Category: News

February 15, 2016 Off

Rackspace Announces Data Connectors, Bridging Gap Between Disparate Data Stores

By David
Grazed from Rackspace

The Rackspace data team today unveiled early access for Data Connectors, which allows customers to intelligently move and analyze data that previously required coding and posed significant difficulties when integrating with BI and data visualization tools. With Data Connectors, and built-in automation for ObjectRocket Elasticsearch, customers can seamlessly connect MongoDB instances to Elasticsearch and Kibana.

February 15, 2016 Off

All Signs Point To The Cloud, But Will IBM i Crowd Follow?

By David

Grazed from ITJungle. Author: Alex Woodie.

You don’t need a weatherman to see that clouds are quickly building. American companies are moving workloads to big public computing clouds from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and others at an unprecedented rate, spurring a massive data center building boom. But will IBM i shops fall in line and move to the cloud? That’s where the forecast gets a little iffy.

There’s an abundance of signals reflecting big uptake of clouds, including public clouds run by the aforementioned companies, as well as private clouds run by managed service providers (MSPs) and IBM business partners. A January study of more than 1,000 tech pros from RightScale, a provider of cloud management software, shows that private cloud adoption grew from 63 percent of surveyed companies to 77 percent. The survey found that four out of five companies have a hybrid cloud strategy (unchanged from 2015), but that nearly every company (95 percent) is running or at least experimenting with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in the cloud…

February 14, 2016 Off

Preventing the abuse of privileged rights in a cloud computing environment

By David

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Bruce Jubb.

There was a time when the lives of those tasked with managing an enterprise’s IT security was, well, simple. Firstly, there were employees; who you knew about and (largely) trusted. You knew who they were, where they sat, what jobs they did, (and so what systems they used). And crucially, when they left.
 
And then there was everyone else. Your job was to keep everyone else outside the perimeter and only let in those who were deemed important and who you trusted.  Well, life ain’t so simple these days and I suspect those now charged with IT security would read that first paragraph and silently weep…
February 14, 2016 Off

Cloud Computing: Who needs faster computers?

By David

 Grazed from TheGuardian.  Author: John Naughton.

Fifty years ago, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of the chip manufacturer Intel described a regularity he had observed that would one day make him a household name. What he had noticed was that the number of transistors that could be fitted on a given area of silicon doubled roughly every two years. And since transistor density is correlated with computing power, that meant that computing power doubled every two years. Thus was born Moore’s law.

At the beginning, few outside of the computer industry appreciated the significance of this. Humanity, it turns out, is not good at understanding the power of doubling – until it’s too late. Remember the fable about the emperor and the man who invented chess. When asked to name his reward, the inventor requested that one grain or rice be placed on the first square of the board, two on the second, four on the third and so on. The Emperor readily agrees, not realising that when you get to the 64th square the pile of rice required would be bigger than Mount Everest…

February 13, 2016 Off

IBM Gains DoD Authorization for Cloud Services

By David

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM has announced that the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has authorized the company to deliver IBM Cloud services at the highest security levels—known as Impact Level 5—for Controlled Unclassified Information as defined by the U.S. Department of Defense.  The DISA authorization enables DoD agencies to take advantage of IBM’s cloud offerings to support applications and manage sensitive data. DISA has granted IBM a "conditional authority to operate" IBM Cloud services hosted at the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory data center in West Virginia, which is owned by the Department of the Navy and leased by IBM.

Big Blue says it is the first cloud provider with a direct connection to the DoD’s internal network known as the Non-Secure Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). The authorization granted by DISA will give other DoD agencies the opportunity ultimately to streamline their authorizations by taking advantage of the thorough process DISA followed…

February 13, 2016 Off

Top CEOs Focusing on Cognitive Computing

By David

Grazed from Sci-Today.  Author: Jeff Cozza.

High-level executives from around the world are beginning to focus more on cognitive computing as the technology threatens to disrupt a variety of different industries, according to IBM. The use of cognitive computing is set to rise dramatically in the coming years, with half of CEOs expecting it to disrupt their sectors.

The news comes from the recent IBM Institute for Business Value study, “Redefining Competition: Insights from the Global C-suite Study — The CEO perspective.” Researchers interviewed more than 5,000 C-level executives worldwide about their perspectives on a variety of technology issues, including the importance of mobile solutions, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things…

February 13, 2016 Off

Culture around cloud needs to change in research community

By David

Grazed from FedScoop.  Author:  Greg Otto.

In a sentiment familiar to those who follow the federal IT community, a number of research experts say the culture around scientific discoveries needs to change if scientists are to fully harness the capabilities of cloud computing.
 
Work like discovering gravitational waves or research tied to the Human Genome Project produce an astounding amount of data, which need to be shared amongst multiple scientific outlets if researchers are to answer the pressing problems of our time. Experts from the public, private and academic sectors all agreed Friday at a Center for Data Innovation event that silos need to be knocked down to make sense of the mountains of data associated with their projects…
February 12, 2016 Off

Cloud Computing: Netflix Now Depends On Amazon More than Ever Before

By David

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Jen Wieczner.

Netflix, which began shifting its billions of hours of film and TV content to Amazon’s cloud in 2008, has finally finished that process. In a post on its blog Thursday, Netflix said it had migrated the last of the data stored in its own facilities to Amazon Web Services—a shift that Netflix credited with its fast speeds and eight-fold membership growth since it began the transition seven years ago.

But Netflix also acknowledged that its reliance on Amazon can come with problems, as illustrated back in September when a glitch in Amazon’s cloud database caused a temporary Netflix streaming outage for some customers. “We have hit some inevitable rough patches in the cloud,” Netflix wrote in its post, referencing an outage on Christmas 2012…

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2016/02/12/netflix-amazon-cloud/

February 12, 2016 Off

Most enterprises plan to boost cloud use this year

By David

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Sharon Gaudin.

The cloud market shows no signs of slowing down, with 90% of enterprises planning to maintain or boost spending on cloud computing this year, according to a survey from Washington, D.C.-based research firm Clutch. The majority of enterprises in the U.S. said they would increase cloud spending in 2016, with 42% eyeing increases of between 11% and 30% and 14% looking to boost cloud spending by 31% to 50%.

Another 7% plan to increase spending by more than 50%. Those increases are consistent with numbers from 2015, according to Alex Miller, an analyst with Clutch. "Businesses are continuing to expand into cloud services and operations," Miller told Computerworld. "More and more companies are either moving to the cloud or moving more operations to it…

February 12, 2016 Off

Cloud Data Security can’t be overlooked in 2016

By David

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Sean Mallon.

The number of cloud users – both corporate and personal – increases dramatically each year. And as these numbers grow, so do the security threats. Cybercriminals realize that many of these cloud providers aren’t as safe as believed and will target this vulnerable data. As a business owner or IT professional, you need to take a long look at security before trusting your data to the cloud.

Growth of the Cloud

Last year, only eight percent of the $1.6 trillion in IT spending was spent on cloud solutions. In 2016, the cloud will make up 60 percent of all IT spending growth. By 2018, that number will balloon to a decisive 100 percent. In other words, cloud computing is growing at maximum capacity. And it’s not just a trend happening at home…