Category: News

Grazed from BusinessCloud. Author: Steve Brooks.

China is vast, it is the second largest country by land mass in the world with 9.6 million square kilometres and a population of 1.3 billion. The challenges of providing cloud services to such a huge market are huge and China Telecom as one of the main providers in China has turned to Nuage networks to solve one of its key issues.

With the need to build a dynamic software defined network (SDN) to enable it to deliver new services, China Telecom has turned not to Huawei, as one might expect, but to Nuage networks. With a large and increasingly complex network the SDN technology will be important to meet the growing demand on its network and cloud services. Part of the contract also includes security services to mitigate against Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS), which because of the volume of computers on the network becomes almost a certainty as a result of events rather than malicious intent. In the event of targeted attacks against specific customers the technology is able to isolate parts of the network to mitigate that attack…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Stephen F. Deangelis.

In “Practical Artificial Intelligence Is Already Changing the World,” I promised to write a follow-on article that discussed why Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly), the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a former IBM employee and strategic advisor to Citigroup, are optimistic about the future of artificial intelligence (AI).

In that article I noted that some pundits believe that AI poses a grave threat to humanity while other pundits believe that AI systems are going to be tools that humans can use to improve conditions around them. I also wrote that it would be foolish to predict which school of thought is correct this early in the game…

Grazed from NewScientist. Author: Jacob Aron.

These days it’s easy to access ultra-powerful computers: just borrow one from Amazon, Microsoft or other firms offering cloud computing services. But analysing data on someone else’s hardware means they can see what you’re doing – not ideal if you want to keep it secret. Now it seems a dash of quantumness might be the best way to stay safe in the cloud.

There are currently two ways to run secure cloud computing. The first is called homomorphic encryption, essentially a complex mathematical trick that means you can send your data to a cloud provider in an encrypted form. Without this trick, the cloud computer would normally be unable to run calculations on data that was obscured like this. Computer firm IBM has been working on this since 2009…

Grazed from WindowsITPro. Author: Richard Hay.

Are you interested in learning more about Microsoft Azure, its offerings and the basics about Microsoft’s cloud services that are available on the growing platform? Yesterday, Microsoft Press announced the availability of an electronic book by authors Michael S. Collier and Robin E. Shahan that is actually the first in a series about Microsoft Azure.

I have been poking around Azure for several months now and currently host several aspects of my WindowsObserver.com website on the service including my Observed Tech PODCAST MP3 files, Windows Themes and other miscellaneous downloads. Recently I even built a few small websites on the service using WordPress to see how reliable it is and so far with these sites and the downloads I mentioned it has been rock solid…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

Very few applications have generated more profits and revenues for solution providers than the portfolio of offerings created by SAP. But with the launch today of SAP Business Suite 4 for HANA (SAP S/4HANA) in the cloud, solution providers might want to take stock of how the application delivery and customization is rapidly evolving around them.

Instead of always having to deploy highly customized versions of its software running on premise, SAP envisions moving large portions of its customer base to upgrade to a cloud application hosted by SAP. Naturally, for a whole range of security and compliance concerns there will still be instances of SAP S/4HANA that run on premise…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

As enterprises turn to public cloud services and managed service providers to meet their IT needs, colocation providers have seen their customer base gradually diminish. Infact, managed service providers now bring in five-times more revenue. Colo providers are aware their traditional business models are no longer relevant and that they need to give enterprises what they want: the cloud.

But incorporating cloud into their provision in such a saturated market won’t be simple. To have any chance of success, colo providers need to carve out what differentiates them from their competitors and implement the right technology to underpin their offering. But where do they start? Service providers who got into the cloud game early seemed, at the time, to be more visionary…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: carrie Simpson.

Using IT terminology in your sales pitch can be confusing to a non-technical audience. We can learn a lot about why we should keep it simple by considering a visit to the doctor’s office. If a physician said, "You present with ecchymosis, vastus medialis," would you understand what she was telling you? Would you spend a few minutes wondering if you should ask them to clarify the terminology?

Would you feel a little uncomfortable? A little panicked, perhaps? That overly complicated terminology means the patient has a bruise on the inside of their thigh above the knee. Doctors have learned to bring their terminology to an accessible level. You have "a cold," or you have "the flu" or a "bruise on your knee."…

Grazed from EdTechMag. Author: Dr. Frank Smith.

IBM is taking its Big Data and cloud capabilities overseas to help transform a French institution into a "smart business school" with international reach. EMLYON Business School has partnered with IBM to use the company’s technologies to provide a more personalized education experience to its international students.

Cloud computing techniques can make education more compelling and encourage students to explore more topics, Katharine Frase, vice president and CTO of IBM’s public sector, told EdTech. It’s also a technology that makes sense for a school that intends to offer courses in multiple languages to countries on multiple continents…

Grazed from StreetWise. Author: Jacob Maslow.

I don’t mean to be a stick in the mud here. I know there are a lot of analysts who are happy that Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is pursuing the fast-growing cloud computing industry in a very public way. Indeed, Microsoft has made its cloud business strategy the centerpiece of its transition from a traditional desktop-based software company.

This is all well and good. However, if you look at the numbers, it can’t help but leave you with a sinking feeling in your stomach. Let’s put it this way, Microsoft has an annual revenue of close to $100B. That’s how big Microsoft is. We’re talking about its Xbox, hardware initiatives, and of course Windows and Windows-based software. Of that figure, $5.5B came from cloud computing and its cloud business…

Grazed from Microsoft. Author: Editorial Staff.

Progressive is looking to expand its use of cloud computing to help it realize greater organizational efficiencies, “investing less time on infrastructure and more on providing high-value services to the business,” write two of the company’s executives in a guest post on the Office Blogs.

Office 365 “will be an important part of our cloud approach and we are now taking the first steps by setting up identity management and deploying Office 365 ProPlus, the user-based subscription version of Microsoft Office, to our more than 26,000 employees,” write Scott McPherson, manager of enterprise architecture organization and software and security group, and Matt Lynn, domain architect of unified communications and collaboration group at Progressive…