-delivery model gets their applications up and running fast and uniformly across geographies and business units. On the flip side, SaaS vendors have recreated the same sort of seperate data silos that plagued the client-server computing era.

That’s the problem database pioneer Roger Sippl is attacking with Connection Cloud, his startup that aims not only to free up that SaaS data using the SaaS company’s own APIs and Connection Cloud’s own connectors…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Xath Cruz.

The European Commission’s panel on privacy is planning to promote the concept of cloud computing and aims to endorse it as legal under the continent’s privacy law. In line with this, the commission also encourages organizations and companies to learn how to police themselves better in order to protect data and personal information that is stored remotely via cloud.

Dubbed the Article 29 Working Party, the panel is expected to make recommendations and create guidelines on cloud computing, which will finally address security and privacy concerns that have long hindered wider adoption of cloud computing services outside of the US.

The Article 29 Working Party’s recommendations and guidelines will be included in a report, which will also highlight the benefits of cloud computing and its ability to encourage innovation and economic efficiency. The report emphasizes the European officials’ more practical approach to the role of remote computing in the economy…

Grazed from OpenPR. Author: PR Announcement.

Multi-vendor; mixed technology support and professional services organization, Vitrx, have teamed up with Dynamax, one of the longest standing digital signage providers in the world, to extend the range of its cloud-based services it offers to businesses looking to improve productivity and cost efficiency.

The companies joined forces due to the compatibility of their offers and their commitment to delivering premium customer service. Cloud- based digital signage software- digitalsignage.NET- allows businesses to decrease their printing and travel expenditure by scheduling and sending news and information to a network of screens, from any location with an Internet connection.

With this new product in their portfolio, Vitrx aims to enable companies to communicate smarter not harder enhancing the quality of their communications, as content can be quickly refreshed and amended via the cloud. The software is based on Amazon’s EC2 solution and supports HTML5 technology for real-time data input…

Grazed from NewYork Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

There is something strangely familiar about what is going on in tech. We’re having something like an early-1980s operating system struggle, with corporate survival as the prize.

June’s three big announcements by Apple, Microsoft and Google made plain that we have a new mainstream model for using computers. As one of the participants noted, it is marked by the interaction of “the hardware, and the software and the cloud.”

The three big companies all seem to have a big cloud computing capability, a decent-looking mobile device, and relationships with software developers. Those may be the minimum elements for competition in the new world. The two great challenges are mastering the cloud technology and convincing outside developers to join your team, making things to go inside one or another system…