Category: News

Grazed from InformationAge.  Author: Chloe Green.

It’s been a fascinating 2014 for the cloud.  Some very niche technologies are hitting the mainstream, while the debate over data protection and governance clearly isn’t going away any time soon. So, we predict the cloud will rise high in 2015 – but how (and where) it is tethered to the ground will matter more than ever:

SDN and NFV will enter the enterprise

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) have become well established within the telecoms industry, where they have helped service providers industrialise and automate their service delivery to a large extent.  In the enterprise, however, the familiar hodge-podge of switches, firewalls, and routers still remains.  But with vendors of all sizes starting to build the open SDN and NFV specifications into their hardware, IT departments will soon enjoy cloud-like levels of automation within their own environments…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Kristen Lee.

At SIMposium 2014, the annual CIO event hosted by the Society for Information Management, Stephen Braat of IT service provider CDW gave CIOs some insight into where he and his clients have found points of risk in their cloud operations. Security, privacy and data protection loom large, of course, said Braat, a vice president of cloud and managed solutions at the Vernon Hills, Illinois CDW.

Unfortunately, one of the first missteps CIOs make is to rely on the vendor contract to address their concerns. “If you’re trying to affect those things contractually or after the fact, it’s really too late,” Braat warned. “The biggest mistake any of you can make in cloud computing is assuming it’s made to be well-protected, that it’s made to be secure, and it’s made to be redundant.”…

Read more from the source @ http://searchcio.techtarget.com/tip/Advice-for-CIOs-on-cloud-computing-risk-management

Grazed from FCW. Author: Sean Lyngaas.

The Defense Department might be missing out on benefits of the cloud and increasing the risk from cyber threats because of flawed implementation of its cloud-computing strategy, an inspector general report has found. The DOD IG reviewed three cloud contracts from October 2013 to September 2014 and found that DOD authorities did not get the waivers they needed to use a non-DOD-approved cloud service provider because DOD’s CIO "did not develop an implementation plan that included assignment of roles and responsibilities and associated tasks, resources and milestones," the report states.

Furthermore, auditors said the CIO did not have a detailed written process in place for getting a waiver. The department also has provided insufficient training to acquisition and contract specialists who buy cloud services, states the report, which was published Dec. 4…

Read more from the source @ http://fcw.com/articles/2014/12/05/dod-ig-cloud-report.aspx

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Editorial Staff.

O’Reilly Media released the results of its second-annual data science salary survey on Thursday (available for free download here), and the results were not too surprising. Essentially, it shows that people who work with tools designed for big data, machine learning, statistical computing and cloud computing make more money — often between $20,000 and $30,000 more a year, based on median incomes — than people whose jobs only involve tools such as SQL and Excel.

In that regard, the survey doesn’t really tell us anything new. All the talk over the past couple years about competitive recruitment and high salaries for data scientists was true, and it was true precisely because companies want the people who know how to work with new technologies. They want this decade’s data scientists — people who can build AI systems or pipelines for streaming sensor data — not last decade’s data analysts…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Each week Talkin’ Cloud compiles a list of cloud computing financing stories for readers who might have missed the news earlier in the week. This week’s column features funding news from ThinkingPhones, Tute Genomics, 21Vianet Group, ThreatStream and SimplyTapp. These stories have been gathered from Talkin’ Cloud’s article database and other media sources. If we missed something, feel free to leave a comment below. We might just add it into the mix. Here’s this week’s list of 5 Cloud Computing Funding Stories You Might Have Missed, December 5.

ThinkingPhones Raises $56.7M for Cloud-Based Unified Communications Suite. ThinkingPhones on Wednesday announced it has raised a $56.7 million round of financing for its cloud-based unified communications suite. Technology Crossover Ventures led the Series D round of funding, with participation from existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners. The additional funds bring the company’s total financing to date to $89 million…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-funding-and-finance/12052014/5-cloud-computing-funding-stories-you-might-have-missed-nov-21-0

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence. Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon Web Services has announced pricing for data transfer from AWS to the Internet is now 6% to 43% lower, and transfer out of AWS to CloudFront is now free. Once again AWS are announcing price reductions and this time it’s for data transfer. Announcing the reduction on its AWS Blog Amazon’s new pricing will reduce outbound data transfer from AWS to the Internet by 6% to 43% – depending on the Region and the amount to transfer – and will make data transfer from AWS to Amazon’s CloudFront content delivery network free of charge.

Additionally, pricing for data transfer out of CloudFront edge locations in the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia is now 4% to 29% lower, depending on the edge location and usage tier. New pricing for outbound data transfer is as follows:…

Read more from the source @ http://cloudcomputingintelligence.com/item/1703-aws-is-reducing-rates-for-data-transfers

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Alan Atkinson.

One of the fastest-growing segments of the software-everything universe is software-defined storage (SDS). Vendors new and old – including my company – are busy staking out their claims in this fast-developing market. The basic concept is simple: abstract the storage services (e.g. management, data protection, data placement, I/O, etc.) from the hardware that provides these services. When deployed intelligently, SDS has the potential to be a reliable solution for certain workload and customers large and small. Potential benefits include greater flexibility, scalability, CapEx and OpEx savings, and reduced complexity.

The State of Storage

Enterprise storage today can be fragmented with many moving parts, including different technologies (e.g. SAN, NAS, Flash, Object, etc.), multiple vendors, tools, and management software. Information types are changing too, with structured and unstructured data, rich or complex data, Big Data and the Internet of Things…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Bruce Rogers.

Paul Maritz finds himself once again at the center of a paradigm shift in computing. From mainframes to distributed computing to desktops and now the Cloud, Maritz has served a central role in building and scaling computing platforms that change the way we do business and communicate. The former head of the Windows platform at Microsoft, entrepreneur and sought-after technologist and business leader is the founding CEO of Pivotal,an innovative software and services company that positions itself as the operating platform for the future of Cloud computing. The company is a start-up that began life as a nearly billion-dollar baby born of assets spun off from EMC and VMware.

“Pivotal came about through a set of thinking that myself and a few others started doing some three years ago. At the time, I was at VMware, and VMware had been a very successful technology. But it wasn’t about doing fundamentally new things, it was more about enabling people to do what they were already doing, but in a much more efficient and more manageable way…

Grazed from Phys.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing and Big Data are the two top innovation hubs in ICT. Together they have the potential to become pivotal enhancers of social transformation and economic development for many years to come. Two ICT initiatives are filling technology headlines these days, promising to revolutionize computing, business practice, education and most areas of knowledge one can think of.

On the one hand, Big Data is an emerging paradigm for large scale distributed data management that aims at being able to process large amounts of data beyond the possibilities of traditional database technologies. On the other hand, cloud computing is born as a paradigm for distributed computing systems whose goal is to offer software as a service over the Internet…

Grazed from Symantec. Author: Dennis Wenk.

Few markets have grown as quickly or have caused as must disruption as cloud computing. According to IDC, the cloud computing market will surged by 25% in 2014. The market will continue to expand rapidly as enterprise organizations realize the significant impact that embracing the cloud can bring in terms of productivity, agility, and competitiveness.

Security has often been cited as a reason NOT to adopt cloud services. In response to this concern Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are investing more in security, as a result secuirty is now becoming baked into the cloud service. This fundamental shift caused by cloud computing continues to disrupt traditional security markets. This disruptive force is different than the usual competitive rivalry. In an effort to get a better understanding of ‘why’ cloud computing is such a market disruptor a quick a “Five Forces” analysis is in order…