Category: News

Grazed from BSMinfo. Author: Christine Kern.

A study by Meritalk finds, despite a majority (62 percent) of federal agencies in 2010 that reported they would move to cloud-based computing within five years, in a recent poll, just 41 percent of Feds see cloud as an integral component of their overall IT strategy. This latest study demonstrates that, despite the potential savings of $18.9 billion annually, federal agencies are dragging their feet in the migration to cloud services.

In the 2010 survey, just 5 percent stated that they did not intend to ever migrate to cloud services, while 19 percent predicted a shift within two years. Despite the best efforts of cloud vendors, 89 percent of federal agencies polled report being apprehensive about moving IT services and applications to the cloud, and only 51 percent have utilized cloud-only for a limited number of specific applications…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Sean McAvan.

As cloud continues to be mainstream, the question amongst progressive IT departments when rolling out new applications is shifting from “why cloud?” to “which cloud?” Currently, the public cloud is dwarfed by private and on-premise solutions, with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger stating that the latter represents over 90 per cent of the total business. Furthermore, Gartner has estimated that by 2020, on-premise cloud will account for 70 per cent of the total market.

There are many good reasons for organisations still opting to host their applications on hardware owned and managed in-house. Most organisations still have large investments in technology, people, and processes that cannot simply be written-off; certain workloads still do not suit virtualised or multi-tenanted platforms; renting resources is not always cheaper or better than owning them; and there are valid security and compliance reasons for keeping certain data on premise…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2015/apr/10/why-hybrid-cloud-way-forward-it-leaders/

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

At the AWS Summit being held in San Francisco today, AWS has just announced that its EC2 container service, a service that developers use to run applications within Linux Containers, is now generally avaialble. Readers will recall that AWS announced the beta of this product late last year. The increasing adoption of, and interest in, containers has led them to accelerate the availability of this product.

It can also be seen as a counter move to Google’s increasingly obvious intentions with Kubernetes. Google launched the Kubernetes initiative as an open source Docker container orchestration tool, recently it announced a deep partnership with competing container company CoreOS to tie Kubernetes into CoreOS’s solutions…

Grazed from TheStack. Author: Martin Anderson.

IBM has announced that it is providing hybrid cloud solutions to the U.S. Army’s logistics system – one of the biggest of its kind in the United States. The army’s Logistics Support Activity (LOGSA) division has migrated to an on-premise IBM-supplied hybrid cloud environment handling 40 million data transactions daily, and claims to have achieved cost savings of 50% with the new arrangement.

LOGSA houses the Logistics Information Warehouse (LIW), a military depositary for logistics data which employs business and analytics tools to provide logistics information to over 65,000 end-users and 150 trading partners worldwide. General Manager for U.S. Federal at IBM Anne Altman said in the report:…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.

In only a handful of years, cloud computing has transformed the way many enterprises do business. However, according to Verizon’s 2014 Enterprise Cloud Report, about a third of all organizations still haven’t made a move to using any cloud services. For the others who have invested in cloud computing, the journey was likely a bumpy ride—especially if the migration was their first.

Given that cloud isn’t going away, developing a seamless migration path to the technology can help IT minimize mistakes and, more importantly, attain objectives. However, if enterprises think all their data management and IT issues will be resolved with a move to the cloud, they’d better think again. Cloud hype is as rich in misnomers and falsehoods as it is in promising value and efficiency…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

In a case that first began in December 2013, Microsoft is still refusing the government’s demands to hand over emails of one of its users. The government wants the emails as part of a drug trafficking investigation. The problem is the emails are stored on a server in Ireland and Microsoft says that the US government doesn’t have the jurisdiction to demand them, at least not from Microsoft.

Last summer, Microsoft lost its appeal on the matter. On late Wednesday evening, Microsoft filed a legal brief reply on the matter, once again arguing that it should not be compelled to turn over emails stored in a foreign country, Microsoft’s head lawyer, Brad Smith explained in a new blog post…

Grazed from Barrons. Author: Tierman Ray.

Amazon.com (AMZN), hosting its “AWS Summit” in San Francisco for its Amazon Web Services, today, announced a number of new initiatives, including a “Marketplace” in which to buy desktop applications delivered over the Internet, a new set of tools for managing files, the “Elastic File System,” and a new service for helping companies make predictions.

The company also made a pitch that more and more companies are moving all their computing to AWS, and talked up companies that are doing so, such as publisher Time Inc. Amazon shares rose 47 cents to $381.67 following the presentation. The EFS is the “missing piece” in Amazon’s cloud computing initiative, said Andy Jassy, senior VP for AWS. He billed it as a “file system that grows and shrinks, automatically.”…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Cloud service providers (CSPs) can no longer treat security as a luxurious add-on, and customers have to ensure their providers take care of the issue, a new report asserts. The research, the latest cab off the rank from Ovum and FireHost entitled “The Role of Security in Cloud Adoption within the Enterprise”, offers sound advice to vendors and users alike. True, it’s stuff everyone will have heard before – but it’s worth repeating.

“On too many occasions, security has been positioned as an afterthought when new technology initiatives have been brought to market,” Ovum analyst Andrew Kellett writes. “Any service that includes access via public networks cannot ignore user and data protection requirements.”…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

A new report from ABI Research estimates that the volume of data captured by IoT-connected devices exceeded 200 exabytes in 2014. The annual total is forecast to grow seven-fold by the decade’s end, surpassing 1,600 exabytes—or 1.6 zettabytes—in 2020. Principal Analyst Aapo Markkanen says, “The data originating from connected products and processes follows a certain journey of magnitudes.

The yearly volumes that are generated within endpoints are counted in yottabytes, but only a tiny fraction of this vast data mass is actually being captured for storage or further analysis. And of the captured volume, on average over 90% is stored or processed locally without a cloud element, even though this ratio can vary greatly by application segment. So far, the locally dealt data has typically been largely inaccessible for analytics, but that is now starting to change.”…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

Since cloud computing hit the commercial market, cloud service providers have exploded in popularity, with a huge variety of different services each tailored to its own unique variety of client. For clients, though, this presents a challenge: how to find the right provider? Out of all the numerous options, which one is best for your business?

Of course, in order to answer that question, you first need to know what needs a cloud provider will serve. In other words, what is your unique set of priorities in making the selection? For most people, the primary benefit of cloud computing is that it reduces costs, and so price will be a prime consideration in choosing a service provider…