In follow to an earlier report this month about Dell seeking a "cloud computing" trademark, latest updates indicate that the company has been denied a trademark because of the generic nature of the term which describes services offered by numerous other companies. In an initial ruling, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), included dozens of news stories and other material supporting its contention that cloud computing is a widely-used term of art for the technology industry. Dell is given six months to file a response or the USPTO will abandon the application. more»
HP, Intel Corporation and Yahoo have announced today the creation of a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing. The HP, Intel and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed aims to provide a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services. more»
James Urquhart claims Cloud is complex - deal with it, adding that "If you are looking to cloud computing to simplify your IT environment, I'm afraid I have bad news for you" and citing his earlier CNET post drawing analogies to a recent flash crash. Cloud computing systems are complex, in the same way that nuclear power stations are complex - they also have catastrophic failure modes... more»
Bill St Arnoud blogs that he is a big advocate of using commercial cloud services rather than rolling out a do-it-yourself cloud for a number of reasons... The cloud market is intensively competitive and innovative, where scale can make a huge difference in terms of reliability and accessibility. It is much easier to develop a set of common contractual service and interface requirements with commercial suppliers in regards to privacy, reliability etc. more»
U.S. Office of Management and Budget released a memo today establishing a program to reduce "duplicative efforts, inconsistencies and cost inefficiencies when assessing and authorizing cloud systems." The initiative called, Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), is aimed to develop a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services through standardized security requirements and controls. more»
The ongoing Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has also had a significant impact on some of the developments in our industry -- for example, cloud computing. It looks as though the GFC is the key reason that developments in cloud computing have not happened more quickly. Industry evidence suggests that shifting to the cloud saves 20%-50% off current IT deployments, and, according to its advocates, it can be many times more than that. more»
Wout de Natris writes to report: "EU Commissioner for the Information Society Neelie Kroes today launched the EU co-funded project for the Internet of the future in which everything will be connected to everyone in the cloud. Here's the link to Mrs. Kroes' speech." more»
The Wall Street Journal has an interview with the outgoing head of the FBI's cyber crime investigation Shawn Henry. In it, he has a blunt assessment of the US's capabilities when it comes to combatting online crime, especially data theft and hacking... The more I read around the Internet, the more clear it's becoming at how cyber security is becoming a central focus. This has pretty big implications for the cloud. more»
Is desktop anti-virus dead? Someday I'd love to make that announcement, but it still feels to me that there's a Patron Saint of Voodoo with an affinity for bringing it back to life -- like some macabre mirror image of the malicious zombies it's supposed to provide protection against. It's kind of ironic that today's innovation in desktop anti-virus isn't really happening at the desktop; rather it's occurring in the cloud. more»
Studies have found only limited, insufficient agency adherence with FISMA's (Federal Information Security Management Act) continuous monitoring mandates. One survey found almost half of federal IT professionals were unaware of continuous monitoring requirements. A recent GAO report found that two-thirds of agencies "did not adequately monitor networks" to protect them "from intentional or unintentional harm." more»
Virtualization of core network services such as DDI has created a lot of controversy over the last couple of years. Perhaps most notably, Infoblox and Gartner have been both claiming that virtualized network services are not on the agenda of larger organizations, nor will they ever be. I'm not sure I have ever seen a convincing technological reasoning for this position. Rather, the logic has always been circular: it's not going to happen because we're not seeing it happening. more»
As readers of my blogs may know I have long argued that advances in research and education through cyber-infrastructure (or eInfrastructure) can be largely justified, if not entirely paid for through the energy savings of using clouds, networks or outsourcing. But a big impediment in adopting cyber-infrastructure in most jurisdictions is the lack of financial incentives. The energy savings of cyber-infrastructure are usually earned by the facilities or estates department or rarely based on to researchers and educators. more»
Google sees all enterprise trends pointing toward cloud computing and it wants a piece of the action. Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Enterprise, speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in the US, said: "The next 10 years of innovations are going to be in the cloud. Enterprise software is not going away but there is a transition taking place." more»
In my previous blog on the topic, I stated that the business case supporting the IPv4 roll-out in the late 90s was the Internet. Although IP depletion will slowly become a reality, the chances are that due to mitigating technologies such as NAT and DNS64, it may take quite a while before organizations in the developed economies will get serious about IPv6. So where should we look to find a business case for IPv6? more»
There is such a huge volume of genomics (DNA related data) and bio-informatics data being produced that it cannot be transferred over commercial Internet networks, and instead organizations are using FedX and other sneaker nets to ship the data. The same crisis in data volumes is also occurring in the climate modelling and other fields as well. Research and Education (R&E) networks for many years have been warning about this coming data tsunami. more»
