Category: News

Grazed from FederalTimes. Author: Aaron Boyd.

The Department of Defense’s new cloud procurement policy — orignally promised for mid-November — is now slated to be released in December, according to a spokesperson from the DoD Office of the Chief Information Officer. In an effort to speed the department’s move to cloud computing, the new policy will divest authority from the Defense Information System Agency to the contracting officers at each branch and agency within DoD.

Before issuing the policy, a memo has been circulating among the component agencies for review, a process that is still ongoing. Despite minor delays, the policy should be signed and released in early December, sooner than later, according to the DoD representative…

Read more from the source @ http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20141202/FEDIT01/312020017/New-DoD-cloud-policy-delayed

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: nicole Perlroth.

What if it isn’t too late to start from scratch? It was only about 40 years ago that Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn holed up in the conference room of a Hyatt hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., and sketched out the sets of rules and protocols that laid the foundation of the modern Internet."

Despite big advances in speed, performance, memory and machines, their decisions continue to form the basis for modern digital communications — much to the detriment of security, some experts argue. But the United States government is teaming up with computer scientists to do something about it…

Read more from the source @ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/reinventing-the-internet-to-make-it-safer/?_r=0

Grazed from Nasdaq. Author: Editorial Staff.

Technology company International Business Machines Corp. on Tuesday entered into a new seven-year cloud-computing services contract with British advertising giant WPP Plc (WPP.L, WPPGY) for IBM to transform and manage WPP’s global technology platform. The deal will enable WPP to accelerate its digital transformation and global leadership.

"This announcement is a significant milestone in the deployment of enterprise cloud and extends IBM’s position as the premier global cloud platform. Our secure, open enterprise cloud platform will enable WPP to quickly deliver new innovations to their customers," said Erich Clementi, Senior Vice President, IBM Global Technology Services…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

The pool of online data analysis services available for corporate users is about to grow larger, with Hewlett-Packard set to offer two of its own products as hosted cloud services by early next year. The company’s high-performance columnar database, Vertica, will be available as a hosted offering starting early in 2015, as HP Vertica OnDemand.

The company will also offer selected functions of its IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer) text processing software as discrete services that can be embedded into mobile and desktop computing applications, in a package called IDOL OnDemand, already available to selected developers…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Matt Turck.

The frenzy around the Internet of Things (IoT) should be reaching its final countdown. There has been a period of extraordinary activity in the IoT space since this original attempt at charting the ecosystem for TechCrunch. While the Internet of Things will inevitably ride the ups and downs of inflated hype and unmet expectations, at this stage there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

The IoT is propelled by an exceptional convergence of trends (mobile phone ubiquity, open hardware, big data, the resurrection of AI, cloud computing, 3D printing and crowdfunding). There’s also an element of self-fulfilling prophecy at play, with enterprises, consumers, retailers and the press all equally excited about the possibilities. As a result, the IoT space is now reaching escape velocity…

Grazed from BetaNews. Author: Vivek Vahie.

One of the current challenges for a business IT team is supporting a variety of desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile end user devices for employees. This task can be a considerable overhead in terms of time, resource and cost. Physical desktops are not only expensive, insecure, and maintenance heavy, they are also not necessarily a good fit for an increasingly mobile and demanding workforce.

The groundswell of Windows 7 migration plans, an expanding virtual workforce, the growing popularity of mobile devices, and tighter IT budgets each point to the need to re-evaluate desktop strategies. While virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) seems like a promising alternative to managing physical desktops and mobiles, in reality, it’s too costly and complex for most companies to implement successfully…

Grazed from GigaOm. Author: Jonathon Vanian.

For the past several months, it seemed like Docker was on its way to becoming the de-facto standard for container technology, the hottest thing in cloud computing in 2014. Then along came CoreOS, which dropped a bomb (or in this case, a rocket) on Monday, kicking off what could become a container-standardization war between the two entities.

CoreOS’s announcement that it has built a container engine that can potentially compete with Docker’s container technology caused quite a commotion within the tech community on Monday. Docker has enjoyed a swift ride to prominence past year with its container skills catching on with some of the biggest names in the industry, such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: Paul Mah.

FierceCIO had the opportunity to speak to Stephen Schmidt, the vice president of security engineering and the chief information security officer of Amazon Web Services, on the sidelines of the re:Invent 2014 conference last month. We were curious as to what the head of security for the world’s largest public cloud service had to share regarding top enterprise security concerns, as well as what it takes to keep AWS secure.

Top enterprise concerns

"The biggest concern that I hear from customers is that they don’t get the division of responsibility right," said Schmidt in response to our first question. "It’s a shared responsibility. We are responsible for the bottom layer. We are responsible from the floor of the data center up to the hypervisor," he said…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Keith Ward.

Open source is becoming an increasingly attractive option for companies in the cloud, or planning on moving to it. And of those companies, a clear choice has emerged as their No. 1 option: OpenStack. So say the 376 respondents to an Open Source Cloud survey conducted by Zenoss, a vendor specializing in cloud-based management.

Its "2014 State of the Open Source Cloud" study found that 69 percent have implemented some form of cloud computing; of that number, 43 percent have cast their lot with open source. Of those, 69 percent are using OpenStack, which has been on a meteoric growth curve over the last several years…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

We at Talkin’ Cloud want to know your perspective on how cloud computing technology such as software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) will impact the channel in 2015. And if you act immediately, you’ll even receive a small (but useful) gift of appreciation for your participation. Sounds like a good deal for opinonated channel partners, no?

To help us further understand the insights of our channel partners, Talkin’ Cloud made the decision to work with PartnerPath on its State of Partnering annual study, which measures the priorities and challenges in partnering from both the vendor and solution provider perspectives. The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-research/12012014/channel-partners-needed-wheres-cloud-heading-2015