Category: News

Grazed from MIT. Author: Adam Conner-Simons.

CSAIL researcher Matei Zaharai was recently profiled by The Economist in a story about the state of cloud-computing start-ups. Zaharia is co-founder of Databricks, a promising startup whose data-crunching technology Spark has drawn the attention of prominent developers, as well as a little company called IBM.

From The Economist:

“When my hair gets long, I kind of look like him.” Matei Zaharia jokingly evades the question about what he thinks of being compared to Bill Gates. But the 30-year-old Romanian-Canadian computer scientist is indeed reminiscent of Microsoft’s former boss in his early days: he is considered one of the most brilliant geeks of his generation; he has developed an exciting new technology, called Spark, to crunch data; and he is one of the founders of a promising startup, Databricks…

Grazed from CrucialCIO. Author: Evangeline Alfeche.

On Sept. 22, Hewlett-Packard has announced its plans to lay off about 30,000 workers in the next three years as it moves on with its restructuring. With HP Enterprise and HP Inc., the CEO plans to focus on the former company that will work more on developing cloud computing and other high-growth technologies.

As of now, CIOs focus more on cloud infrastructure services and mobile devices and less on hardware and data centres. The recent move clearly shows the tech giant’s struggle for survival in a changing world of corporate computing. In the end of July this year, HP has announced its agreement with ActiveState to buy Stackato at an undisclosed amount…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

When it comes to analytics there are primarily two types of use cases. The first generally involves fairly sophisticated end users that access analytics applications via a traditional user interface. Less conventionally, however, more users of other types of applications are starting to invoke analytics engines via an application programming interface (API).

Case in point is Salesforce, which at the recent Dreamforce 2015 conference announced that it has opened the programming model surrounding the Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud. Anna Rosenman, senior director of product marketing for Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud, says that while the first version of this cloud offering was aimed primarily at line of business users, Salesforce is now also focusing on recruiting independent software vendors (ISVs) to make use of Salesforce Analytics Cloud as part of applications that invoke Salesforce customer records…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/analytics-becomes-next-great-cloud-service

Grazed from TheStack. Author: Chris Kelly.

What does it mean to have agility with cloud computing and how can it be an advantage for enterprises? Agility is not a new concept in the IT industry. However, the proliferation of cloud computing has shone a spotlight on how technology is enabling companies to be more agile. When CIOs and CTOs refer to agility in the context of cloud computing, it can mean two things.

The first is a reference to cloud agility in the technological sense: The ability to achieve true cloud agility is tied to the rapid deployment of computer resources. Cloud environments have the capability to provide new compute instances or storage in minutes, compared to weeks or months taken in traditional IT shops…

Grazed from CloudComputingNews. Author: James Bourne.

Japanese IT giant Fujitsu has announced new functionality which the company claims will help CIOs to deliver hybrid IT environments without compromising compliance and data security. The company is announcing Fujitsu Cloud Services Management, which builds on the previous Fujitsu Cloud Integration Platform and aims to enable unified management of various cloud environments, across different departments within an organisation.

Fujitsu is also announcing an extension of its range of standardised managed services, and says it continues to invest in cloud platforms. As this publication reported, last year the IT giant ploughed over £1 billion into strengthening its infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) base. According to Fujitsu, the company grew its global year on year IaaS revenues by 49% last year ,with 91% growth in its virtual cloud IaaS business…

Grazed from CSO. Author: Ben Rothke.

When we wrote our first PCI application security article Who’s Guarding the Data Bank? in 2008, commercially available cardholder tokenization was in its infancy. Generally speaking, data tokenization usually refers to a process through which cardholder data (usually the Primary Account Number or PAN) is replaced with a substitute cyphertext value known as a token.

The token is typically generated via a strong, one-way publicly known mathematical hashing algorithm. If the one-way cryptographic algorithm is suitably strong and utilizes a known publicly validated mathematical algorithm, the resultant cyphertext is no longer considered to be cardholder data as defined by the PCI SSC. It does not require additional obscuring or encryption as the process cannot be reversed to reconstitute the original data (in this case the PAN) short of a brute force ‘dictionary’ based attack…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Advances in software architecture over the last eight to 10 years have led to more complex and dynamic software architectures in the form of distributed systems. Despite this progress, today’s software applications, web-based or not, continue to still either provide a slower response or become completely non-responsive too often.

Utilising software like Chaos Monkey, which challenges a software application’s distributed systems by taking random instances offline, allows developers and system architects to test their designs well before the unexpected, yet inevitable system failure does occur. With this, we aim to show how to design applications that contain an Agile-friendly framework to gracefully handle component failure in a distributed system to minimise downtime…

Grazed from Cavium. Author: PR Announcement.

Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, service provider wired and wireless networking, will be participating at 2015 OVH Summit at Paris, France on 24th Sept 2015. OVH Group is one of the largest cloud computing and hosting providers in the world and the largest hosting provider in Europe. In its booth, Cavium will be demonstrating popular cloud workloads running on ThunderX® based servers deployed in RunAbove™ Cloud, the OVH Group’s site devoted to labs and trying new technologies.

At the Summit developers and customers will be able to login into ARM® based multi-tenant environments demonstrating popular cloud workloads including NGINX, Cassandra, MemcacheD and MySQL. This provides developers the opportunity to experience the advantages of RunAbove’s ARM based cloud offerings and to speak directly with our technical experts…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Robert Hof.

IBM’s Watson became famous in 2011 when the artificial intelligence-driven supercomputer handily beat the two best players ever on the TV game show Jeopardy. During a demonstration on Sept. 21 of what it has learned since then, it played another role: expert debater. Asked to present an argument that “Wikipedia is reliable,” it pored over some 4 million entries in the crowdsourced encyclopedia.

In nearly natural-sounding English, Watson presented several reasons why it should indeed be considered reliable, concluding politely, “I hope I have convinced you to support my view.” But more significant than the demonstration, which was a scripted version of what Watson is actually doing in IBM labs, was the setting: one of the biggest tech startup conferences of the year in San Francisco…

Grazed from Dell. Author: Shelly Kramer.

When it comes to the enterprise and the hybrid cloud, and what CIOs need to know about that, let’s start here: Nine out of 10 IT decision makers say embracing the hybrid cloud for their business is necessary for building a future-ready enterprise. Odds are that those same nine out of 10 CIOs are still struggling to agree on exactly what the term “hybrid cloud” actually means.

That’s because hybrid cloud is a bit of an “umbrella term,” covering all sorts of collaborative scenarios. That said, it almost always requires the intermingling and central managing of public or private off-site cloud technology, along with some in-house IT—both operating independently of one another—and both able to communicate over encrypted connections. Hybrid cloud also describes the general coordination of two or more clouds…

Read more from the source @ https://powermore.dell.com/technology/the-enterprise-and-hybrid-cloud-what-cios-need-to-know/