Category: News

Grazed from Computing. Author: John Leonard.

A recent Computing survey of 130 IT decision-makers in companies with 100 to over 5,000 employees, found that organisations using cloud services are now in a large majority. Given that “cloud” covers services as diverse as online storage of personal photos and big data analytics-as-a-service this is perhaps not surprising.

What is unexpected though, is that as many said that they have deployed some sort of private cloud set-up as are using public SaaS, PaaS and IaaS combined. With as many private clouds as public ones, hybrid cloud architectures (currently in 19 per cent of firms surveyed) have emerged as pressures grow to make the platform fit the business rather than the other way round…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

A few years ago, we defined the value of cloud computing in terms of opex versus capex. These days, most people define the value of cloud around agility. Why the change? Because if you define the value of cloud as the ability to avoid buying hardware and software — the capex-versus-opex view — you can’t make cloud computing compelling from a cost standpoint.

However, if you define the value of cloud as the ability to make your business more agile, you quickly get to the value numbers you need. I’ve been shouting about the value of agility and the cloud for years, but I didn’t see the view become common in the IT or vendor community until recently. Now, cloud providers are all about agility, and they use it to sell the public cloud to enterprises…

Grazed from CCI. Author: John O’Keefe.

Wave after wave of technological innovation has crashed over businesses in the last few decades. Gone are the days when having a PC and an up-to-date office suite was the cutting-edge of corporate IT. Of course, some innovations have had bigger impacts than other. Cloud technology is the latest trend reaching the threshold of widespread adoption. The recent IPO of Box attests to the success of cloud storage companies. Much of the excitement around cloud technology is based on the door it opens to the quick adoption of other business intelligence tools. It is clearly one of the main forces driving the explosive growth of productivity software.

The growth of workplace communications

Collaborative software tools, like Slack and Join.Me, which facilitate workplace communications are experiencing unprecedented growth. More established players like Salesforce and Evernote are rapidly growing the services they offer enterprises, such as Salesforce’s analytics cloud Wave…

Grazed from Fool. Author: Jeremy Bowman.

International Business Machines Corp. suffered another setback on Monday after the tech titan registered its 12th straight quarterly sales decline as investors continue to wait for the company turnaround strategy to bear fruit. Shares traded down just 1% the day after the earnings release as the report was not all bad news. Management said adjusted operating profits rose 4%, and currency-neutral revenues in strategic imperatives rose 30%.

As IBM transforms itself from a hardware manufacturer to a 21st century tech-services provider, the company has staked its future on core offerings that it believes will eventually drive sales and profits consistently higher. Those are cloud computing, business analytics, growth markets, and smarter planet, according to its 2011 Road Map to the Future…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Serdar Yegulalp.

Operating systems like CoreOS and Joyent’s SmartOS/Triton have worked to redefine, in radically different ways, what an OS needs to be to run applications at scale in the cloud. Now another OS is set to join the ranks of those trying to do the cloud-OS thing in a maverick way: OSv, an open source, hypervisor-optimized OS “designed to run an application stack without getting in the way.”

OSv runs existing Linux applications, but is not itself Linux; it’s an entirely new OS written from the ground up in C/C++. It can run on a slew of hypervisors and virtual-machine systems, or in cloud environments like Amazon EC2 or Google Compute Engine. The company claims significant performance gains for apps running on OSv, saying the boost comes from various design choices that rely on the hypervisor, rather than separate user and kernel address spaces, for keeping things isolated…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/2913783/cloud-computing/no-linux-no-docker-no-cloud-os-think-again.html

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud computing has many variations and nuances, and everyone is doing something different with it. However, there appear to be four distinct phases to the cloud evolution (or revolution?). We’re still early in the process (working our way through the second phase), but ultimately, it will bring organizations to the point in which decision-making is pushed down through the ranks, and traditional business models are cast aside in favor of more entrepreneurial ventures — even within large corporations.

That’s the word from Don Rippert, IBM general manager of cloud strategy, who discussed where the world is at in the progression in a recently released video. Speaking at the company’s InterConnect event, Rippert started off by reminding attendees that the purpose of cloud wasn’t to make things simpler, but rather, “magnify and amplify” the talents of employees…

Grazed from MIT News.  Author: Larry Hardesty.

In the last 10 years, computer security researchers have shown that malicious hackers don’t need to see your data in order to steal your data. From the pattern in which your computer accesses its memory banks, adversaries can infer a shocking amount about what’s stored there.

The risk of such attacks is particularly acute in the cloud, where you have no control over whose applications are sharing server space with yours. An antagonist could load up multiple cloud servers with small programs that do nothing but spy on other people’s data…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Dave Olivier.

Here’s a safe prediction for 2015: by the end of summer you will have finally said goodbye to that reliable workhorse of your IT infrastructure,Windows Server 2003. In July, Microsoft will stop releasing critical patches and other support for this once-groundbreaking product. In fact, you’ve got much less time than that remaining. If you haven’t yet begun your migration to Windows Server 2012 R2, you need to start planning for it now.

There’s really no rationale for waiting (or, worse, for sticking with the status quo), and all IT professionals understand what’s at stake. After support ends, new security vulnerabilities will place sensitive data at risk of theft, unauthorized access and other attacks—no more patches from Microsoft. How will that impact your business? Let’s examine:…

Superior security  

Businesses looking to ratchet their security up a level can use the Cloud Backup service to back up a copy of their data in the cloud. The new solution from Aruba Cloud delivers a backup service where backups are performed, encrypted and stored independently of the server, virtual machine or computer in question. As such, a backup copy will always be available to the user.

Grazed from Datamation.  Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

When it comes to the cloud, transparency and control are the keys to security. That’s the message coming from Scott Charney, Corporate Vice-President of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing, during a keynote at the RSA security conference here.  "As people move to the cloud, how much transparency do they get into what is going on?" Charney remarked during his keynote.

Charney said that in 2004 Microsoft started to implement its security software development lifecycle. The basic ideas was to have security in design, security by default and security in deployment. Charney said that Microsoft changed the way it updated systems and went to a regular patching cycle that aimed to help improve things…