Category: News

Grazed from SeekingAlpha.  Author: Zejia Yao.

When we talk about Alibaba, we always refer to its e-commerce business. In fact, Alibaba is more than just an online shopping operator. It also offers cloud computing services that are underappreciated by the market.

Aliyun ("yun" means cloud in Chinese) is Alibaba’s cloud computing division. Originally, it was founded to handle the traffic volume and serve the data management of its own e-commerce platforms and Alipay, the payment platform. Since 2010, it has shared its cloud computing resources to generate revenue…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Tom Tennant.

As an IT professional, what would you say are the top three concerns that keep you awake at night? According to the results of a recent survey, your peers listed security, downtime (disaster recovery), and talent management, in that order.

The survey was commissioned by Sungard Availability Services, a cloud computing, disaster recovery, and managed hosting services provider based in Wayne, Pa. I had the opportunity to discuss the findings with Ric Jones, CIO at LifeShare Blood Centers, a blood donation services provider in Shreveport, La., that’s a Sungard AS customer. Jones ranked disaster recovery ahead of security on his own list of concerns, but he indicated that the two are inextricably linked…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Linda Musthaler.

Does your organization have a shadow IT problem? Would you even know if you did? According to the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), 72% of respondents to the 2014 Cloud Adoption Practices and Priorities survey know the scope of shadow IT in their computing environments.

CSA defines shadow IT as “technology spending and implementation that occurs outside the IT department, including cloud apps adopted by individual employees, teams, and business units.” Nearly half of the survey respondents (49%) say their primary concern about shadow IT is the security of corporate data in the cloud…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Mark Greene.

Over the last 20 years, software has slowly eaten the world. Marc Andreessen pointed out this trend in 2011 and noted that increasingly industries are going to be disrupted by software. Here we sit four years later with an “app” for everything. “There’s an app for that” is leading to the acceleration of fragmented software.

The Rise of the App

The rise of the app has meant a shift away from large and complex applications that typically were bundled into a platform or suite (think ERP) to a world of small, consumable, and easy to use apps with specialized functionality. The movement from monolithic applications to individual apps is providing more personalization opportunities…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Dan Kusnetzky.

Fortscale’s Idan Tendler, CEO and co-founder, came by to discuss what his company has been doing since our last conversation at the Splunk user group conference roughly a year ago. Each time I have the opportunity to speak with him, I learn something more about how analysis of the organization’s operational and machine logs can help.

This time Tendler pointed out that many of today’s security breaches or thefts of customer data can be attributed either to malicious staff behavior, or staff not following the enterprise’s data governance or security policies. Staffers are typically given access to many of the organization’s data assets…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Danny Bradbury.

Vancouver-based firm CA Cloud is offering CIOs the chance to run their own private cloud implementations, using open sourced cloud platform OpenStack. The benefits of cloud computing are well understood: elasticity, cost-effectiveness, and the option for automation and self-provisioning of services.

For many companies, moving to a public cloud-based infrastructure (where lots of customers share a single server) is too risky. Heavy regulation and compliance issues, along with their own security concerns, may prevent them being part of a multi-tenanted environment. Many may not have the time or resource to build up a cloud infrastructure outside their own organisation…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Klint Finley.

Running a startup isn’t fair. To succeed, you need talented software engineers who can write good code. You need experienced product managers who can guide those engineers along the way. And in the end, you need savvy marketing types who can promote the finished product. But inevitably, most of the top talent goes elsewhere.

Tech giants like Google and Facebook—not to mention incredibly well-funded newbies like Uber and Dropbox—always have an advantage in the talent wars. They can attract the best and the brightest with enormous salaries, juicy stock options, and a host of other perks, from chic Silicon Valley open office spaces to sprawling coffee bars to of-the-moment artwork…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Natalie Leher.

When your data and files are going to be ‘up there somewhere’, it’s only normal that you’ll want to think security in the cloud. You could of course adopt the strategy of never betting more (data) than you can afford to lose. However, the cost reductions available and the massive move of your competitors to the cloud may force you to use rather more of it than you anticipated. Gotta keep up with the neighbors, right? Well, it turns out that the applications you live next to in cloud computing can also be a source of security risk for you…

1. Not So Nice Neighbors Depending on what kind of cloud computing you want to do, other customers may affect you in a couple of ways. For example, if a multitenant cloud database is not properly designed, a flaw in somebody else’s application may open the door for a hacker to everybody’s data in that database…

Grazed from DataCenterDynamics. Author: Drew Amorosi.

This week Google announced it would provide a cloud computing performance evaluator called PerKit Benchmarker. The evaluation tool is hosted on the open-source collaboration site Github, and will allow users of the Google Cloud Platform, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft’s Azure to measure their current provider’s performance against industry-established benchmarks.

“For those of you developing applications on the cloud, performance is often a critical concern”, Google’s Cloud Platform Performance Team wrote in a blog. “It turns out that it’s surprisingly difficult to evaluate cloud offerings beyond just looking at price or feature charts”. Google said it then invited input from other cloud providers, industry analysts and academia – in all, more than 30 parties – to help develop the benchmarking framework. Industry contributors included, among others, CenturyLink, Microsoft, Intel, Rackspace, and ARM…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Seth Mitchell.

Twelve million. That’s the number of physical servers around the world still running Windows Server 2003, according to Microsoft’s count. But July will see extended support for the beloved 11-year-old workhorse operating system come to an end. It’s never easy to change, but since when has IT been immune to change? You deal with change every day.

IT teams today serve less as technicians and more as service providers to the business, thanks to highly virtualized environments and cloud computing in its various flavors. To keep pace with business demands in these contexts—better yet, to stay one step ahead of the game—IT needs to make the leap to a next-generation server operating system…