Category: News

September 26, 2015 Off

Placing the Need Before the Cloud

By David

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

Arguing over which kind of cloud is “best” for the enterprise is like arguing over what kind of apple tastes better than the others. Some people like the crispy sweetness of the Red Delicious, others the floral spiciness of the Courtland or the classic apple-taste of the Macintosh. And then the criteria change completely if you plan to bake a pie, make applesauce or press some cider.
 
The best cloud, therefore, is obviously the one that satisfies strategic and operational objectives to the highest degree, which means that most enterprises are going to rely on a mix of public, private and hybrid infrastructure to get the job done…
September 26, 2015 Off

Tea traceability cloud launched

By David

Grazed from TaipeiTimes.  Author: Chen Wei-Han.

The Council of Agriculture has developed a tea traceability system using cloud computing to allow consumers to trace the source and production of tea, while using Facebook to provide instant advice on pest prevention and control to farmers.  To boost the quality and traceability of tea amid recent pesticide scares involving tea drinks, the council’s Tea Research and Extension Station on Tuesday said that it launched an online platform for tea farmers and enterprises to list the information of each product batch, which consumers can access via a QR code attached to the product or access on a Web site to search for approved suppliers.

Information listed on the Web site includes the product’s place of origin, manufacturer, pesticide test results, certificates and the flow and volume of each harvest, the council said.  Four major tea companies have been included in the system, the Tait Marketing and Distribution Co, the producer of Kaisi oolong tea, and Good Young Co, which supplies the nation’s Starbucks franchises, the council said…

Read more from the source @ http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2015/09/27/2003628710

September 26, 2015 Off

More proof that we live in a multi-cloud world

By David

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Barb Darrow.

If your company, like most, runs some stuff in the cloud plus non-cloud-ready databases or enterprise apps, RightScale may have a management tool for you.  There’s lots of evidence showing that when companies move workloads to the cloud, they are apt to use more than one cloud.

Part of the reason is that different constituencies spin up their own cloud operations outside the normal IT approval process. It’s also true that most companies still run some older databases and enterprise applications that do not lend themselves to cloud deployment…

September 26, 2015 Off

The Cloud Gets More Popular and Complex

By David

Grazed from GovTech.  Author:  Steve Towns.

After some initial skepticism, government agencies are embracing the cloud. That’s putting pressure on public-sector IT organizations to deliver a new class of cloud solutions to their customers.
 
Georgia is a good example. With agency customers asking both for more and more complex cloud services, the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) is developing an enterprise approach to cloud, and thinking about the type of support and resources agencies will need to deploy more sophisticated cloud services successfully and securely…
September 25, 2015 Off

One of our generation’s “most brilliant geeks” on cloud-computing and Bill Gates comparisons

By David

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…

September 25, 2015 Off

HP’s CIOs Purchase More Cloud And Mobile Services And Shows HP Adapting To Changing Demands

By David

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…

September 24, 2015 Off

Analytics Becomes Next Great Cloud Service

By David

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

September 24, 2015 Off

Cloud Computing: Emerging technologies and the future of business

By David

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…

September 24, 2015 Off

Fujitsu aims to help CIOs master hybrid IT through new functionality

By David

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…

September 24, 2015 Off

Doing tokenization and cloud computing the PCI way

By David

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…