Category: News

Grazed from TMC. Author: PR Announcement.

The potential benefits of Big Data for an organisation’s efficiency and bottom-line will be a particular focus of the upcoming GCC BIG DATA SUMMIT – taking place in Dubai during March 2015.

Regional public and private sector organisations already implementing Big Data solutions have signed up to present case studies of their experiences in generating growth from emerging analytics technologies. They consist of international and local thought-leaders from the telecommunications, airline, energy, utilities, healthcare, banking and retail industries.

The Summit’s Speaker panel accordingly includes senior representatives of Etisalat, Injazat Data Systems, DU Telecoms, Halliburton, ADNOC, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Gulf Air, ADWEA, Emirates Group, Etihad Airways, Daman Health Insurance and Mobily. This senior-management-only GCC forum has been designed for CEO and COO level participants – just as much as for CTOs and CIOs. It will take place at Dubai’s Address Marina Hotel from March 8-10…

Grazed from Cloudify. Author: Tamir Korem.

Nowadays, if you’re a huge technology company and you’re not venturing into the cloud, you’re living in the past. So it’s not surprising that many companies are investing heavily in cloud across the board. This is also true for IBM, that decided in 2013 to acquire SoftLayer for approximately $2B, like many others such as HP who invested just as largely in their Helion play, and this is only one example of many.

SoftLayer, which was at that time, the world’s largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider, served thousands of customers. Today SoftLayer (under the auspices of IBM) maintains a global cloud infrastructure platform spanning 16 data centers (and counting…) all over the world, and only intends to expand this reach to serve their strategic plans and penetration into the cloud market…

Grazed from GCN. Author: William Jackson.

Two powerful trends will shape the government cybersecurity agenda in the coming year, say security experts, but they have more to do with how government security is managed than what technologies will better defend agency systems.

First, cybersecurity will increasingly be integrated from the start into the platforms and software being acquired and developed by agencies. This means that perimeter defenses – already abandoned to the realm of what is necessary but inadequate – will receive less attention as cybersecurity becomes more integrated into the government infrastructure.

Also, cybersecurity will no longer be considered the exclusive province of the CISO or the CSO, but will become a professional requirement for everyone responsible for IT services to the agency. “As a security vendor, we are ending up in conversations with the IT shop,” rather than just the security shop, said Ken Ammon, chief strategy officer for Xceedium, an identity management company. “Next year will be the year of convergence.”…

Grazed from  CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

2014 was an extremely busy year for cloud computing, as more and more businesses migrate and cloud increasingly becomes the de facto setting for IT. The competition between vendors for infrastructure as a service continued ferociously, with Microsoft and IBM cutting back some of AWS’ market dominance.  Before we look at what might happen in 2015, here’s a quick reminder of the main events and highlights from 2014:

Cloud in 2014

March: IBM rebrands as a cloud-first company, lays out its strategy. 2014 has been a year of turbulence and change for the large legacy tech vendors. IBM announced it was to push $1bn of its resources into cloud and that it was rebranding as a cloud company. Rival companies also gave it the big one this year; SAP, for example, made frequent overtures about its ambition to become ‘THE’ cloud company.

Read more: IBM’s cloud strategy: Will it become the best in the business?…

Grazed from CloudWedge. Author: Hadley Jones.

Have you ever thought about how much money it takes to set up a cloud computing service? Behind the end-user convenience of low or no capital investment and pay-per-use agreements, somebody has to finance the infrastructure, the computing power, the networking and the personnel to look after it. Cloud service providers have to take a deep breath and write large checks to put the service in place – or find somebody else who is willing to make the investment. So where (if you were so inclined) should you put your money if you want a good return on investment?

The Money-Makers

Enthusiasm for cloud service providers as an investment opportunity seems to have calmed in recent times. Some emerging companies make it clear that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is still far away, if indeed it can ever be reached. Box Inc., the innovative online file sharing and synchronization service provider, recently filed to go public with this statement: “We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future.”…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Lillian Ablon.

When cybercriminals can easily buy cheap hacking programs with exotic names like Fiesta, Lucky, Nuke, Siberia, Sploit, Tornado, Sweet Orange and Cool, what chance that anything online can remain safe? Lillian Ablon and Martin C. Libicki offer ideas for how to close down Web thieves.

Black markets for computer-hacking tools, services and by-products, including stolen credit card numbers, continue to grow, posing threats to businesses, governments and individuals. A prominent recent example was the capture of an estimated 40 million credit card numbers and 70 million user accounts in the December 2013 breach of retail giant Target. Within days, those data appeared—available for purchase—on black market websites…

Grazed from USA Today.  Author: Mike Snider.

The pocket PC is set to make a return.  But these aren’t the forgotten Pocket PCs of the last decade. These are fully-powered portable Windows workstations for consumers and professionals alike.

L.A.-based start-up firm The Hive is unveiling its new Amplicity portable smartphone-sized personal computers this week at the Consumer Electronics Show. The Windows-based products are about the size of a smartphone – just more than half an inch thick and rectangular at about 3-by-5 inches (4.8 inches)…

Grazed from SysConMedia.  Author: Natalie Lerner.

Hosting a website shouldn’t be a tedious task. With so many web hosting vendors to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start. Before you begin shopping, it is imperative that you create a list of traits that each web host must possess before making your short-list.

As many with experience will tell you, all web hosting companies are not created equally and depending upon the types of apps you are trying to launch, it may be important to note that not one size fits all when you are shopping for web hosting services…

Grazed from MacroInsider.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Final year software maker K2.com stopped relying on Amazon.com (AMZN) for its cloud solutions and turned to Microsoft (MSFT) as an alternative. K2 Chief Executive Officer Adriaan van Wyk says he’s delighted with the choice—most of the time. The developer tools of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service are superior, he says, and he likes its customized client service.

Yet occasionally Azure is slow, and on Nov. 18 it suffered a worldwide outage that lasted numerous hours. As insurance, Van Wyk has moved five percent of his organization back to Amazon Internet Solutions. “We nonetheless like Microsoft,” he says. “At the identical time, it’s been a bit bumpy. The five % tends to make confident if we have to move back to AWS we can do it swiftly"…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Seagate Technology a world leader in storage solutions, today unveiled two new storage products for the home, Seagate Personal Cloud and Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay. Seagate Personal Cloud provides the accessibility of cloud storage with the peace of mind that content is stored safely at home.

What differentiates these two Personal Cloud drives apart is how easily they can stream content to smartphones, set-top boxes, tablets, PCs or televisions via the Seagate Media application. Additionally, when used in conjunction with the acclaimed Seagate Mobile Backup app and Dashboard software, Seagate Personal Cloud also serves as a central backup device for PCs, Mac computers, USB drives, iOS and Android mobile devices…