Category: News

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?…

Grazed from Wired.  Author: Editorial Staff.

BEN URETSKY HAD a shoebox filled with $10,000 in cash.  He worked for a company that rented computer power from a data center in Brooklyn, New York, and this was a company where “cash was king.” “I was paid in cash, and I literally had a Nike shoebox where I would put the money away,” says Uretsky, who immigrated from Russia at the age of five and grew up in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn.

“Don’t ask me why.” The company was called Like Whoa, and it no longer exists. But with that $10,000, Ben Uretsky and his brother Moisey set up their own computers at a data center across the river in Lower Manhattan, hosting websites and other software for anyone who came knocking…

Grazed from ComputerDealerNews.  Author: Jeff Jedras.

 NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson is known for his, shall we say, frank assessments of the business decisions of his enterprise resource planning (ERP) software competitors. During his keynote this year through at the annual SuiteWorld user conference, Microsoft was moved from the foes category to the friends.

After all, it would have been awkward had Nelson launched his usual broadside at Microsoft – and then had CEO Satya Nadella pop up on the video screen to greet SuiteWorld attendees. In fact, NetSuite and Microsoft will be working together a lot more closely in the future…

Grazed from GovLoop. Author: Catherine Andrews.

Today, nearly every agency, department, and government sector uses cloud computing. Some use it to build more robust IT infrastructures and replace legacy systems, while others use scalable software services to increase the agility of their platforms. Of course, others also use cloud to cut costs and even increase IT security.

Cloud is quickly becoming the IT backbone of government and, as a govie, you probably use it every single day. But do you know exactly how cloud is being used? Do you know the multitude of ways it can be deployed to serve a wide variety of purposes? Do you even really know what cloud is?…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Jonathan Feldman.

Last week at Interop and Cloud Connect, I shared a bit about how my staff and I have worked through some very natural fears about our organization expanding the production use of cloud computing. The bottom line: It’s all about communication, mutual flexibility, managing the real operating risks, dispelling irrational fears, and providing a career path forward.

As with many IT and leadership topics, the "how" matters just as much as the "what." The "how" we did it is what I focused on in my Cloud Connect slide deck, and what I explore here…