Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Fujitsu today announced its FUJITSU Cloud Initiative to develop the Company's cloud business by providing various cloud-related products and services in a new systematic way to meet the cloud needs of customers.

The FUJITSU Cloud Initiative represents the Company's constant efforts to provide its customers with cloud solutions that are ideally suited to their ICT needs, from private clouds to hybrid clouds, and from integration services to the full cloud sphere of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Today's announcement details the first stage of the initiative with 10 new services (two IaaS, four PaaS, and four cloud-integration services) and two upgraded services (one PaaS and one security service)...

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Jordan Novet.

It’s clear that Wal-Mart Stores wants to stay on top as a major online retailer in the United States and abroad, as it takes steps to turn stores into fulfillment centers and bolster its virtual capabilities. What hasn’t been clear is how that transition will look, or how long it will take.

@WalmartLabs gave people a glimpse at its playbook on Tuesday by disclosing in a blog post the acquisition of OneOps, a finalist in the LaunchPad competition at GigaOM’s 2012 Structure conference, as well as Tasty Labs, whose CEO, Joshua Schachter, founded Delicious. Terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed...

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

Last year, when Google combined the privacy policies for more than 60 services into a single policy governing most of the company's services, the company assured lawmakers that its consolidated privacy policy would allow for a more seamless user experience and information sharing across different products. On Monday, Google extended that policy merger into the product realm. The company broke down the wall that separated Gmail from Drive and Google+ Photos. Henceforth, Google users have access to 15 GB of free online storage that covers Gmail, Drive and Google+ Photos. Previously, Gmail came with 10 GB of free storage and Drive and Google+ Photos collectively came with 5 GB.

The combined free storage pool puts an end to Google's previous practice of slowly increasing Gmail storage over time. But Google product management director Clay Bavor insists separate storage doesn't make any sense anymore...

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Kognitio, driving the convergence of Big Data, in-memory analytics and cloud computing, and DMG Federal, providing quality Information Technology and Business Intelligence services and solutions to the federal government and commercial clients since 1995, today announced an agreement, under which the two companies will work together to deliver secure, cloud-based data analytics to federal government and other public sector agencies.

DMG Federal's FISMA-compliant Cloud Framework, Federal IQ, is available through its GSA schedule and other contract vehicles. Federal IQ enables public service agencies to perform in-depth analytics of vast amounts of data in a secure manner, at a low cost that saves significant amounts of taxpayer money over previously implemented solutions...

Grazed from The Data Center Journal. Author: Jeff Clark.

The cloud boasts a variety of benefits that entice businesses: lower costs, security comparable to that of proprietary IT implementations, scalability and so on. Although some of these benefits (specifically, cost and security) are still matters of debate, they potentially mask a darker side to the cloud: centralization. Might the cloud, despite its apparent upsides, pose a danger to companies and consumers?

The Cloud: Reversing Decentralization

One of the amazing achievements of the twentieth century (and continuing into the twenty-first) is the diffusion of computing power to almost anyone who wants it, enabling all manner of capabilities that were once the province solely of “professionals.” Average individuals can now do advanced image and video processing, publish written works, perform complicated mathematical calculations and on and on...

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Thomas J. Trappler.

From time to time, organizations are asked to provide access to data for legal reasons. Those requests can be more complicated when the data is in the cloud. But a new report sheds some light on one critical aspect of such requests. One risk with cloud computing is that the customer has less control over who can access its data. When customer data is stored on and processed by the cloud vendor's data center instead of in-house, what's to stop a third party, such as the government, from going directly to the cloud vendor to obtain access to that data without the customer's permission or knowledge? And if that happens, will the cloud vendor's priority be to protect its customer's rights and data or to protect itself?

With the April 30, 2013, release of its third "Who Has Your Back?" report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has tried to answer these questions. The report reflects that, as with most things in the cloud, vendors vary widely on how they handle third-party requests for access to data. For the 2013 report, the EFF used six criteria to assess cloud vendors, and awarded a star for good performance in each category. The six criteria are:...

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Bob Evans.

While cloud computing’s popularity as a powerful and transformational business tool is soaring, some companies have been frustrated with cloud apps procured from multiple vendors requiring extensive integration that has dragged out time to value, stunted innovation initiatives, and reinforced the very silos those cloud apps were intended to break down, a new survey has found.

Called Cloud for Business Managers: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the report reveals that a fragmented approach to cloud apps has led many companies into their very own troughs of disillusionment, in which the hoped-for increased business agility, nimbleness, and optimized decision-making continue to remain beyond their reach...

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

8KMiles, a leading global cloud computing company, today announced the acquisition of FuGen Solutions for $7.5 million to expand and build on its cloud and big data security services and solutions to better serve and meet large enterprises and government agencies' growing security and compliance needs.

The purchase includes the acquisition of FuGen Solutions' market leading patented Cloud Identity Broker and Multi-domain Identity Services Platform (MISP™), an on-demand partner onboarding platform that extends the capabilities of existing Identity Management (IDM), SSO solutions and legacy services to allow enterprise customers and their partners to establish, scale and manage their federated access, certification and SSO, and web services via the cloud. The platform is complementary to 8KMiles' existing cloud architecture, serving as an added layer of security, while streamlining authentication and enabling secure single sign-on access across multiple cloud-based business systems...

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

It should come as no surprise that two of the biggest sponsors for the forthcoming Technology in Government conference and exhibition are specialist providers of mobile device management and security technologies. Mobility will feature prominently in the conference program, as will the other major industry developments that are occupying chief information officers in government and industry alike: big data, cloud computing, security and the seemingly unstoppable rise of social media.

The enthusiastic uptake of smartphones and tablets by the Australian public has put huge pressure on corporate IT departments to allow these devices to be used in the corporate environment and BYOD - bring your own device - has gone from being barely tolerated to generally accepted, in part because the technologies for securing and managing them have improved...

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Paul Korzeniowski.

The emergence of cloud computing has given InfiniBand a boost in acceptance. Touted as the high-performance networking option of choice at its inception at the turn of the millennium, InfiniBand struggled to gain wide acceptance in the enterprise -- but it did find niche acceptance. The networking option has established itself as the interconnect of choice in many high-performance computing applications, replacing propriety technologies, such as Quadrics and Myrinet.

The need for similar capacity has emerged in the cloud market. Typically, cloud data centers consolidate server, storage and network functions in central locations. As system configurations become denser, the need for higher bandwidth network connections -- especially from server-to-server and server-to-storage -- becomes clearer...