Category: News

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

The enterprise IT industry faces a massive transition. The economics of cloud computing are causing IT organizations to rapidly adopt lean practices. The provisioning, installation and management of IT infrastructure is a $400 billion industry, with more than 1 million employees in the US. The quality, affordability and efficiencies of cloud computing are displacing more costly and error-prone traditional computing models. The days of the system administrator are numbered.

Starved for talent

The good news is that this cloud has a silver lining. The global economy is increasingly driven by software and the need has never been greater for developers and IT operators who can support DevOps, a new process of agile IT. DevOps, a portmanteau of Development and Operations, requires managers with a much wider perspective of technology development, where the IT Operator is responsible for provisioning servers, development of software and delivery of a complete service to the final customer. It’s a big change from the siloed approach of the last 20 years, where IT operations and development were not only separate but often hostile to each other…

Grazed from CNBC. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing company Rackspace could take itself private, as a source told TechCrunch the company has been negotiating with a private equity firm to fund the transition. Rackspace could make the announcement this week, TechCrunch reported. Rackspace, which is currently public, would not confirm to TechCrunch whether it was considering going private.

The company, which competes with Amazon.com, Microsoft and Google in a crowded cloud computing sphere, announced in May that it had hired bankers in an effort to partner with or be acquired by another company. At least three companies, including HP and IBM, have offered to buy Rackspace, TechCrunch said, citing a source within the company. Rackspace currently has a market value of $4.8 billion, and an acquisition could value it at upwards of $6.1 billion, TechCrunch wrote. Rackspace shares rose in pre-market trading Wednesday.

Grazed from CloudComputing News. Author: Editorial Staff.

Last week, the news that Code Spaces suffered a breach that overnight put the company out of business and cost their clients untold millions reminded everyone in the IT community how devastating a major data security breach can be for our companies and clients. At Logicworks, we manage highly available, compliant cloud infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, and in the wake of this catastrophe, we decided to publish a list of AWS security best practices.

Data security is not binary. Best practices are to use defense in depth and continuously evaluate what improvements can be made and how the threats are changing. AWS, and public cloud computing in general, provide many new capabilities, but along with that come new threats and new tools to counter them. Here are some of our recommendations to improve AWS security and build a good foundation for a secure scalable environment…

Grazed from LSE.ac.uk. Author: Dr. Monica Horten.

A judgement handed down in the US Supreme Court recently has underpinned the claim of a group of broadcast companies that royalties were due from a cloud-based service relaying copyrighted content. The ruling also raises a looming threat of new liabilities for the nascent cloud computing industry.

The case of ABC Inc et al vs Aereo Inc, concerned whether or not a cloud service transmitting broadcast television to computer users over the Internet infringes copyright law. In brief, the Supreme Court ruling means that it does, but it is in the detail of the ruling that the cloud liability is implied…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Bull is launching a new range of bullion(TM) servers designed to speed up the implementation of Big Data and private Cloud infrastructures. The latest bullion systems feature a suite of leading-edge technologies for the next generation of Data Center. The bullion S servers have been developed by Bull with the aim of delivering an innovative response to the new requirements created by the massive explosion in enterprise data and the challenges of Data Center modernization and optimization.

Featuring an architecture designed to support up to 240 processing nodes and exceptional memory of up to 24TB, the bullion servers are engineered for performance and in-memory computing. Powerful, reliable and scalable, the new bullion models are designed to be the most efficient enterprise servers for Data Center optimization, information systems modernization and transforming raw data in real value for organizations…

Grazed from InfoTech Group. Author: Steve Saslow.

What a different world we live in than the one most of us grew up in, am I right? – Mobile technology. A wealth of information our ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of at our fingertips. A computer just recently passed the Turing Test for the first time, and Google is making investments in research and development firms that aim to “cure” aging.

Unlike the brave men and women who braved the primitive Earth before us, carving out their survival wherever they stood, today’s men and women can run businesses and work for corporations from the comfort of their own homes or even while moving swiftly around the planet…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Stacey Collet.

DreamWorks Animation knows the magic of the cloud. Since 2003, the famed studio has held its product development, design and manufacturing functions in a hybrid cloud environment, long before the storage option was even called "cloud." The cloud gives the Los Angeles-based company "massive flexibility in both human and digital capital," says DreamWorks CTO Lincoln Wallen, adding that it gives "any artist access to any movie from any site, anywhere, on any project… instantly."

It also allowed DreamWorks to move from producing one movie every 18 months to three movies a year. A blockbuster solution, no doubt. But things proved trickier when cloud options were weighed for corporate and back-office functions. In 2012, DreamWorks switched email systems from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail on the Google Apps platform to create a uniform framework for its 2,600 employees, half of whom used Linux for creating animation and the other half Microsoft tools for corporate functions…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/425298/how-recover-after-cloud-computing-misstep

Grazed from TechTimes.  Author: Robert Lawson.

Cloud storage is now viewed as a commodity and the result is a bidding war between the major consumer and enterprise solutions offered by tech companies such as Google Drive, IBM SoftLayer, Dropbox, Box, Apple iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive and Web Services (AWS/S3). 

The mantra of the day is, "it’s in the cloud," a phrase that, several short years ago, would have held a completely different meaning to consumers. But because of the exponential shift in the worldwide information economy, the "consumerization of IT" has taken hold and placed a premium on value in terms of flexibility, scalability, reliability, cost and mobility…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Sue Poremba.

Cloud computing solutions may be growing in use, but a new survey of 400 global IT professionals by Enterprise Management Associates finds that cloud migration is fraught with failures and unexpected challenges. As InformationWeek reports, the survey reveals that companies are turning to cloud computing in order to keep up with technology innovations. Charles Babcock puts it simply: "The enterprise now wants the advantages of cloud computing, and IT needs to deliver." By migrating to the cloud, companies of all sizes — especially small and midsize businesses (SMBs) — are able to stay more competitive.

At the same time, however, the report adds that cloud migration appears to be overwhelming IT departments, which is leading to unexpected challenges such as monitoring and correcting problems on the fly. By not being able to meet these challenges, IT departments are seeing computing failures. "Unfortunately, many IT organizations lack the skills they need to perform these tasks," InformationWeek quotes from the report. "In part, this is because clouds represent an entirely new platform — from their pricing models to their operational metrics — and thus require entirely new expertise."…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Red Hat (RHT) is introducing a new incentive for enterprises to adopt its open source OpenStack cloud computing solutions. Now, the company will certify cloud-management solutions for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The certification offering comes as part of Red Hat’s OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, which the company calls "the world’s largest commercial ecosystem for OpenStack." Through the program, Red Hat will provide certifications for integrating channel partners’ cloud-management products into RHEL OpenStack.

Red Hat is pitching this initiative as a way for enterprises to take full advantage of the diversity of OpenStack solutions now available on the market without having to commit to a single vendor’s offerings. Instead, they will be able to adopt any of a wide range of the certified OpenStack management tools and integrate them into RHEL OpenStack…