Category: News

Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author: Caroline Donnelly.

Google has spent the best part of a decade telling firms to ditch on-premise productivity tools and use its cloud-based Google Apps suite instead. So, the news that it’s moving all of the company’s in-house IT assets to the cloud may have surprised some.

Surely a company that spends so much time talking up the benefits of cloud computing should have ditched on-premise technology years ago, right?   Not necessarily, and with so many enterprises wrestling with the what, when and how much questions around cloud, the fact Google has only worked out the answers for itself now is sure to be heartening stuff for enterprise cloud buyers to hear…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jaikumar Vijayan.

Five one-day events will be held in New York, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam and Tokyo next month, with the goal of attracting more enterprise interest in its cloud computing platform.  Google is expanding its efforts to get more businesses to notice its array of cloud computing technologies.

Google’s cloud platform team will hold live events in five major cities this June where it will have customers and developers talk about their experiences with the company’s cloud computing technology…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

CIO Review’s most Innovative Cloud Company for 2015, CloudFX today (May 14) announced the launch of its first-of-its-kind Cloud Service Brokerage platform that will allow users to customise, configure, deploy and manage cloud services from the world’s most popular cloud service providers through one secure, central market place.

CloudSelect 2.0 follows fast on the footsteps of CloudFX’s first CSB platform offering CloudSelect and offers a multitude of functionality enhancements they believe will finally bring the promise of Cloud computing to SMB’s, Enterprises and Service Providers looking to simplify the design, deployment and management of multi-supplier cloud services…

Grazed from InformationManagement.  Author: Scott Feuless.

As more and more enterprises move infrastructure from in-house data centers to off-site public clouds, they begin to see changes in staffing requirements and functions almost immediately. At the very least, IT shops are freed from the work of purchasing, installing, configuring and upgrading hardware. You already know about those benefits.

But when an enterprise moves further along their migration journey to include a much larger percentage of the infrastructure and perhaps higher levels of the software stack, it will eventually reach a tipping point — where the benefits begin to build on one another, exposing unanticipated opportunities that can increase organizational efficiency, reduce staffing requirements and lower asset costs in a step-wise manner…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Many IT teams find that their AWS cloud costs grow less efficient as “clutter” builds up in their accounts. The good news is that both AWS and a small army of third party providers have developed tools to help engineers discover the cause(s) of these inefficiencies.

While there are several “easier” fixes, such as Reserved Instances and eliminating unused resources, the real issue is usually far more complex. Unplanned costs are frequently the result of nonstandard deployments that come from an unclear or absent development processes, poor organisation, or the absence of automated deployment and configuration tools…

Grazed from GeekWire.  Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

Despite making a commitment to use more renewable energy to power its datacenters, Amazon was blasted in a new report today from Greenpeace. The 2015 update to the group’s “Clicking Clean” report argues that Amazon’s commitments are laudable, but the company doesn’t offer enough information about its energy use to allow proper evaluation of its progress.

AWS-Logo-OrangeThe company was given a “F” grade for its transparency, and it scored a 23 percent on Greenpeace’s Clean Energy Index. That’s a far cry from the company’s other competitors in the public cloud: Microsoft scored 39 percent, while Google scored 46 percent. Apple swept the board with a perfect 100 percent score, keeping up its position at the top of Greenpeace’s report…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author:  Susan Marquette Poremba.

Cloud security has always been a sensitive topic. For many years, security was listed as the number-one reason why companies shied away from adopting cloud technologies. Cloud security has improved considerably over the years, but a survey conducted by Perspecsys shows just how far we have to go, especially when it comes to understanding where and how data is protected.

While at RSA, the folks from Perspecsys surveyed more than 125 attendees about data control in the cloud and more than half (57 percent) said they don’t have a complete picture of where their sensitive data is stored. Perhaps more alarming, 48 percent of the respondents said they don’t have a lot of faith in their cloud providers to protect their data. And because of this lack of trust, cloud adoption is slowed…

Grazed from TopTechNews.  Author: Dan Heilman.

The software Relevant Products/Services unit of General Electric on Monday announced its "Industrial Dojo," in collaboration with the Cloud Foundry Foundation, intended to strengthen its efforts to solve challenges in the so-called industrial Internet.

The Cloud Foundry Dojo program allows software developers to work on open source projects to learn the inner workings of the core technology and the agile development environment, along with recommended methodologies for contributing code for development in the Internet of Things (IoT)…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author: Caroline Donnelly.

The closure of the Tor Cloud Project should be seized by users as an opportunity to find an alternative way to access the internet anonymously using the cloud, its operators have claimed.  The Tor Cloud Project was set up in November 2011 so users could deploy Tor bridges using Amazon EC2 instances and – in doing so – donate bandwidth for other members of the Tor network to use.

However, since hitting peak usage in mid-2013, the number of Tor Cloud bridges being deployed has steadily dropped off and now the operators of the pro-privacy internet network have called time on it completely…

Grazed from WSJ.  Author: Ted Greenwald.

Paging Sarah Connor!  After decades as a sci-fi staple, artificial intelligence has leapt into the mainstream. Between Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, IBM’s Watson and Google Brain, machines that understand the world and respond productively suddenly seem imminent.

The combination of immense Internet-connected networks and machine-learning algorithms has yielded dramatic advances in machines’ ability to understand spoken and visual communications, capabilities that fall under the heading “narrow” artificial intelligence. Can machines capable of autonomous reasoning—so-called general AI—be far behind? And at that point, what’s to keep them from improving themselves until they have no need for humanity?…