Category: News

Grazed from the Globalist. Author: Peter Morici.

With Walmart sales and profits falling, pundits are asking if the economy is again headed down. Hardly so, even though IBM and other business icons are in trouble. Better competitors — and mostly Americans — who herald a new age of American innovation, are simply squeezing the Arkansas retailer.

Walmart’s recipe for success was simple. Through a detailed knowledge of supplier costs, disciplined supply chain management and low wages for store personnel, it bargained hard with manufacturers and delivered goods at the lowest prices. Unfortunately, its methods were hardly occult and others like Dollar General and Target caught on, undermining the Arkansas behemoth’s competitive edge…

Grazed from FirstPost. Author: Editorial Staff.

Hard-disk drive maker Western Digital is buying SanDisk for about $19 billion. The deal is expected to increase Western Digital’s ability to make flash memory storage chips used in smartphones and tablets. Western Digital needs access to SanDisk’s NAND technology to better compete in the market for solid-state drives used in cloud computing, data centres, smartphones and laptops. With this, Western Digital said it will double its addressable market and expand its participation in higher-growth segments.

"The combined company will be ideally positioned to capture the growth opportunities created by the rapidly evolving storage industry," said Steve Milligan, chief executive officer, Western Digital. Both companies have strong R&D and engineering capabilities and over 15,000 combined patents issued or pending worldwide…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Bob Brown.

Signs that cloud computing is for real are piling up around Carnegie Mellon University’s Tom Dugas, but nothing else brings this home like the fact that the renowned Pittsburgh research school has posted a job opening for its first-ever cloud architect. “Most higher education IT leaders are starting to assign an individual person to be cloud architect or point person for cloud technology,” says CMU’s associate director for client operations.

Dugas (@TomDugas) anticipates that the topic of IT organization transformation will be among many cloud-related issues up for discussion at next week’s annual EDUCAUSE conference in Indianapolis, where he will be wearing multiple hats, including that of co-lead for the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) Cloud Working Group…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Tom Krazit.

You can’t blame companies with huge technology budgets for being conscious of computer security. Today, everything seems to be Internet-connected—and every day there seems to be a headline about a new data breach. Even if industry mentalities have shifted to thinking about a corporate hack as a matter of “when,” not “if,” it’s still paramount to make sure you are doing everything in your power to minimize the risk.

This defensive mindset was a big problem for the budding cloud computing industry in its early days. You want me to store my company’s most sensitive data in the same place as my competitors do? And in the same place as data from scuzzy startups I have nothing to do with? And then let a bookseller host it? No thanks!…

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Black Duck Software, a global leader in automated solutions for securing and managing open source software, today announced a collaboration to establish a secure and trusted model for containerized application delivery by providing verification that application containers are free from known vulnerabilities and include only certified content. This validation is a major step forward in enabling enterprise-ready application containers, and builds upon the strengths of each company – Red Hat’s leadership in container technologies and solutions, including its platform and certification strategy, and Black Duck’s unique position as the provider of the most comprehensive identification and earliest notification technologies of open source vulnerabilities.

Because containers enable consistent operating environments for development, testing, and deployment, they are quickly becoming a mainstream technology. Container security, however – including provenance, certification, policy and trust – has emerged as a challenge for enterprise adoption. A recent survey of global IT professionals commissioned by Red Hat through TechValidate showed that more than 60 percent of respondents identified container security, certification, and image provenance as key issues.

The world has been a-buzz about VDI for several years. For VMware, this journey accelerated in 2007 with the acquisition of Dunes Technology. Dunes Technology gave VMware its initial brokering and provisioning framework. In the beginning and for several years thereafter, it was all about brokering a virtual machine.

Grazed from BusinessKorea.co.kr. Author: Editorial Staff.

South Korea and the E.U. have joined forces for a joint study of core information and communication technology, like 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing. The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (MSIP) chose topics for a Korean-E.U. joint research project, announcing that it will invite specific task forces to carry out the topics for 3 months from Oct. 19 to Jan. 19, 2016.

The Korean government and the European Council have decided to invest 3.6 billion won (US$3.2 million) each in the joint research per year, which totals 14.4 billion won (US$12.8 million) for two years. The two parties have held high-level and working-level talks several times…

Hosted in Azure Public cloud, MARS Fabricallows Gridstore to quickly create a secure environment to analyze the configuration and utilization of an individual workload or complete data center environment. A lightweight agentless MARS Fabric probe is installed at the customer site and data is gathered using standard interfaces such as SMI-S, WMI or System Center Configuration Manager. Gathered data is encrypted and transmitted securely to MARS Fabric server hosted on Azure using protocols such as SSL, or HTTPS. MARS Fabric provides reports and analysis with which Gridstore can specify an HCI solution that is uniquely tailored to a particular user’s needs, without over provisioning and dramatically reducing TCO.

Grazed from DarkReading. Author: Ericka Chickowski.

As the lines blur between data center and cloud provider facility, very few organizations are keeping up with policies and technology geared to handle the shift to dynamic data centers, reports a new study out by the SANS Institute last week. The report shows that even at the most basic level, planning is scarce: fewer than a third of organizations have a strategy in place to tailor security requirements to the mix of environments they use.

“Security teams need to do a lot of thinking to keep up with the rapid diversification? of enterprise computing into a variety of private, public, cloud and traditional environments,” says Dave Shackleford, SANS analyst and author of the report. “Teams that are ahead of the game have already developed strategies describing how traditional and cloud computing models fit together, typically outlining what data or other assets can go to which type of external provider and what conditions should be placed on providers of different types or security levels.”…