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This Week in Cloud, October 6, 2011: Benioff uninvited from Oracle OpenWorld, NASA spinoffs compete head-to-head, Identity management in the cloud. And more…
Cloud News
- Oracle held its annual user conference, Oracle OpenWorld, this week. GigaOm’s Barb Darrow reviews Oracle’s launch of Big Data Appliance and poses 5 questions she’d like Oracle to answer in this article. The big news from the show seems to be Larry Ellison canceling Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote session at the last minute. Read about it in this TechCrunch article and this New York Times blog. Says Benioff, “This is the best possible outcome. It’s free publicity and it is clear that Oracle is threatened by us.”
- The former CTO and the former technical lead of NASA’s Nebula cloud computing project are squaring off in competing cloud computing ventures. Both companies, Piston and Nebula, are focused on helping customers quickly build and deploy OpenStack-based private clouds, both plug into commodity hardware and both are targeting big data applications. Read more in this Information Week article.
- The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the first federal agency to take advantage of the General Services Administration’s IaaS blanket purchase agreement to move all its public websites to the cloud. Read more in this InformationWeek article.
- The US Department of the Interior (DOI) is re-opening a search for a cloud email and collaboration vendor—a contract whose worth is nearly $60 million. The DOI was being sued by Google, which claimed it was unfairly ignored and that procurement documents were skewed to favor Microsoft. After DOI decided to reopen the search, a federal judge dismissed Google’s lawsuit, according to this CRN article.
Feature article
Pragmatic Cloud: You Can’t Always Get What You Want
By George Watt
Give your customers what they need. It's not always what they ask for.
Soft skills are a key ingredient to cloud computing success.
This week I had the pleasure of joining the Cloud Exchange discussion in Toronto. Though there was a great and diverse group in attendance with a broad range of interests, there were a few things that were of more universal interest. Amongst these were several issues that might be placed into the "people management" or "soft skills" categories. I was very encouraged to learn that, though not because I enjoy the suffering of others. I believe this signifies an increase in the maturity of cloud computing. At the very least it is a sign that more organizations are more mature when it comes to their thinking about cloud solutions. Read the full article.
Cloud Views
- This Computer Weekly article discusses the identity management strategies enterprises should deploy in cloud environments.
- This Government Computer News article titled ‘Cloud caveat: responsibility cannot be outsourced,’ includes a discussion of cryptography challenges and evolving threats and controls.
- Learn how Amazon’s recently announced Kindle Fire tablet and its Silk web browser leverages Amazon Web Services EC2 to make web browsing faster for customers in this PCWorld article. This CNN article delves into concerns about Silk, which are being raised by privacy advocates.
MSP Corner
- MSP Mentor hosted a webcast titled Five SaaS Habits of Highly Profitable MSPs. To register and watch a replay of the webcast, click here.
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