Category: News

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.

Google today announced yet another round of price cuts for its cloud computing platform, as well as a new instance type that will allow businesses to save even more on some of their cloud computing tasks. Today’s cuts focus on the Compute Engine side of the service and include cuts of up to 30 percent for the smallest instances.

A Micro instance on Google Cloud platform will now cost as little as $0.006 per hour under regular usage. For other instance types, the price cuts are somewhat less dramatic and range between 5 percent for High CPU instances and 20 percent for the Standard instances. Google argues that these cuts mean “Google Cloud Platform is now 40 percent less expensive for many workloads.”…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Dan Kusnetsky.

Several suppliers have announced small, limited operating systems (OS) designed to live inside a virtual machine (VM). A few examples of this are the recently announced VMware Project Photon, Piston’s CloudOS, CoreOS, and the OS component of Red Hat’s OpenShift. When I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jim Morrisroe, CEO of Piston Cloud, the company had the following things to say:

"Piston CloudOS is a new type of operating system that manages clusters of commodity servers in your datacenter as a single pool of highly-available resources. These resources may be shared by any service or framework, including OpenStack, Hadoop, Spark, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, or Mesos for better resource efficiency, and streamlined operations…

Read more from the source @ https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2015/05/18/are-cloud-oses-a-benefit-or-bane.aspx

Grazed from ITbusinessEdge. Author: Mike Vizard.

As part of an effort to provide a set of managed IT services in the cloud, CDW has announced that it will now manage implementations of the Microsoft Azure cloud on behalf of its customers. Best known as a multi-billion dollar reseller of IT hardware and software, CDW in recent years has expanded its service portfolio to include managed services for IT hardware and software installed on premise.

Now Stephen Braat, vice president of cloud and managed solutions for CDW, says the company is expanding the scope of those services to include the cloud. While not committing yet to providing managed services for clouds other than Microsoft Azure, the company does have plans to support multiple cloud computing platforms via its network operations centers (NOCs), Braat says…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/it-unmasked/cdw-outlines-cloud-computing-ambitions.html

Grazed from CIO. Author: Paul Gillin.

Wikipedia traces the first use of the term “write once, run anywhere” to 1996. A Google search turns up 139,000 occurrences of that phrase. So why is the dream of absolute portability still elusive 20 years after it was first described? The cloud was supposed to make portability easier. In theory, fully virtual environments should reduce dependence upon underlying hardware, and cloud providers typically offer a choice of platforms and tools. Once an application is in the cloud, it should move anywhere else pretty easily, right?

Unfortunately, no two IT environments are exactly alike and the cloud is no exception. Users may not know this however. When the IDG Enterprise 2014 Cloud Survey asked if switching from one cloud provider to another is more or less difficult than switching from one on-premise provider to another, 29% of IT leaders said it is more difficult, compared to 22% of non-IT leaders. More than 40% of the non-IT leaders said they just didn’t know…

Grazed from BackupTechnology. Author: Editorial Staff.

Today, the cloud is not standardised. Companies operate in the cloud under different criteria. Basically, they all do their own thing without regard to what their competitors or other related companies do. Is this an effective strategy or does this lack of standardisation adversely affect the end user? If so, what can be done to streamline and harmonise the activities of cloud vendors?

Presently, we are seeing a plethora of cloud based vendors offering a variety of services ranging from financial management services, video applications, data storage and archiving, email hosting, and many other services. The cloud also allows businesses and individuals to have a virtual office, sharing and storing documents in a cost effective and time efficient manner. This is a boon for anyone wanting to do business more efficiently and cost effectively. However, cloud based vendors currently operate in a vacuum, and as a result, there are some challenges inherent in cloud computing that could be positively affected if the industry was standardised…

Grazed from ITNews. Author: Juha Saarinen.

A Polish security firm has discovered more vulnerabilities in the Java coding platform used on Google’s App Engine (GAE) cloud computing service, which could allow users to get access beyond their own virtual machines. The Security Explorations team, which has made a name for itself by unearthing large numbers of security holes in Oracle’s Java framework over the past few years, said it had reported seven vulnerabilities to Google, along with proof of concept code.

Three of the flaws allow complete bypass of the GAE Java security sandbox. Such a bypass could be used by attackers to glean information about the Java Runtime Environment as well as Google’s internal services and protocols to spawn further attacks on the GAE platform itself…

Grazed from EnterpriseInnovation. Author: Editorial Staff.

Business growth rather than cost reduction is the focus of organizations with a mature approach to cloud computing, a new IBM report written by The Economist Intelligence Unit reveals. They are also more likely to achieve those benefits as a result of their use of cloud. The global survey reveals that cloud is poised to become the dominant model for IT service delivery. Two thirds of respondents predict that 60% or more of the technology services will be delivered via the cloud within three years.

High cloud-maturity organisations are more likely to view “boosting customer demand” and “expanding sales channels” as drivers to cloud adoption, the report shows. They are also more likely to have achieved revenue growth as a result of their use of cloud. Low cloud-maturity organizations are typically more focused on cost reduction and efficiency…

Read more from the source @ http://enterpriseinnovation.net/article/business-growth-primary-focus-mature-cloud-users-1185143256

Grazed from SysConMedia.  Author: Kevin Jackson.

While SAP is globally renowned as a provider of enterprise management software, the name is hardly ever associated with the spooky world of intelligence. That is one reason why I jumped at the opportunity to talk with SAP executives responsible for the company’s work in that clandestine marketplace.

SAP National Security Services, Inc.™ (SAP NS2™) is an independent U.S. subsidiary of the company and offers a full suite of SAP enterprise applications, analytics, database, cyber security, cloud, and mobility software solutions. These offerings, however, are endowed with specialized levels of security and support needed to meet the unique mission requirements of US National Security Agencies and critical national infrastructure customers…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Peter Wagner.

The ascendance of mobile devices, cloud computing and big data is having a profound impact on the lives of workers. Yet many of the business applications that run on their smartphones and tablets still fail miserably to take full advantage of this revolutionary shift. Even services that tout themselves as “mobile first” often fall short of delivering novel functionality that boosts productivity and profit.

The offerings that will come to dominate the emerging $100 billion market for enterprise applications will be those that are “authentically mobile,” a term we use to describe services that would be extremely difficult or impossible to achieve without taking full advantage of the unique properties of the mobile ecosystem…

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Joel Clark.

The “Internet of Things” is a buzzword which is becoming more and more prevalent in today’s society. This is mostly due to the rise of crowd funding schemes and an insurgence of low power, highly capable microcontroller platforms such as Arduino.

The Equity Kicker expects 33 billion devices connected by 2020 with a large portion of them falling under the IoT umbrella term and Forbes are predicting some pretty mind-bending revenue estimates over the next few years.  Many of these devices are greatly enhanced by increased connectivity to the internet where they have access to large amounts of cloud based computing power…