Category: News

Grazed from GCN. Author: Editorial Staff.

The National Institutes of Health aims to launch an electronic “Commons,” a community-controlled cloud infrastructure that would support collective uses of computing, storage and data for biomedical research by NIH and its academic and industry collaborators. NIH’s Office of Data Science is in the process of prototyping the Commons, which it described as “a shared computing environment that takes advantage of emerging cloud computing and existing high-performance computing resources.”

In a sources-sought notice for contributors, NIH noted that its biomedical and health sciences research was fast outgrowing the means – through journal articles, scientific conferences and simple networks – to circulate data to the research community. Instead, biomedical researchers need a new mechanism that is scalable, straightforward to use and could take advantage of emergent cloud and high-performance computing resources, said NIH…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ping Li.

Big data, cloud services and mobile technology are having a revolutionary impact on business. Not only are these innovations fueling the modern enterprise, they are also sending security risks sky high. Traditional network perimeters are dissolving as businesses reshape their organizations around these burgeoning technologies.

I actually have a lot of empathy for CISOs. They have one of the hardest jobs in the world these days, especially as the traditional perimeter-based approach to network security rapidly loses its relevance. Enterprise security has changed because the enterprise has changed, drastically so…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Douglas MacMillan.

After months of delays, the initial public offering for online storage company Box Inc. is finally a go. Box said Friday that it plans to register as many as 14.4 million shares, expected to price between $11 and $13 a share, and sees raising as much as $186.9 million. It began its road show pitching the stock to investors, putting it on track to have its shares trading by the end of January.

The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “BOX.” The IPO would value Box at more than $1.5 billion. The company said in its filing that it expects to receive about $134.3 million in net proceeds that it plans to use for general purposes…

Grazed from TechCocktail. Author: Rick Delgado.

Businesses can’t seem to stop talking about cloud computing. It feels like the term is everywhere, with many companies acting like it’s the solution to every issue your organization faces. There’s little doubt that the cloud has become extremely popular in the past few years, but some companies are reluctant to take that final step.

Your company might be one of them, constantly asking basic questions like, “What is cloud computing?”, expressing concerns about such a major transition, and essentially feeling uneasy about the cloud and all that it offers. While there’s nothing wrong with showing a little bit of caution with new technology, worries over your company’s readiness for the cloud might be a bit overblown. In fact, you’re likely already using it, even if you don’t know it…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jaikumar Vijayan.

Google Wednesday released a beta version of a software-debugging tool that it says will give application developers a way to quickly diagnose performance bottlenecks in production applications running on the company’s cloud computing platform. Google Cloud Trace works with applications running on Google App Engine or using a Google Cloud Platform managed virtual machine.

It helps developers gain visibility into software code while it is running, to see which line or lines of code might be dragging down application performance. In the event of a performance bottleneck or other problems, the tool generates a report containing details on what might be causing the issues…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Sharon Gaudin.

With some of Verizon’s enterprise customers about to lose their cloud service for up to two days, now is the time for them to prepare for the extended downtime. "One of the major selling points of cloud computing is that it takes the burden of IT management off the shoulders of the customer, but with this outage, Verizon’s customers are right back in the thick of things when it comes to IT management," said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group.

"They’re going to have to figure out how to minimize the impact of the Verizon two-day fail on their business." Verizon confirmed to Computerworld this week that it will shut down its Verizon Cloud service to do maintenance for up to two days, starting at 1 a.m. ET Saturday. Users are being told to shut down their virtual machines at least an hour ahead of time…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Lindsey O’Donnell.

Solution providers are expecting accelerated growth in the managed services space but stress that MSPs must transform as the need for cloud, mobility and big data solutions rises. A study released Wednesday by research and consulting firm MarketsAndMarkets predicted the demand for managed services will jump drastically in the next five years, with the global market slated to grow from $101.2 billion in 2014 to $193.3 billion in 2019.

Kyle Cebull, CMO of Fort Myers, Fla.-based solution provider Entech, said customers are looking to managed services to increase efficiency and reduce in-house costs. “Managed service providers are a more sophisticated way of handling information technology,” he said. “Companies are becoming more sophisticated in general about looking for new ways to excel…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Jordan Novet.

Microsoft is moving right along in its efforts to maintain a leading position in the public cloud market. Today the company is announcing a public preview for a new service for storing cryptographic keys in the Azure cloud — and it’s rolling out the G-Series of virtual machines for running applications.

New virtual machines, each of which is a sliver of a physical server in a Microsoft data center, are par for the course in the highly competitive cloud business, where it’s only natural for computing power to increase over time. The new Key Vault service, for its part, could be interpreted as Microsoft’s answer to the Key Management Service, which cloud market leader Amazon Web Services announced last year to manage keys, and Amazon’s older CloudHSM service, which provides dedicated gear called hardware security modules (HSMs) for key storage…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Linthicum.

Creating a business case for cloud computing has always been tough. And as cloud continues to evolve, putting its true value on paper won’t become any easier in 2015. Cloud technology often provides a great deal of value and quickly pays for itself. If you’re concerned that your cloud business case is weak, then it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some companies may not benefit from cloud or see the anticipated return on investment. To build a strong cloud business case, it’s important to consider these three issues:

1. Cloud deployment data points suggest the value of cloud computing has morphed in new and unexpected directions. Initially, the cloud’s value was allowing organizations to move from a Capex to an Opex model. Today, it’s more about the cost of ownership and cost of risk…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Information technology spending is still expected to maintain its upward trajectory over the coming year, so that begs the question: where will all this extra money be going? Where should it go? A new survey of 112 executives from Piper Jaffray suggests that more IT spending is being funneled into cloud computing services.

Overall IT spending increased 2.6% from last year, and two-thirds of respondents say they will boost their budgets at least as much in 2015. Most of the boost goes to cloud services — average cloud budgets are up six percent, compared to a two-percent jump in on-premises spending…