Cloud Computing

On its face, EMC's recently acquisition of ScaleIO seems pretty straightforward. The company said the deal will further strengthen its Flash portfolio by combining ScaleIO's highly scalable server software with PCIe Flash card solutions, like EMC XtremSF. ScaleIO will operate within the EMC Flash Pr...

Amazon is hiring more than 5,000 people to work in 17 of its U.S. fulfillment centers, it said Monday. In addition to the fulfillment center jobs, Amazon will hire 2,000 new employees to work in its customer service centers. The fulfillment center jobs, which are scattered throughout the country, ar...

American cloud service providers seeking to do business abroad are feeling the fallout from the NSA's PRISM surveillance program, suggests a month-long online survey by the Cloud Security Alliance. Fifty-six percent of more than 200 overseas respondents said they were less likely to use U.S.-based c...

Over the past three-plus decades, it's hard to think of a business computing-related technology that's driven more fundamental value than virtualization, and it's for a very simple reason: Since hardware evolves at a far faster pace than software, systems tend to deliver far more performance than ne...

The U.S. Department of Commerce is planning a major upgrade of its customer relationship management capabilities, which is likely to include a multiyear contract opportunity for a cloud-based CRM system. The project underscores the increasing awareness of federal agencies of the potential use of clo...

For most technologists in the enterprise nowadays, cloud is a pretty big deal -- and securing it can be an even bigger deal still. Security was the top concern of 46 percent of respondents to a recent survey by North Bridge Venture Partners. While this number is actually down from last year's 55 pe...

A persistent myth in the tech world is that major enterprises in highly regulated industries are risk-averse and reluctant to adopt new technology innovations. In the case of the financial services sector, this has not been the case for years, and it is being disproved again as a growing number of f...

Open cloud provider Rackspace has entered into a yearlong contributor agreement with CERN openlab whereby it will deliver a hybrid cloud solution based on OpenStack to help CERN research the origins of the universe, the company announced on Monday. CERN openlab provides a framework for testing and v...

Technology vendor partnerships come in two general flavors: 1) strategically transformative relationships that aim to develop and deliver something essentially new; and 2) tactically accretive relationships that strengthen the partners' individual efforts. The first sort typically occurs between com...

E-commerce companies rely on Big Data to glean valuable, real-time insights that drive smarter, more profitable business decisions. Problems can arise, however, when Big Data infrastructures become riddled with bottlenecks and don't perform optimally, causing critical intelligence to be delayed or u...

In a drive to reduce government computing costs, federal agencies have been required to cut and consolidate data centers. So far, agencies have reduced hundreds of operational centers -- but they still have fallen short of a five-year target set when the consolidation program was launched in Februar...

"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer," as the old saying goes, and this week Oracle took steps to do just that. Specifically, the database giant inked partnership deals with longtime competitors Microsoft and Salesforce.com in a bid to expand its reach in cloud computing. Announced on Mo...

U.S. residential broadband Internet penetration has grown more than 400 percent since 2002, when just 16.5 million U.S. households had fast Internet service. The increased presence of these high-speed connections has implications for a variety of devices, which increasingly are arriving in the home ...

After announcing last month that all of its Creative Suite apps would soon move to the cloud, Adobe on Tuesday made good on its promise and delivered the resulting subscription-based software. Now included under the umbrella name Creative Cloud, the latest versions of apps including Photoshop, Illus...

The GAO earlier this month found two key deficiencies in a cloud contract that the CIA intended to award to AWS. The GAO decision was prompted by a protest against the contract filed by IBM. GAO is the designated federal agency for handling challenges to federal contracts. The proposed contract prov...