Category: News

Grazed from BusinessWeek.  Author: Colin McCabe.

The cloud has been the subject of much hype recently, and with good reason. There are significant benefits of moving to the cloud, including shorter application deployment times and plummeting costs. These measurable benefits make it tempting for businesses to run towards the cloud. Right now the most challenging, important and strategic decision that CIOs face is how to build the right cloud for their business.

CIOs that make the right choices can significantly improve their organisation’s competitiveness, flexibility and IT economics for the next decade or more. Fearing security risks and being locked in to unsuitable arrangements, many CIOs are reluctant to let go of the traditional model of capital expenditure, hardware budgets and data centres…

Grazed from SFGate.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Paul Kocher, one of the country’s leading cryptographers, says he thinks the explanation for the world’s dismal state of digital security may lie in two charts.  One shows the number of airplane deaths per miles flown, which decreased to one-thousandth of what it was in 1945 with the advent of the Federal Aviation Administration in 1958 and stricter security and maintenance protocols. The other, which details the number of new computer security threats, shows the opposite. There has been more than a 10,000-fold increase in the number of new digital threats over the last 12 years.

The problem, Kocher and security experts reason, is a lack of liability and urgency. The Internet is still largely held together with Band-Aid fixes. Computer security is not well regulated, even as enormous amounts of private, medical and financial data and the nation’s computerized critical infrastructure — oil pipelines, railroad tracks, water treatment facilities and the power grid — move online…

Grazed from Bloomber.  Author: Andrew Harris.

Cisco Systems Inc. claims Arista Networks Inc. (ANET) is using too much of its technology in taking its business, even duplicating copyrighted work right down to inadvertent typos.

Arista, run by former Cisco vice president Jayshree Ullal, has been winning market share in one of Cisco’s most important businesses: the sale of machines called Ethernet switches which are used in data centers by Internet companies, banks and other large companies…

Grazed from Datamation.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

IT managers are in for big changes during the next few years as billions of connected devices light up the Internet of Things (IoT), according to IDC.  The Framingham, Mass.-based technology research firm published its IoT predictions for 2015 and they point to massive disruption in data center market.

Ninety percent of data center and enterprise systems management environments are expected to switch to new business models to handle IoT and BYOD devices by 2017. Forty percent of IoT data will be processed and stored at, or close to, the network edge by 2018.  IoT at the edge: By 2018, 40 percent of IoT-created data will be stored, processed, analyzed, and acted upon close to, or at the edge, of the network…

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