US Senator Seeks Federal Funding for New York Cloud Computing Center It’s no secret that the US Government is a big supporter of cloud computing. Although this support has declined slightly from the days when former Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra was at the helm of the country’s information technology initiatives (See: The Architect of the Official Cloud Computing Revolution – CIO Vivek Kundra), cloud computing still manages to get considerable attention in the US administration (See: US Cyber Command Chief Gives Cloud Computing Security His Vote of Confidence). Now, it seems individual lawmakers have also decided to get
Technology
Put A Clamp on Cloud Music? Village Voice Insists Yes Music writers have rung in the New Year with cloud complaints. A recent edition of New York City’s “Village Voice,” America’s largest weekly newspaper, finds head music columnist Maura Johnston picking away at premium music-listening services for the dearth in their artistic content. Her article, “New Year, New Rules,” advises readers on several cogent ways to improve their appreciation of fine music in 2012. Among her recommendations is to refrain from the cloud as a source of comprehensive music listening. Johnston specifically maligns Spotify, one of the most popular streaming
How to Build a Private Cloud Despite it being so easy to just hook into the public cloud by going to Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other public cloud vendors, a private cloud offers a bit more control to your virtualization and automation efforts. Many people have already tried it and posted up how they did it and all of them have mentioned the headaches and migraines that are in store for you. The main reason this is so, is because there is no one set way to build a private cloud, although there are some attempts currently underway to do
AT&T Joins The Cloud OpenStack Community “We also announced today that AT&T has become the first U.S. telecom services provider to join the OpenStack initiative, a community of more than 140 technology companies worldwide. We’ve been participating in OpenStack for more than a year and have already contributed a blueprint for a potential new function within OpenStack, focused on transactional task management. We’re housing our OpenStack capabilities on dedicated infrastructure in three AT&T data centers today, with locations in Dallas, San Diego and Secaucus, New Jersey. We plan to more than double the number of our centers with open-source capabilities
LAPD Refuses To Go On the Cloud Google Mail may be the most popular email service in the world, but it evidently fails to meet strict security guidelines as laid out by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). On 14 December 2011, the Los Angeles City Council voted to scale back the city’s email services contract with Google partner Computer Science Corp. (CSC) from 30,000 to 17,000 employees citing Google Apps’ inability to meet certain FBI security requirements. Consequently, the city’s 13,000 law enforcement employees will continue to use the existing Novell GroupWise applications. To add salt to its wounds,
Security concerns related to cloud computing Preventing data loss was stated as the main security concern overall, with 71% of respondents identifying it as one of their top three security concerns. However, preventing outages, rated second with 64%, was cited most often as the top issue, bearing out the fundamental role that ICT plays in business processes today. Large companies were much more concerned about keeping security up to date (69%) and meeting regulatory requirements (67%) than small and medium-sized companies. To help reduce security concerns overall, cloud providers need to clearly communicate their practices for maintaining a secure cloud.
