Category: News

Grazed from The Fiscal Times.  Author: Susan McGee.

For more than a decade, we’ve all been referring glibly to “cyber space” – that place where misdirected e-mails end up; the home of countless websites peddling discount-priced Viagra; the source of music and movies that stream almost magically onto our tablet devices. Now cyber space, under its proper name of “the cloud,” has become one of the hottest investment trends around – it even has its own exchange-traded fund, the First Trust ISE Cloud Computing Index Fund (SKYY) to prove it. Over the last three years, the index on which that ETF and other investment products have been based has soared 235.53 percent…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Allen Oguis.

It is a common reality that people spend a lot of time collecting data and then finding ways to store it. 

 To illustrate this scenario, let’s start on the most basic level of computing. Say for instance you are downloading and saving files like movies, music and photos. You store these in your hard drive. But when there is no more space for new data and you don’t want to delete any of your old files, what do you do? You buy a bigger hard drive, of course. The more data you collect, the more space you need…

Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Richard Beales.

Cloud computing and cybersecurity are both hot, fast-growing markets. But faith in the cloud took a knock with outages at Amazon and elsewhere in 2011. And the hacking of targets from Sony to Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson, whose email was broken into, underlines the need for better security.

Keeping data and services on someone else’s servers in the so-called cloud – all the while just clicks away – means companies don’t have to invest up front. They pay for what they need, and scaling up is easy. Hence the fast growth observed by research firms like Forrester, which pegs the cloud market at more than $60 billion by the end of 2012…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Frank Ohlhorst.

Once viewed as the formula for desktop PC provisioning and management roles, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) technology is moving into the mainstream via a new path, as a solution for business services.

Most enterprise administrators have viewed Virtual Desktop Infrastructure as a way to deliver enterprise desktops to users more efficiently. However, VDI can deliver more than just a typical business desktop; the technology can also be used to deliver specialized business services.

A case in point is bank hardware vendor Diebold, which is now running a pilot program to deliver ATM (Automated Teller Machine) services via VDI. Diebold’s program aims to transform how enterprises deliver business services by divorcing the dedicated/proprietary hardware from the business service through virtualization technology….

Grazed from CRN.  Author: Andrew R. Hickey.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) gained more vocal opponents from the cloud computing and Web community this week as DreamHost and Domain.com publicly denounced the bill.

DreamHost’s and Domain.com’s moral opposition to the proposed legislation, which is currently making its way through Congress, comes as rival Go Daddy faces a boycott and mass customer exodus over its support of the Hollywood-backed bill that, on the surface, seeks to stop online piracy and copyright infringement.

The companies also join a growing list of tech top dogs speaking out against SOPA. Some of the bill’s most vocal opponents include Google, Twitter, Facebook, and AOL…

Grazed from VMBlog.com.  Author: David Marshall.

Global studies prove that ‘cloud services’ could add US $800bn in net new business revenue by end of 2013.

The time when IT was just a support function to a few businesses around the world is over. Global politics and the global economy are being shaped by IT. For the IT leader to survive and sustain in this environment they must lead by consistently changing the strategies and re-create IT. This new era brings with it urgent and compelling forces : the cloud, social, mobility and an explosion in information.

Fleming Gulf Conferences launches Cloud Computing Imperative 2012 to be held on 12-13 March followed by a cloud security workshop programme on 14 Marchin Dubai – UAE, which will set the stage for IT specialists from public, private and government entities to network with industry peers, share experiences and learn how to view and implement Cloud and its security…

Grazed from The BrainYard.  Author: David F. Carr.

Before I try to rank social business stories, let me explain what I’m talking about.

Someone asked me to define "social business" the other day, and my take is that it’s broader than just "enterprise social networking" (social media applied inside the firewall) but still ought to be construed to mean serious business applications of social media, beyond publishing, advertising, and marketing. Naturally, the consumer applications of social media are serious business for companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn, but I’m more interested in social collaboration technologies and techniques that can be applied to any business–the enterprise 2.0 stuff…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Ed Scannell and Stuart Johnston.

Despite slow adoption by enterprise IT in the years since cloud computing emerged, 2012 may turn out to be the year when cloud technologies finally begin to gain parity with more traditional data center staples such as virtualization and tape libraries.

TechTarget’s 2012 IT Priorities Survey found that a growing number of enterprises — some 24.1% — plan to grow their expenditures for cloud services over the next year. In fact, 27% of respondents said that cloud computing initiatives were viewed with high importance at their companies. Another 53% rated the importance of their cloud projects as medium…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Sridhar Sarathy.

Cloud Computing is definitely the biggest trend in the market. However, the transition to cloud computing won’t realize its full potential until more vendors and buyers fully understand security requirements in the cloud. If you’re overseeing your company’s migration to the cloud, you need to ask some tough questions and consider getting an assessment done by a third-party before committing to the migration. 

The questions can be broadly classified in one of the following categories –

1. Can you ensure segregation of my data from that of your other customers?…

Grazed from InternetEvolution.  Author: Jerry Bishop.

When Congress passed the fiscal 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last week, it may have done more for cloud computing than any other organization to date.

Now that his objections have been addressed, President Obama is expected to sign the final version of the NDAA (HR1540) into law. The majority of news coverage of the act has focused on controversial provisions for the indefinite detention of US citizens who are suspected of terrorism, but the cloud computing industry and IT departments should focus on “Section 2867: Data Servers and Centers.”…