Category: News

Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author: Archana Venkatraman.

BT’s new, secure, high-performance connectivity to Azure public cloud has gone live in Europe three months after the UK telecoms giant teamed up with Microsoft to provide ExpressRoute connection to its Azure service, bypassing the public internet. 

The service now connects to Microsoft Azure’s Dublin and Amsterdam datacentres. BT will later follow this up with connections to locations in Asia, the US and further round the world.  BT says the issues of security and reliability are still holding many CIOs back from fully embracing the trend. It collaborated with Microsoft so that its enterprise customers can treat the cloud as a seamless, flexible extension to their existing corporate network and datacentres, without any degradation of performance or security…

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Shawn Drew.

With the industry and its watchers so focused on the public side of cloud computing, it is easy to forget just how powerful and popular hybrid cloud computing deployments are becoming. Midsize businesses are in a position to benefit from utilizing the cloud’s middle ground, but only if IT managers understand all of the options that a hybrid solution makes available to them.

The Growth of Hybrid Cloud Computing

Two new reports focusing on the growth of the hybrid cloud shed some light on this phenomenon. The first report, from the Cloud Industry Forum and covered by TechRadar, found that 78 percent of businesses are using at least one cloud service, while 85 percent are using on-premise servers or data centers. Furthermore, after support for Windows Server 2003 ends next year, the number of businesses using a cloud service will likely jump to 90 percent…

Grazed from FederalTimes. Author: Jane Snowdon.

Many regulations, laws, and industry guidelines govern how sensitive personal information and regulated data are managed in the healthcare, banking, and financial industries. Improper release of regulated or sensitive information can result in significant consequences and damage, making compliance with government regulatory acts and industry guidelines paramount.
Micro-Cloud: Cloud moving into the network

Cloud computing has many benefits but cases exist where some data cannot be moved to the cloud for of a variety of reasons. For example, security concerns or regulatory compliance requirements might limit the use of the cloud. In some cases, data may be generated at rates that are too big to move or at rates that exceed transfer capacity, for example in surveillance, operations in remote areas, and telemetry applications…

Grazed from IBM. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM reported higher-than-expected quarterly revenue and profits last night, as it pressed ahead with its shift to higher-end businesses such as big data, cloud computing, and security and mobile services. The business technology giant’s total revenue fell two per cent to $24.4bn (£14.3bn) in the second quarter, above analysts’ average estimate of $24.1bn.

Profit rose to $4.1bn from $3.2bn during the same period last year. On Wednesday, IBM announced a partnership with Apple to begin selling iPhones and iPads into enterprises, as well as developing business-specific applications for use on Apple’s platforms.

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Ray Solnik.

Like most maturing industries, standards are required to achieve broad adoption and maximum value. For the cloud, in particular cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud, it’s time for a standard method for presenting these services so buyers can reasonably compare and contrast and make better buying decisions.

At the moment, purchasing IaaS is similar to how groceries were bought decades ago – very difficult to compare – both the product contents and the price/value vary from one vendor to another. A recent study conducted by the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) – involving Intel, Appnomic Systems and a number of other ODCA enterprise members – illustrates just how difficult the situation is today…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

Companies moving aggressively to adopt cloud computing are winning competitive advantage by reducing complexity and increasing business agility, according to a recent study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. Angelia Herrin, research director at HBR, says 70 percent of respondents to HBR’s survey had adopted cloud computing, and 35 percent of adopters "are very aggressively moving forward where ever it makes sense."

Drilling deeper, 56 percent of aggressive adopters told HBR they were gaining "significant advantage" as a result." "The people that are really getting competitive advantage are the ones who are moving aggressively," Herrin says. "And they’re certainly not leading with cost as a reason to do this."…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Joining a plethora of other vendors to support the open source cloud computing platform, software giant Oracle this week announced a partnership with pure-play OpenStack distributor Mirantis, blessing this company’s open source software to support Oracle Linux and Oracle VMs.

This is not Oracle’s first foray into the OpenStack community – in fact the company is a corporate sponsor of OpenStack and has its own distribution of the open source cloud management platform. But, it is one of the company’s first alliances in this competitive, yet still nascent community…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Do you remember last Christmas? Target lost data from about 40 million credit and debit cards that were stolen at its stores between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, the height of the holiday shopping period. Thieves tampered with the sales terminals’ card swipers to gain access to the data stored on the magnetic stripe on the back of credit and debit cards.

And do you remember Sony’s huge PlayStation Network security blunder that exposed as many as 100 million credit card numbers? It cost Sony big and required user account reboots. What do all these security issues have in common? All are breaches that occurred from internal systems — systems in which IT departments were in direct control…

Grazed from PredictionIO. Author: Editorial Staff.

PredictionIO today announces the finalization of $2.5M in funding in a capital raise whose investors include Azure Capital QuestVP, CrunchFund, Stanford StartX-Fund, Kima Ventures, IronFire, Sood Venture and XG Ventures. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and marketing and sales and operations for the company’s open source machine learning server for predictive analytics.

PredictionIO aspires to fill the role in the predictive analytics space played by MySQL in the relational database space by delivering an open source platform that empowers data scientists to both leverage a pre-defined library of predictive algorithms as well as create new algorithms that they can either choose to contribute to the platform, or keep to themselves. Built using Scala, the PredictionIO platform supports JVM and Java-based code as well as backend Hadoop-based data. Typical use cases for PredictionIO’s technology include the production of personalized content and recommendation engines, as well as algorithms that predict the behavior of users and industries based on historical trends…

Grazed from ChannelWeb. Author: Fleur Doidge.

The EMEA region’s spend on cloud computing-related hardware is continuing to grow, according to market analyst IDC; in fact it is now expected to exceed $4bn (£2.4bn) this year. Giorgio Nebuloni, research manager of the EMEA enterprise server group at IDC, said: "The rise of cloud has triggered a revolution in the hardware market.

"While white-box and a few large OEMs fight to absorb the surge in demand for public cloud, most incumbent hardware players invest heavily in offerings enabling on-premises and hosted private cloud environments, such as integrated systems, high-end networks, and high-performance storage."…