Articles about Cloud

There's a new version of Ubuntu on the block -- Minimal Ubuntu. It's been stripped right back to the bone to leave a tiny footprint, and these back Linux distros  should boot 40 percent faster than a standard Ubuntu server image. Despite the reduced footprint size, Minimal Ubuntu retains all of Ubuntu's standard tools (such as ssh, apt and snapd) and maintain full compatibility.

Designed for cloud developers and ops, Canonical says that the release is intended for completely automated operations, and as such much of the user-friendliness has been stripped out, but it's still ideal for used in KVM, Google Computer Engine and AWS.

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Timehop -- the social network for those who like to reminisce -- has revealed that it fell victim to a security breach on Independence Day. The attacker managed to access an internal database stole the personal data of 21 million users from Timehop's Cloud Computing Environment.

The vast majority of those affected by the "security incident" (as Timehop refers to it) had their names and usernames exposed, but for nearly a quarter of them -- 4.7 million -- phone numbers were also exposed. The hacker also took access tokens which could be used to view users' posts.

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Public cloud services can be affordable for many enterprise applications. But achieving the same service levels that the enterprise data center delivers for high availability and high performance for mission-critical applications can be quite costly. The reason is: high availability and high performance, especially for database applications, both consume more resources and that costs more money -- sometimes considerably more.

Is there a way to make public cloud services equally, if not more, cost-effective than a high availability, high performance private cloud? Yes, but that requires carefully managing how the public cloud services are utilized by each application.

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Google has announced a new storage option for developers using Google Cloud Platform. The new Cloud Filestore is due to launch in beta next month, and it provides a managed NAS in the cloud.

Google describes Cloud Filestore as a "managed file storage for applications that require a file system interface and a shared file system", and the aim is to offer higher performance to users that need it than the existing options do.

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Traditional Hadoop-style big data is giving way to cloud and container solutions like Docker, according to the results of a new survey.

The State of Data Science survey, carried out by Python data science platform Anaconda, among over 4,000 of its users, shows that Docker now makes up 19 percent of data science platforms, beating Hadoop/Spark with 15 percent and Kubernetes at 5.8 percent.

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According to a new report, 74 percent of respondents believe DevOps enablement capabilities are essential, very important, or important for their organization. Yet only 33 percent believe their organization has the ability to deliver those capabilities.

This is according to research carried out by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by digital business specialist Embotics, which analyzed the results of a survey of more than 600 individuals responsible for cloud management at organizations with an average budget of $147 million for managing hybrid cloud operations.

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New research commissioned by cloud-native analytics platform Sumo Logic from 451 Research, reveals that the degree to which non-IT roles and functions are using machine data analytics for business value is growing faster than anticipated.

The findings show the more software-centric a company is, the more likely it is to have 100+ people who use machine data analytics at least once a week, indicating that these companies are recognizing the value of machine data analytics.

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A new study shows that 87 percent of IT Decision Makers (ITDMs) limit their use of the cloud because of the complexity of managing regulatory compliance.

According to the research by WinMagic, which spoke to ITDMs in Germany, India, the UK and US, 24 percent say this means they only work with a single cloud vendor in their infrastructure, rather than exploit the benefits of a multi-cloud environment.

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As more systems move to the cloud, companies often struggle with factors like costs and incident response due to a lack of visibility.

Operations management platform OpsRamp is launching an update to its SaaS platform that delivers greater visibility for multi-cloud environments and features a new Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) inference engine for more powerful alerting and event correlation.

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Enterprises have a clear appetite to move to the cloud, but businesses are creating additional technical complexity and recruitment challenges in the process, according to a new report.

The study carried out by 451 Research for cloud provider Skytap finds 67 percent of respondents plan to migrate or modernize at least half their on-premises applications in the next 12-24 months. As a result of this process, nearly two-thirds of respondents expect better customer responsiveness and to be more competitive.

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Serverless computing is increasingly popular as it allows developers to upload code for functions to the cloud rather than run it on local servers.

But specialist in serverless security PureSec has released a report detailing how hackers can turn a single vulnerable serverless function into a virtual cryptomining farm by taking advantage of the scaleable nature of the architecture.

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A new survey from data analytics platform Sumo Logic finds a staggering 98 percent of European companies face organizational challenges implementing security in cloud environments.

The survey of over 300 IT security professionals responsible for environments with significant investment in both cloud and on-premise IT infrastructure covered the US and Canada, and Europe, The Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

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Using cloud apps is fast becoming standard practice for businesses and Microsoft Office 365 usage is accelerating ahead of Google's G Suite, according to a new report.

The 2018 Cloud Adoption Report from cloud security company Bitglass shows global cloud adoption has topped 81 percent -- a 37 percent increase since 2016 and a 238 percent increase since 2014.

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While businesses often cite cost cutting as a motive for moving to the cloud, a new report reveals that 37 percent of organizations surveyed listed unpredictable costs as a top cloud pain point.

The study by cloud management company SoftwareONE also uncovers a lack of transparency into cloud resource usage -- something nearly one third of companies find to be a challenge.

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One of the darkest secrets of Information Technology (IT) is called the Productivity Paradox. Google it and you’ll learn that for at least 40 years and study after study it has been the case that spending money on IT -- any money -- doesn’t increase organizational productivity. We don’t talk about this much as an industry because it’s the negative side of IT. Instead we speak in terms of Return on Investment (ROI), or Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). But there is finally some good news: Cloud computing actually increases productivity and we can prove it.

The Productivity Paradox doesn’t claim that IT is useless, by the way, just that we tend to spend more money on it than we get back in benefits from those expenditures. IT still enabled everything from precision engineering to desktop publishing to doctoring movie star photos, but did so at a considerable cost. Follow the history of any organization more than 50-60 years old and you’ll see that they acquired along the way whole divisions devoted not to manufacturing or sales but just to schlepping bits and keeping them safe. Yes, IT reduced the need for secretaries, telephone operators, and travel agents, but it more than replaced those with geeks generally making higher wages.

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