Category: News

Grazed from Fool. Author: Timothy Green.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has long pointed to the free cash flow, not the net income, as the best way to measure the health of his online retail empire. Even as Amazon’s net income has turned negative in recent periods, free cash flow has remained at a seemingly healthy level. Most bullish arguments for Amazon ultimately boil down to pointing out this fact — that Amazon is still managing to generate cash despite the losses that it’s reporting on the income statement.

But here’s the thing: A company that’s growing rapidly and investing heavily in its business through capital expenditures should be burning through nearly every dollar that it brings in. How has Amazon been able to do exactly the opposite, recording multibillion-dollar free cash flows despite its heavy investments? The answer? Accounting gimmicks…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Dan Holden.

Today’s security landscape feels more like a James Bond movie than normal life. International intrigue is now a standard equation for any large-scale cyber-attack, as we’ve seen recently with the Sony breach and the potential for North Korea being behind it all. Events like this are great fodder for politicos and make for glib and gossipy water cooler talk about the latest celebrity leaks, but they obscure the real dangers just beneath the surface.

What if skilled, persistent attackers targeted critical infrastructure like the water supply or electric grid, rather than a Hollywood studio pushing a silly movie? What if they targeted your business? With many calling 2014 the year of the data breach, corporate security teams are on notice. They face a wide range of threat actors, from nation-state cyber espionage to highly skilled patient attackers for hire, down to home gamers and nuisance attackers…

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Mike W. Thomas.

The OpenStack Foundation has approved Symantec, the security software company, as its newest gold member. OpenStack is the open-source cloud operating system that was founded by Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) in 2010. Symantec has been active in the OpenStack community through code contributions and has helped develop training and security guidelines for members.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Symantec, which has operations in San Antonio, joins Aptira, CCAT, Cisco, Dell, DreamHost, EMC, Ericsson, Hitachi, Huawei, Juniper, Mirantis, Nebula, NEC, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing, and Yahoo at the gold member level. There are also eight platinum level members including Rackspace, Nebula, SUSE, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Canonical, IBM and Red Hat…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/news/2014/12/22/symantec-joins-rackspace-backedopenstack-group-as.html

Grazed from FCW. Author: Troy K. Schneider.

Platform as a service promises significant savings of both time and money. The biggest names in cloud computing all offer PaaS solutions — as do countless providers that specialize in everything from mapping to content management to mobile app development. A few offerings already comply with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, and a 2013 survey of federal IT professionals found that 95 percent believed their agency would benefit from migrating to PaaS.

So why is PaaS still mysterious to so many? Partly it’s been a matter of structure and security. Many of the most popular early PaaS solutions, such as Heroku and Engine Yard, were available only in the public cloud, limiting their practical appeal for most federal agencies…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ron Miller.

Oracle added another piece to its growing cloud portfolio today, buying digital-marketing, Data as a Service broker Datalogix. The move not only gives Oracle another cloud tool, it’s one that’s aimed directly at marketers, an area where Oracle is fighting hard with rival Salesforce.com and others for dominance. The announcement did not include terms.

Datalogix gives Oracle a data-driven service, designed to help companies link consumer spending with online ad campaigns, a powerful combination because it can help digital marketers understand if their online ad campaigns are actually translating into offline buying. Oracle surprised some people in its latest earnings report when it showed significant growth in its cloud computing business, announcing “cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) revenue was up 45% to $516 million.”…

Read more from the source @ http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/22/oracle-continues-march-to-cloud-buying-data-as-a-service-broker-datalogix/

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Zetta.net today announced that it was named a winner in the 2014 Cloud Computing Product of the Year Awards, presented byCloud Computing magazine. The award was given based on Zetta.net’s appliance-free enterprise-grade cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) solution for small and mid-sized enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs).

The Product of the Year Award honors vendors who have been determined to offer "the most innovative, useful, and beneficial" cloud products and services that entered the market over the past year, while leveraging the latest technology trends. The annual award is sponsored by global media company TMC, which publishes Cloud Computing as well as other magazines in the technology industry. TMC has honored companies in the technology and communications sector with awards in various categories for more than two decades…
 

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Today IBM announced the opening of its first cloud data center with SoftLayer in Japan, located in Tokyo. This announcement comes on the heels of recent SoftLayer cloud data center launches in Melbourne and Paris and represents the next step in IBM’s $1.2 billion investment to expand its global cloud footprint.

The facility in Tokyo complements other SoftLayer resources located in cities within the Asia-Pacific region, including Singapore, Hong Kong, and Melbourne and broadens data redundancy options and geographic diversity within IBM’s growing number of cloud data centers worldwide…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

The Cloud. Can it really be avoided? The cloud market is expected to grow to $121 billion dollars in 2015, a 26% compound annual growth rate from 2010’s $37 billion (i). Such growth is set to continue, with research showing that 81% of organizations forecast a move to the cloud for 50% of their future transactions.

So what are the drivers for the growth in the cloud market? With 60% of CIOs stating that their number one priority is cloud computing (ii), a major driver has been the adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) technology. By 2017, SaaS is set to generate almost 60% of cloud revenues (iii). The move to SaaS is primarily driven by its ability to offer greater scalability, higher efficiencies with no loss of functionality, and reduced application costs, with a move to the cloud offering annual savings of over 20% (v)…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Identacor – a unique cloud based access and management solution provider – announced availability of real-time Active Directory (AD) integration capabilities for its enterprise users to ensure swift and secure access control across disparate cloud-based enterprise apps and software. The robust integration features 360-degree access management for all connected software, including software as a service (SaaS), desktop and mobile phone applications, in an instant with just a few simple configuration steps!

“Our strategy is to help enterprises do more with compelling apps and showcase the best of cloud computing and business instinct in a secure environment.” said Sandy Dalal, CEO at Identacor. “Today, we are excited to announce the integration between Active Directory and our cloud-based identity and access management service that will let enterprise users to access all apps, be it on-premises or over the cloud, with just a centralized network username and password.”…
 

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Eileen Yu.

China is planning to rate the trustworthiness of cloud computing vendors, allowing only those with full security clearance to partake in government projects. The move could leave foreign companies out of government procurement contracts, according to a report by China Daily.

Zuo Xiaodong, vice-president of industry group China Information Security Research Institute, said: "The basic idea of the security rating mechanism is to find trustworthy hardware, software, and service providers to ensure the government has total control of the entire ecosystem."…