As the US Government’s appetite for cloud services hits a marked upswing, Microsoft has opened a Microsoft Office 365 community cloud specifically for federal agencies to move their productivity and collaboration apps to the cloud. Office 365 for Government, as Microsoft is calling it, contains the entire roster of Microsoft productivity solutions, including Exchange Online, Lync ...

In a presentation to AWS Summit 2012 Australia attendees earlier this month and just posted to YouTube, Amazon Web Services General Manager & Chief Information Security Officer Stephen E. Schmidt preemptively answers the single most common question around the public cloud – security – by introducing the concept of the “shared responsibility” model. It’s a long presentation( ...

On June 7th, Microsoft is holding a “Meet Windows Azure” event, which promises an update on the future of the platform-as-a-service cloud. Microsoft’s keeping mum on what we can expect, but rumor has it that Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie and company will be debuting the long-awaited Antares application framework and Linux VM. Both of these ...

Christophe Bisciglia, the Google veteran and Silicon Valley entrepreneur best known for co-founding Apache Hadoop services firm Cloudera in 2010, joined SiliconAngle’s John Furrier in The Cube at last week’s HBase Con 2012 to talk about Wibidata, his current venture – and how personalization is the next real opportunity space for big data developers. Apache ...

Yes, maybe there’s a significant skills gap in the big data and analytics market. And with enterprises everywhere looking to reap the benefits of actionable large-scale business intelligence, we can’t wait forever for formalized education to bring the next wave of data scientists. To get some perspective on this issue, I spoke with Deloitte Consulting’s Advanced ...

Capacity planning is a huge headache for the IT professional, no matter the scale: Too much capacity, and you’re wasting money and resources, but too little and you’re risking a shortage.  Prospective Microsoft Windows Azure cloud customers in the South Central US data center region are discovering they are on the wrong side of that ...

Today saw the general availability of Intel Cloud SSO, a single sign-on tool built on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform and designed to simplify user access to cloud and SaaS applications and enhance identity and access management for the IT pro both. It may seem a strange, given Intel’s reputation as a hardware player. But it all ...

Puppet Labs, provider of the very popular Puppet automation solution, has announced the launch of Razor, an open source, “next-generation” provisioning tool for both virtual and physical servers, developed in conjunction with EMC, and designed to enable management of the entire IT lifecycle, from bare metal to cloud application delivery. The real differentiator here, Puppet ...

If there’s a theme at HBaseCon 2012 here in San Francisco, it’s that the big data sector is hiring. Even Apple is trawling conference attendees, looking for a Hadoop/HBase engineer to assist with Siri. The conference organizers seem to have guessed this would happen, and provided ribbons for attendees to attach to their badges flagging ...

The Future of Open Source 2012, a survey sponsored by North Bridge Venture Partners and Black Duck Software and conducted by the 451 Group, indicates that when it comes to IT trends like cloud, mobile, social and big data, open source is leading, not following – and adoption rates are following. In fact, over $675 million ...