Articles about Cloud

According to a new survey, 88 percent of IT decision makers at mid- to large-sized companies think having to meet compliance standards in the cloud inhibits further cloud adoption within their company.

The study from Wakefield Research and Logicworks, finds that among senior management -- those most close to and responsible for cloud execution and performance -- the figure is even higher, with 97 percent agreeing that compliance inhibits cloud adoption.

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Earlier this week, movie theater chain AMC dumped coal in my Christmas stocking when I attempted to cancel the $19.95-a-month, watch-three-movies-a-week Stubs A-List subscription. One, and then another, customer representative informed me that at signup, the terms of service explicitly states that commitment is for three months. He, then she, warned that cancellation would trigger immediate charge for the remaining two months. But the ToS restriction shouldn't apply to me, being a returning customer.

Everything comes down to the meaning of one word: Initial. When A-List launched, on June 26, 2018, my wife and I joined. We ended our membership about 90 days later. The ToS states: "A-List has an initial non-cancelable term of three (3) monthly membership periods (the 'Initial Commitment')". We were good with accepting that requirement, which we met. But on November 18, with a few holiday movies of interest, I resubscribed, presuming that by making a second commitment I could cancel whenever. However, AMC service reps claim that my 3-month obligation reset and initial is the applicable word. Oh, did I futilely argue the semantics of that. C`mon? Doesn't initial mean first time?

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Use of the cloud is now well established in many businesses. But that's not to say that it isn’t still a fast moving sector of the industry.

With greater competition than ever and the pace of innovation showing little sign of slowing down, we’ve put together some expert views on what might be in store for cloud users in 2019

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DevOps teams are under constant pressure to release faster, improve quality and keep costs under control. This means testing increasingly becomes a priority to ensure accelerated releases and many companies are turning to cloud-based testing tools.

However, as with any move to the cloud, there are some challenges that need to be overcome. We spoke to Uzi Eilon, chief technology officer at cloud-based testing platform Perfecto to find out more.

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According to a new study 94 percent of respondents find it at least 'somewhat difficult' to recruit candidates with the right technology and business skills for driving digital innovation.

The report from AIOps platform company OpsRamp shows that over 60 percent of IT professionals say that a majority of their applications are either built or run using hybrid cloud architectures.

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Microsoft is rolling out new features to the mobile version of OneDrive. The company has also announced that it is introducing a new Block Download feature in "late November" that can be used to stop people from making copies of a file or its contents.

Android and iOS users can look forward to improvement to the MyAnalytics component, but the big OneDrive news is that the Camera Upload feature has now left beta and is available to everyone -- if they are using Android, that is.

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In May 2010, I wrote about Apple's market cap passing top-valued Microsoft; it's only fitting to follow up with an analysis about the unbelievable turnabout that, like the first, marks a changing of technological vanguards. Briefly today, the software and services giant nudged past the stock market's fruit-logo darling. A few minutes after 1 p.m. EST, the pair's respective market caps hovered in the $812 billion range, with Microsoft cresting Apple by about $300 million. By the stock market close, a rally for Apple put distance from its rival: $828.64 billion to $817.29 billion, respectively (Bloomberg says $822.9 billion, BTW). Consider this: As recently as October, Apple's valuation touched $1.1 trillion. But since the company announced arguably record fiscal fourth-quarter earnings on November 1st, investors have punished shares, which currently are down about 21 percent.

Apple has long been a perception stock, even when under the tutelage of CEO Tim Cook company fundamentals deserved recognition. But perhaps Wall Street finally realizes the problem of iPhone accounting for too much of total revenues at a time when smartphone saturation saps sales and Apple pushes up selling prices to retain margins. More significantly: Apple has adopted a policy of fiscal corporate secrecy by stepping away from a longstanding accounting metric. I started writing news stories about the fruit-logo company in late 1999. Every earnings report, Apple disclosed number of units shipped for products contributing significantly to the bottom line. No more. Given current market dynamics, everyone should ask: What is Cook and his leadership team trying to hide?

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Enterprise cloud use is increasing, with with 91 percent naming hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, yet only 18 percent say they have that model today.

This is one of the findings of a new study by Nutanix to create the first of what is planned to be a global Enterprise Cloud Index, measuring enterprise plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds.

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The New York Times is to digitize more than a century's worth of photographs, and it is going to use Google Cloud to do so.

The NYT has a massive collection of photos dating back decades, and the plan is to digitize millions of images -- some dating back to the late nineteenth century -- to ensure they can be accessed by generations to come. The digitization process will also prove useful for journalists who will be able to delve into the archives far more easily in future.

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Cloud adoption is high, with 78 percent using or planning to use cloud in the future, but most organizations lack a formal strategy to realize the full benefits and 62 percent report higher than anticipated costs.

These are among the findings of a new survey by Syncsort that shows only 29 percent report having a centralized strategy and center of excellence in place to proactively plan and manage applications to the cloud, while 42 percent migrate applications on an ad-hoc basis.

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Dropbox has just announced a new feature that makes it possible to edit your files online without the need to download them first. Dropbox Extensions give you the ability to edit a number of file types without the need to ever navigate away from Dropbox.

The company has formed partnerships with a number of third parties including Adobe, Pixlr and Vimeo to give Dropbox users the option of editing images online, signing PDFs, annotating videos, and much more. Dropbox says the aim of the new integrations is to improve users' workflows.

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While organizations are increasingly using the public cloud to create new digital experiences for their customers, the average enterprise experiences more than 2,200 misconfiguration incidents per month in their infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) instances.

This is among the findings of McAfee's latest Cloud Adoption and Risk Report which also finds that 21 percent of data in the cloud can now be classed as 'sensitive', putting the business at risk if it's stolen or leaked.

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Google may have pulled out of the Pentagon's $10 billion JEDI cloud project, but Microsoft has no intention of following suit. Company president Brad Smith has used a blog post to defend the decision to bid for military contracts, despite pressure from its employees.

Smith recognizes that there are ethical concerns about getting involved in military projects, particularly when artificial intelligence technology is involved. However, he says: "we believe in the strong defense of the United States and we want the people who defend it to have access to the nation's best technology, including from Microsoft".

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According to a new report, 71.5 percent of violations on AWS occur around identity and access management (IAM).

The study from cloud security company Netskope analyzed the Center for Internet Security's Benchmarks for AWS. Many of the IAM violations found involve instance rules, role-based access controls, and access to resources or password policy requirements -- things that enterprises can easily address even without an external security solution.

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It seems not a day goes by without a new cloud data breach making headlines. And though the victims change, the attack details remain the same. Why do organizations keep repeating the same cloud security mistakes? And how can we break free from this vicious cycle?

We spoke to Zach Malone, security engineer at security management specialist FireMon, who discusses these issues and tells us why, to identify the biggest threat to cloud security, we need to look in the mirror.

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