Hong Kong has launched the Government Cloud Platform, joining an array of countries with established cloud computing initiatives.
Yet the scheme, named GovCloud, is different from the US and UK initiatives as it is only for internal government use.
“GovCloud is the government’s first major private cloud computing initiative and is important central information technology infrastructure with full cloud computing functions,” a spokesman for the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) said, adding: “With robust and fully resilient infrastructure, GovCloud provides a stable and reliable environment for bureaux and departments to develop and host their e-government services.”
According to OGCIO, there’s a lot of capital in this venture: a total of HK $242m (US $31.2m) has been set aside to implement GovCloud in the next five years, with the doors opening on December 27.
Hong Kong is of course a major area for growth in …
Many news organizations including The Washington Post are reporting that the latest documents leaked by former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden show the NSA is in the early stages of working to build a quantum computer that could possibly crack most types of encryption. The NSA actually discloses they are working on quantum computing technology on their website, however, the status of the research was previously unknown. According to these new documents the agency is working on a “cryptologically useful quantum computer” as part of a research program called “Penetrating Hard Targets” and the goal is to use it for cracking encryption.
With headlines that scream, “NSA Secretly Funding Code-Breaking Quantum Computer Research,” it’s easy to see why many executives and enterprises are anxious and perhaps starting to lose faith in internet communications and transactions. Encryption is used to protect medical, banking, business and government records around the world. But, as many of the articles in the media today point out, the reality today is quantum computing is a theoretical research topic and is many years away from being a usable real-world technology. The Washington Post article quotes Scott Aaronson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “It seems improbable that the NSA could be that far ahead of the open world without anybody knowing it.”
SYS-CON Events announced today that Windstream, a leading provider of advanced communications, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN), a FORTUNE 500 and S&P 500 company, is a leading provider of advanced network communications, including cloud computing and managed services, to businesses nationwide. The company also offers broadband, phone and digital TV services to consumers primarily in rural areas.
IBM is strengthening its software defined environment (SDE) portfolio with the introduction of IBM Platform Resource Scheduler, a dynamic resource management tool for private and public OpenStack cloud that automatically allocates the right resources to the right job, balances workload demand with infrastructure supply and ensures adherence to service level agreements.
“IBM Platform Resource Scheduler provides a fully virtualized, open and programmable architecture that ensures enterprises are taking advantage of all available cloud resources – from application software licenses to available network bandwidth,” said Jay Muelhoefer, Director Strategy, IBM Platform Computing. “IBM Platform Resource Scheduler is an important building block of SDE and helps cloud clients optimize infrastructure usage, reduce cost of cloud ownership, and deliver higher workload quality of service.”
While unprecedented technological advances have been made in healthcare in areas such as genomics, digital imaging and Health Information Systems, access to this information has been not been easy for both the healthcare provider and the patient themselves. Regulatory compliance and controls, information lock-in in proprietary Electronic Health Record systems and security concerns have made it difficult to share data across health care providers.
The opportunities inherent in mobile technology are dramatically changing the way healthcare business gets done. Healthcare provider professionals are adopting mobile devices and tablets as an alternative to desktops/laptops and using mobile applications to augment gaps in existing patient management system capabilities. Developing mobile applications for the healthcare industry has some unique challenges, particularly protecting your backend data services while making them available to mobile application frameworks and SDKs.
CloudSigma on Monday announced that it has enhanced its solid-state drive (SSD) storage offering with highly-granular, affordable snapshot management technology to improve data protection and access in the cloud. Now, customers can seamlessly and cost-effectively incorporate enterprise storage strategies into their cloud infrastructure while meeting complex compute requirements.
With CloudSigma’s snapshot management capability, customers are not only able to snapshot live running drives, but also clone them to create full drives to run separate VMs from. The new drive can either be at the same site or a second site, assisting with off-site data recovery and eliminating companies’ cloud backup concerns. Off-site backup is easily managed from the WebApp, allowing CloudSigma to not only guarantee that IOPS bottlenecks are avoided thanks to its SSD storage, but that data can be recovered on a drive-by-drive basis. As one of the few cloud providers that offers this level of granularity, CloudSigma is uniquely able to meet companies’ custom requirements and complex workloads, ensuring enterprise information is highly-available, regardless of its dataset type.
Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Vanessa Alvarez has been named conference chair and Larry Carvalho has been named Tech Chair of Cloud Expo® 2014
14th International Cloud Expo® will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and 15th International Cloud Expo® will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“We are thrilled to see Vanessa Alvarez joining Cloud Expo as conference chair and Larry Carvalho as Tech Chair. Our upcoming event in June will offer the best sessions and faculty to date,” said Carmen Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO of Cloud Expo, Inc. “Since the 13th international conference in November, we have received the highest number of sponsorship and exhibit inquiries for Cloud Expo 2014.”
SYS-CON Events announced today that TelecityGroup, Europe’s leading provider of premium carrier-neutral data centers, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
TelecityGroup is Europe’s leading provider of premium carrier-neutral data centers, operating facilities in city locations across Europe. TelecityGroup’s data centers provide secure and highly connected environments for the IT and telecoms equipment that powers the digital economy. Our data centers are enabling environments in which the separate networks that make up the internet meet and where bandwidth intensive applications, content and information are hosted.
“Testing is the last piece of the puzzle. What we have seen is speed – the need for acceleration in terms of software development – and once you start hitting speed you start hitting speed bumps and those speed bumps are quality,” noted Wayne Ariola, Chief Strategy Officer at Parasoft, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.