Category: News

Grazed from Nasdaq.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle’s third-quarter fiscal 2015 results gained significantly from the cloud business. The company’s earnings surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate, while revenues came in line. We believe that the rapid adoption of engineered systems and cloud suites will drive the top line in 2015.

Oracle commands a dominant position in the enterprise software and database management system (DBMS) software market. According to market research firm Gartner, global spending on IT infrastructure is estimated to grow 2.4% to $3.8 trillion in 2015. Among infrastructure, DBMS is expected to gain significantly driven by Big Data and digitalization initiatives. We believe Oracle is positioned well in the DBMS software market to gain from this trend…

Grazed from StockRants.  Author: Editorial Staff.

E-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. AMZN announced the launch of M4, the latest generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) General Purpose instances.  Customers can use M4 instances by means of the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, and third-party libraries.

M4 instances are available in North Virginia, Oregon, and Northern California in the U.S.; Ireland, Germany, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney.  The M4 instances are based on custom 2.4 GHz Intel INTC Xeon E5-2676 v3 Haswell processors that are optimized specifically for EC2. This will enable it to deliver considerable processing power. Using the custom Intel Haswell processor, M4 instances offer new capabilities to the General Purpose and come in larger sizes…

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Nick Black.

As more wearable devices continue to enter into the market and into our lives, questions are being raised as to how vulnerable this may be making us when it comes to potential security and privacy risks.  Smartphones already have the capacity to hold a large quantity of data about us as individuals and wearable technology is likely to work in a similar way – with fitness trackers able to store information about our health, for example, or the routes taken during exercise sessions.

There have been many pieces of research that have looked into the connection between possible privacy risks and wearable technology. Rackspace Hosting, a cloud computing company, surveyed 4,000 people in the UK and US and found that 51 per cent of those who took part believed privacy was an issue when it came to the adoption of wearable technology, and 62 per cent said wearables should be regulated in some way…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author:  Warwick Ashford.

Complacency about distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is putting businesses at risk, a survey has revealed.  Investment in specific DDoS protection is relatively low, according to a survey by F5 Networks at Infosecurity Europe 2015 in London.

Attention is turning to application data breaches, network attacks and malware, despite 60% of respondents saying they are worried about DDoS attacks and 39% admitting it is likely their organisation has already been targeted.  Similarly to advanced persistent threats (APTs), many DDoS attacks are starting to be characterised by long durations, repetition and changing attack vectors, according to a recent report by Imperva…

Grazed from TheStreet.  Author: Rhonda Schaffer.

On a week filled with news of Apple Music and iOS 9 releases from Apple’s at its 2015 worldwide developers conference, a former CEO said the company is able to look to the future, thanks to the foundation set by Steve Jobs.  Former CEO John Sculley reflected on his relationship with Jobs during his Apple tenure. Serving as CEO at Apple from the early 1980s through the early 1990s, Sculley recently wrote Moonshot!, a book about business leadership and opportunity. Sculley said he spent five months getting to know Steve Jobs.  Apple’s board went through about 20 candidates and passed over Jobs.

Sculley said he was brought to Apple for his marketing skills (he had served as the CEO of Pepsi (PEP – Get Report) where he had launched the Pepsi Challenge) and so he couuld serve as Job’s partner while he developed the Macintosh. Sculley said that beyond being business colleagues, the two became good friends; Jobs was focused on building Apple and didn’t have time for many relationships…

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Kathryn Allen and Daniel Farris.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has released new guidance on cyber preparedness and incident response, becoming the latest federal agency to do so in recent months. Newly sworn-in Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, has indicated that the investigation and prosecution of cyber crimes will be one of the top priorities of her administration. Although the Guidance sets forth only voluntary standards, companies wishing to minimize potential liability in enforcement actions and/or civil litigation should take notice.

In releasing its “Best Practices for Victim Response and Reporting of Cyber Incidents,” the DOJ’s Cybersecurity Unit called upon law enforcement and private industry to share in the effort to improve systems that protect consumer information…

Grazed from FirstPost. Author: Deepak Ghodke.

Cloud adoption has been rapid in recent years, including in India. More and more businesses are moving critical services to the cloud—including their data. Studies (like this one from Enterprise Management Associates), show that more than half of businesses are partly or fully cloudy when it comes to analytics. That is to say, most of us in business use some or many cloud tools every day to answer questions relevant to our jobs.

But what about the remaining companies? The forty-some percent that are still just getting started moving analytics to the cloud? For those businesses, there might be some myths about the cloud that may be causing undue caution. If you’re still on the fence because of any of the following reasons, you won’t be after learning the facts…

Read more from the source @ http://www.firstpost.com/business/8-cloud-analytics-myths-holding-back-2292878.html

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Matt Asay.

Life used to be so simple for Oracle. Back in the good ol’ days, the company could build a great database, charge a king’s ransom for it, and milk the maintenance stream forever. Rinse. Repeat. Unfortunately, this model no longer works, as a series of earnings misses over the last few years have shown.

While a number of factors are at play in Oracle’s stumbles, one of the most persistent is the rise of open-source databases, both relational and non-relational (NoSQL), as a recent Bloomberg article posits. As Powa Technologies CEO says, "They scale and operate extremely well, and they don’t cost anything."…

Grazed from Techspective. Author: Rahul Dasgupta.

According to a Gartner prediction cloud adoption will rise to $250 billion by 2017. 42 percent of IT leaders plan to spend more on cloud this year as per a ComputerWorld forecast. These statistics prove how the cloud is becoming increasingly popular as the enhanced flexibility and the potential cost savings that cloud computing offers is continuing to intrigue an increasing number of businesses.

However, there is a thin difference on how cloud vendors operate. One type of vendor offers proprietary cloud services, while the other outsources some of the services covered in the contract to another cloud-computing service provider. While every business is aware of the first type of provider, most organizations fail to consider the security concerns involved if their provider outsources to a third party…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons published “The Coal Question,” a book with a prosaic title that contained profound implications. Jevons set out to establish the size of England’s coal reserves, a critical question for industrial and naval power. During his research, he stumbled upon a curious paradox: As coal use became more efficient due to the advent of better quality steam engines, coal consumption rose rather than fell.

On the face it, this seems counter-intuitive. Improved efficiency leads to greater productivity which should lead to a resource savings. In fact, however, it meant just the opposite: As coal power got cheaper, people found more and more things to do with it. In the end, people consumed so much more coal at the lower price that the total amount spent on coal rose rather than fell. This phenomenon came to be labelled the “Jevons Paradox.”…