Category: News

Grazed from CTOVision.  Author: Bob Gourley.

Reporting by Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley in Bloomberg is shedding new light on a destructive attack against an oil pipeline that caused a massive explosion in Refahiye Turkey in 2008. The event occurred six years ago, but information is just coming out indicating the cyber attack component of this event.

Robertson and Riley’s reports indicate that the pipeline was fitted with sensors and cameras to monitor all 1099 miles of the pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean, but the blast did not trigger a single distress signal. They also did not trigger the massive explosion and continuing combustion in eastern Turkey…

Grazed from NYTimes.  Author: Mark Scott.

FROM their glass-fronted office parks and start-up lofts in Silicon Valley, American tech companies oversee ever-expanding global empires.

Google has a bigger slice of the online search market in Europe than it does at home, where rivals like Microsoft still give it a run for its money. More than 80 percent of Facebook’s 1.3 billion users live outside the United States, with Brazil and India among the social network’s most important markets. And Apple, which generates roughly 60 percent of its revenue overseas, now sells more iPhones and iPads in Shanghai and St. Petersburg than it does in San Diego…

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Mark Gibbs.

Drones are on the verge of becoming everyday service vehicles that will shuttle small items and eventually large ones between warehouses, retailers, and consumers as well as monitor traffic and agricultural operations, deliver pizza, survey building sites, execute search and rescue, …  the list of possible uses is huge.

All of these operations will be done at the local level initially but within a few years you can expect to see drones performing cross country flights for things like surveying and deliveries as a matter or routine. All we’re waiting for is the Federal Aviation Authority to get its act together and issues rules for the commercial use of drones (this is expected to occur in 2015)…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

It should be pretty obvious by now that most enterprises will not adopt “the cloud” as the next phase of data infrastructure, but many clouds. Indeed, with large numbers of employees embracing a variety of public services to process and store corporate data, many organizations already use multiple clouds without even knowing it.

This could be a huge potential problem even beyond the obvious questions of security and availability. If the deployment of cloud services is allowed to continue in a piecemeal fashion, the enterprise could very well end up recreating the same silo-based infrastructure that currently diminishes performance in the data center…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Microsoft has finally flipped the switch on a series of enterprise-grade updates to its Azure cloud computing platform, which the Redmond, Wash.-based company first teased in a cloud-themed press event on Oct. 20. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, announced Azure Premium Storage, a high-performance cloud storage service backed by speedy solid-state drives, during the event.

Today, customers can take the offering for a spin. Microsoft Azure’s director of product marketing, Vibhor Kapoor, announced the Azure Premium Storage public preview in a Dec. 11 company blog post. The service "stores data on the latest technology Solid State Drives (SSDs) and offers up to 32 terabytes of storage per virtual machine," he explained…

Grazed from DataCenter Dynamics.  Author: Drew Amorosi.

Moving IT infrastructure into the cloud is a hot trend, but it appears the practice is burning brighter on one side of the Atlantic. That’s according to newly released survey data showing those who hold the budget purse strings in the US have been faster to move their IT infrastructure to the cloud when compared with their UK counterparts.

The survey of IT decision makers in both regions showed that one-third of those surveyed in the US have moved a “significant” amount (50–70%) of their organization’s IT infrastructure into the cloud, whereas in the UK, more than three-quarters have shifted less than 50%. UK respondents cited a lack of proper tools and technical skills as the primary factor for slower cloud migtation. On the US side, those surveyed said the decision to place infrastructure in the cloud was motivated by perceived improvement in service levels, uptime, and reliability…

Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: Mary Branscombe.

Microsoft plans to open-source the framework that helps developers of cloud services like those behind the popular Halo 4 game.  Building cloud services for millions of users means connecting and coordinating thousands of servers, and handling tasks and information across all of them. Project Orleans is a framework built by the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research using .NET, designed so developers who aren’t distributed systems experts can build cloud services that scale to cope with high demand and still keep high performance.

The Orleans framework was used to build several services on Azure, including services that are part of Halo 4, and Microsoft had an enthusiastic response when it released a public preview of the technology in April this year. Now Sergey Bykov of the eXtreme Computing Group says (http://orleans.codeplex.com/) they will open-source the project…

Grazed from Nasdaq.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft  recently teamed up with Accenture to jointly fund and build a new hybrid cloud bundle, which is expected to launch next year.  The "hybrid cloud" refers to businesses managing some of their own resources in-house, while relying on external cloud services for others. For example, a company can keep its recent customer data on in-house storage, but send its archived data to a public cloud service.

This approach, which is built on top of existing IT services, is useful for large companies, which can’t transfer their data to the cloud as quickly as smaller businesses…

Read more from the source @ http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/12/12/what-microsoft-and-accentures-cloud-partnership-me.aspx#ixzz3Lib6qPY8

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Anastasia Lamotchkina.

It’s becoming clear that out of the top tech trends this year, the Internet-of-things (IoT) is one of the most interesting. With any hope IoT will quickly evolve from simple trinkets to extremely powerful connected devices. So what’s next? you ask, Vordik thinks the cloud will have a lot to do with it.

IS YOUR TOASTER TALKING?: AN INTRO TO IOT

The Internet of Things is simply a label that has been tacked on to the concept of machine-to-machine communication that has existed for around 15 years. In the same way that computers can interact with each other and share information via their IP address, any object can now be assigned its own IP address – thus enabling it to connect to the Internet.

With technology advancing and prices decreasing, practically anything can become “smart” in the right hands. As a ridiculous example, take a look at this toaster that gets upset and jealous when it’s unused…

Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Saroj Kar.

The operating system of most famous open source is gaining ground in business particularly in cloud computing, according to a report from the Linux Foundation and Yeoman Technology Group.

The Linux Foundation has published a study called “2014 Enterprise End User Trends Report” that shows the steady growth of Linux in the market for large companies, especially in recent years driven by factors such as the growth of cloud computing, in addition to its known qualities in terms of safety, capacity deployment, costs or virtualization…