Category: News

Grazed from CIO. Author: Kristopher Spadea.

Thought you were going to read about erotica in the cloud? Sorry to disappoint! But there are indeed 50 shades of grey and more when it comes to selecting cloud computing services. So if you are thinking about migrating to the cloud or if you want to improve your ROI in the cloud, here are the shades of “grey” you’ll need to be defining:

Shades of Grey in Business Objectives – Identifying Why You Are Moving Into The Cloud

1. There are as many business objectives for the cloud as there are shades of grey, such as capex to opex budgeting, flexibility, agility, high availability, etc. Why do you want to move to the cloud?
2. Saying that your objectives are important isn’t enough. How important are these outcomes to the success of your business? Are they all equally important, or can you rank them?…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

Never has the hunger for bandwidth been as high as it is today. To meet that demand, Bell Labs, the industrial research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, has been studying how high-end networks use converged IP and optical transport technologies to meet today’s network demands.

The researchers found that converged IP/optical control integration could reduce network resource requirements without compromising service availability. This was done by "comparing the relative cost of integrating and coordinating resiliency methods in both the IP routing and optical transport network. Resilience is the network’s ability to resume normal operations if a failure occurs and is an essential component of an operator’s highly reliable network."…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Ericka Chickowski.

The volume and diversity of cloud services in use by companies continues to rise significantly year-over-year. And, according to a report out yesterday by Skyhigh Networks, the good news is that security capabilities have also matured as deployments have grown. Increasingly more services are offering better encryption, multi-factor authentication and ISO 27001 certification proving their in-house security practices.

Nevertheless end user organizations are still struggling with data governance and access control in the cloud. The Cloud Adoption & Risk (CAR) Report showed that from fourth quarter 2013 to fourth quarter 2014, the average number of cloud services in use within the enterprises increased by 43 percent to 897 services, which includes both sanctioned and shadow IT applications…

Grazed from Diginomica. Author: Phil Wainewright.

After last year’s change of the guard at the European Commission, there’s been a wait to find out what new policy directions the new team of incoming Commissioners may go off in. Given the attention that the previous cohort of Neelie Kroes, Viviane Reding and others lavished on cloud computing, this has special importance for anyone investing in cloud IT in the European market.

Some strong pointers came at this week’s Think Cloud for Government conference in London during a presentation by Pearse O’Donohue, who has taken over the role previously held by Ken Ducatel as the Commission’s head of unit for software, services and cloud computing. Essentially, this means he is the official in Brussels in charge of developing and delivering the EU’s policies on cloud computing…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Paul Sawers.

The current state-of-play with the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) offers a tantalizing glimpse into the future of ubiquitious computing, with Web-enabled thermostats, self-driving cars, and even connected kettles creeping into our daily lives. But for all the cool applications we’re starting to see in the real world, there needs to be a force that enables it all.

Launching this week, Barcelona-based TheThings.io is setting itself up to be the back-end platform of choice in the burgeoning Internet of Things industry — an “Amazon Web Services (AWS) for IoT companies,” for want of a better analogy. Indeed, just as AWS and similar cloud-computing services have enabled startups to scale faster and more affordably than they otherwise could, TheThings.io is hoping to help fledgling IoT companies launch to market quickly, with enough power and elasticity under the hood to cater for unprecedented levels of growth…

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: James Nunns.

EMC has released the findings of a global IT business decision-maker survey which gauged the global sentiment about IT’s evolving role in organisations today. The survey revealed that there is a global increase in the adoption of cloud computing and that the majority of respondents cited hybrid cloud as the preferred option due to its greater agility and security.

Many respondents believe that IT is a business enabler, however, there are concerns over spending, as many believe that it is moving outside of IT’s control. The pressure to help support business growth and to act as an in-house broker of on-demand services, combined with a widening IT skills gap, is considered to be driving IT professionals to pursue hybrid cloud….

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

According to survey figures released by Gartner, 95% of attendees at the analyst house’s Datacentre Conference in Las Vegas are unhappy with their private cloud deployments. The 140 respondents were given six potential options to explain what was going wrong with their private cloud, alongside a ‘nothing is going wrong’ option. 31% cited a failure to change the operational model, 19% said it was simply doing too little, and 13% cited a failure to change the funding model.

Bittman admitted he was “a little surprised” at the results, although some commentators below the line argued the question was leading in focusing too much on the negative side of public cloud. Regardless, the increasing prevalence of hybrid cloud models – as Matt Asay wrote for Tech Republic, “no wonder private cloud vendors have started calling themselves ‘hybrid’ clouds” – has meant the private cloud as we know it is facing a tipping point…

Grazed from Atlasmonitor. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Human Body Version 2.0 project features none other than arch-Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil as its main proponent. The goals have been openly stated for some time: In the coming decades, a radical upgrading of our body’s physical and mental systems, already underway, will use nanobots to augment and ultimately replace our organs.

We already know how to prevent most degenerative disease through nutrition and supplementation; this will be a bridge to the emerging biotechnology revolution, which in turn will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution. By 2030, reverse-engineering of the human brain will have been completed and nonbiological intelligence will merge with our biological brains…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Matt Asay.

No wonder private cloud vendors have started calling themselves "hybrid" clouds: the private cloud vision has failed — utterly and completely. Gartner analyst Tom Bittman asked why 95% of private clouds are failing, but the answer seems clear: the very notion of a privately provisioned cloud service is contradictory and nearly always doomed. Unfortunately, the odds of failure may skyrocket when enterprises turn to OpenStack.

Fail early, fail often

Roughly five years ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive Andy Jassy spotlighted the problem with private clouds: "Companies usually are not able to provision accurately the amount of data center capacity that they require, and this problem recurs when they create their own internal cloud infrastructure."…