Category: News

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Chris Talbot.

An end-user research study conducted by Enterprise Management Associates(EMA) uncovered data that shows more than half of enterprises consider cloud-based analytics important to their businesses.

The firm’s report,"Analytics in the Cloud", found that 32 percent of respondents indicated they had adopted cloud-based strategies for analytics — and that those strategies were considered important to their business. An additional 24 percent of respondents said they had adopted cloud-based analytics strategies that were essential to their businesses…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

I’ve sworn it off: No longer do I remind people younger than myself that many of today’s concepts we call new and innovative are based on much older concepts popular a long time ago — when I was young. The ones that immediately come to mind are big data and Internet of things (IoT).

Big data — at least the notion of it — was always the objective in the world of database technology. However, back in the days when I was a college professor who taught database technology, it was simply a cool concept. The hardware and software that could provide analytics across petabytes of data simply did not exist…

Grazed from CIOToday.  Author:  Jennifer LeClaire.

Big Blue just launched what it’s calling one of the most sophisticated computer systems ever built. IBM’s new z13 mainframe caps a $1 billion investment and five years of development — and taps into over 500 new patents in collaboration with more than 60 clients.

IBM is pointing to three “firsts” with the z13. It’s the first system that can process 2.5 billion transactions a day — that’s equal to 100 Cyber Mondays every day of the year — which is a key capability given we’re headed toward about 40 trillion mobile Relevant Products/Services transactions a day by 2025, according to Big Blue’s research…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Microsoft has been beefing up its Azure cloud computing platform, and the company has the certifications to prove it, according to Lori Woehler, principal group manager for Compliance and Trust at the software and cloud computing giant.

Woehler revealed in an Azure blog post that Microsoft Azure had "completed an ISO 27001 renewal audit to the 2013 version of the standard, following the ISO [International Organization for Standardization] 27002 best practices for comprehensive information security and risk management." ISO 27001 is a set of standards governing information security within organizations…

Grazed from BroadGroup.  Author: PR Announcement.

Europe’s most prestigious awards recognising Datacenter and Cloud achievements will be announced at an evening ceremony in Monaco on 2nd June 2015. Organised by BroadGroup, the Information Media Technology and Professional Services company, the awards will be hosted prior to the opening of Europe’s ‘must-attend’ Datacloud Europe conference and exhibition.



Now in their 8th year, the Judges have announced a number of exciting changes to keep pace with fast moving industry developments, as the Datacloud Awards sustain their integrity and position as the only pan-European recognition of demonstrable leadership in datacenter and cloud...

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Robert Cohen.

Over the next few years, the majority of IT infrastructure will be delivered through converged offerings that bring together compute, storage and networking. Converged infrastructure is a positive response to IT’s demand for greater agility, simplicity, and scale. Converged infrastructure provides economic, technical, and business benefits over traditional, often siloed servers, storage, and networking resources.

With it, vendors integrate hardware, software, storage, and networking with infrastructure management software to support the deployment of new applications. The next step is to provide interfaces that align more easily with legacy systems. This report will help CIOs, systems administrators, IT directors, cloud architects, and business decision-makers understand the value of converged infrastructure and virtualized systems…

Read more from the source @ http://research.gigaom.com/report/converged-infrastructure-cloud-based-intelligent-operations/

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Although cloud computing has gained an enormous following, it still garners only a small fraction of IT spending. To increase cloud usage, cloud computing has to drive changes in how companies build and use applications. Those changes will focus on the intersection between cloud components and legacy applications — the hybrid cloud.

The most important trends in hybrid clouds are the evolution from compartments to components, the emergence of "migratory processing" and the movement toward event-based applications. Nearly all the early cloud applications that enterprises adopted were forms of hosted server consolidation. These applications were logical starting points because they used hardware and support resources very inefficiently, and they were largely independent within the businesses’ overall IT processes…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Two years ago the biggest battles in the IaaS cloud computing industry were over price. Amazon Web Services would drop prices one day, and Google or Microsoft would cut the price tag on virtual machines or storage weeks, days, or even hours afterwards. It was a seemingly non-stop back and forth that caused some to wonder how low the prices could go.

Fast forward to today and providers are still dropping prices, but not with the same vigor and frequency as in 2013. Constant jostling of prices doesn’t grab headlines, nor the buzz of the industry like it used to. At AWS’s most recent re:Invent conference it didn’t even make a price cut announcement, which had become standard for any big AWS news event…

Grazed from DefenseSystems. Author: Kevin McCaney.

The Defense Information Systems Agency has released its new security requirements guide for cloud computing, which is intended to make it easier—and quicker—for Defense Department agencies to procure commercial cloud services while still ensuring security. The new SRG puts out to pasture the Cloud Security Model, under which only a handful of vendors had received authorization, and more closely follows the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program used by civilian federal agencies—although it does set additional requirements in areas where extra security is needed. In many cases, cloud providers will seek to comply with the SRG in coordination with their FedRAMP reauthorization.

"The SRG is designed to ensure that DOD can attain the full economic and technical advantages of using the commercial cloud without putting the department’s data and missions at risk," Mark Orndorff, DISA Risk Management Executive, said in a statement. The new guide sets the security requirements for information up to the Secret classification, sets standards for what systems or information can be handled in a virtual environment and what data should be physically separated, and tweaks the impact levels identified under the old Cloud Security Model…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Eugene Kim.

In recent years, cloud computing providers have been slashing prices — a phenomenon we’ve called the “race to zero.” Amazon Web Services, for example, has cut its price 44 times in the last six years, while Microsoft and Google have both decreased prices multiple times to keep up with AWS.

On Wednesday, RBC Capital’s Mark Mahaney published a chart that perfectly captures this trend. According to the chart below, the average monthly cost per gigabyte of RAM, for a set of various workloads, has dropped across the board over the past year. This is just one way to measure cloud pricing – cloud companies charge in different ways for different services. But it’s a good proxy for how fast prices have been dropping for real-world use scenarios.

Read more from the source @ http://www.businessinsider.com/cloud-computing-price-war-in-one-chart-2015-1#ixzz3Opdk3GZV