Category: News

Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Ben Sullivan.

The producers behind the Hollywood adaptation of Andy Weir’s ‘The Martian’ made no secret of product placing the technology that would save stranded astronaut Mark Watney from potential doom on Mars. GoPro cameras on Watney’s space suit made multiple appearances, and Cisco-powered live video feeds from NASA to Mars also helped Watney grasp on to the thinning straws of hope.

But in real life, another underlying technology used by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) would have been vital to saving Watney’s life: Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing division of Amazon.com. Speaking to TechWeekEurope at AWS’ annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Tom Soderstrom, JPL’s chief technology officer, said that cloud computing would have been instrumental in bringing Mark Watney home…

Read more from the source @ http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/cloud/cloud-management/nasa-aws-the-martian-movie-178582#RqhAUDA0KAmUXwvJ.99

Grazed from The Economist. Author: Editorial Staff.

EVEN before the European Court of Justice (ECJ) struck down the “safe-harbour” privacy pact between the European Union and America on October 6th, data-protection lawyers were in high demand. American clients asked if their firms’ data-flows across the Atlantic would become illegal—and if so, how to cope? The fears were justified. Though the ruling does not “break the internet”, as doom-mongers have it, businesses may have to find awkward and costly workarounds for data transfers, or shift to European data centres. More broadly, it marks a worrying escalation of a transatlantic row over privacy and data protection.

The safe-harbour pact, signed in 2000, was an attempt to bridge cultural and political differences regarding online privacy. The EU sees protection of personal data as a human right; America considers it mainly in terms of consumer protection, which leaves room for trade-offs. The pact allows firms to transfer data from the EU to America if they provide safeguards equivalent to those required by the EU’s data-protection directive (hence “safe harbour”)…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Upon returning from my fourth AWS re:Invent, another jam-packed cloud computing conference in Las Vegas, I’m left thinking about what really stood out. Here are my three big takeaways.

The cloud is still in its early days

Over two days of keynotes, executives from the following companies were among those who made presentations discussing their use of Amazon Web Services’ cloud: General Electric, Capital One, John Deere, BMW and Major League Baseball. If people were wondering before the conference if enterprises are really using this platform, AWS re:Invent 2015 proved that they are…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Cloud computing is about 10 years old. We’re not talking the technology — that’s decades old — but the term "cloud computing" itself. When it got a name, the cloud became a real phenomenon, and after all this time, it’s gone from being the enfant terrible of enterprise computing to the assumed platform for new enterprise computing. That change was clear at this week’s AWS Re:Invent cloud show.

Although computing as a service — what we call the cloud — remains an evolving notion, it is now fundamental to pretty much everything. Whether you’re thinking Internet of things, big data, mobile computing, or gaming, they are all affected by the use of public and private cloud services. In fact, cloud computing as a concept is systemic to most of what we do in the world of computing these days…

Grazed from BackupTechnology. Author: Editorial Staff.

The term “bandwidth” has been used in Electrical Engineering for years to mean “the difference between the upper and lower frequencies in a continuous set of frequencies, measured in hertz”. In the early 1990’s Telcos started to use the term “bandwidth” to describe the volume of data handled and defined it as “the transmission rate of data across a network”. Bandwidth in data transmission is measured in bits per second and it represents the capacity of network connection. Increase in the capacity means improved performance, considering other factors like latency. We will further discuss the effects of utilisation of bandwidth to the challenges associated with cloud computing.

Cloud computing providers usually calculate required bandwidth of customers just by considering the available quantity of bandwidth as well as the mean bandwidth utilisation needed by variety of applications. In addition, cloud computing providers consider latencies in transmission to calculate the required time to upload both the initial backup and all subsequent backups. For that reason, Internet based cloud backup service providers work hard to enhance the overall Internet bandwidth. They also do everything within their power to reduce the amount of data that flows through their pipes…

Grazed from DigitalJournal. Author: Editorial Staff.

AliCloud, Alibaba Group’s cloud computing arm, today announced that it has launched its second data center based in Silicon Valley in the United States, addressing increasing demand for affordable and secure, mission-critical cloud computing while creating an infrastructure for high availability and effective disaster recovery. Cloud customers can apply for the center’s services starting Monday (October 12).

The new facility is AliCloud’s ninth globally and the fourth data center announced in 2015, after its first U.S. data center in March 2015, a Singapore data center announced in August, and an environmentally-friendly lakewater-cooled data center at Qiandao Lake, China in early September. AliCloud also maintains data centers in Beijing, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Shanghai in China, and plans more facilities in other international locations in the Middle East, Asia and Europe in the future…

Read more from the source @ http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/2702166#ixzz3o57QGcYt

Grazed from FedScoop. Author: Greg Otto.

Some of the biggest proponents of cloud computing in the federal government know their data centers are not going to be shut down overnight. So, agencies must figure out how to take advantage of the agility of the cloud while they’re still dependent on legacy data storage systems. That’s easier said than done, said two executives from early cloud adopters within the federal government.

“Hybrid cloud is really difficult,” Chris Webber, the chief cloud architect for the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Lab, told FedScoop at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference this week. “The controls that have to be put in place to manage the transport of data, it’s really tough to pull that off.”…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Barclay Ballard.

Amazon has revealed a pretty substantial piece of hardware for transferring large amounts of data to the cloud. Amazon Snowball weighs a hefty 50 pounds and can be used to store up to 50 TB of data before being shipped to Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS hasn’t really entered the hardware market before, but Snowball does fit the company ethos of helping customers gain access to cloud computing.

Some businesses find data migration to the cloud challenging, particularly when dealing with magnitudes in the order of terabytes or petabytes. Slow Internet speeds or inadequate network infrastructure can make wireless transfers impractical. Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for Amazon Web Services, believes that as the latest addition to the company’s Import/Export service, Snowball can provide a genuine boost for business customers…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itproportal.com/2015/10/08/amazon-snowball-launched-to-help-with-cloud-data-transfer/#ixzz3o56bsXcJ

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Eugene Kim.

Amazon wants its internet cloud service to connect everything from trash cans to hand sanitizer dispensers. At its annual re:Invent developer conference Thursday, Amazon Web Services launched a new internet of things (IoT) platform that helps devices easily connect to cloud applications and send massive amounts of data to be analyzed for future actions.

That means developers will now be able to connect cars, turbines, or even trash cans to AWS services to process data coming out of those devices and come up with meaningful actions. For example, if a hand sanitizer is about to get empty, it can send a signal to the AWS platform and get it filled up in advance…

Read more from the source @ http://www.businessinsider.com/aws-launches-iot-platform-2015-10

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Alex Konrad.

As more devices from cars to thermometers and light bulbs get connected to the Internet, Amazon is the latest tech company to make its bid to play host. Amazon Web Services, the Seattle-based company’s cloud computing unit it launched in 2006, has become an increasingly strategic business for Amazon, with more than 1 million businesses signed up as customers and revenue of $7.3 billion.

To keep up that growth, AWS is increasingly looking to work with companies not traditionally top-of-mind as potential users of web services, unlike the startups and tech companies that host much of their business online through Amazon’s cloud. On Thursday, Amazon announced the AWS IoT, a platform for processing and using data from Internet-connected devices…