Grazed from Wired. Author: Cade Metz.

John Engates is the chief technology officer at Rackspace, and even he had trouble wrapping his mind around the way his company runs its most important of technologies. Rackspace, you see, runs its cloud software on its cloud software. At first blush, this seems like some sort of cruel joke. Cloud software isn’t the easiest concept to grasp — even when you’re running the stuff all by itself. And it doesn’t help that the world’s PR departments have co-opted the cloud moniker and applied it to, well, just about everything.

But in the end, Rackspace’s cloud-on-cloud arrangement makes good sense. This sort of multilayered setup is rather common in the world of computer science, and if you take the time to think through what Rackspace is doing, it may even help you grasp the very real but often elusive ideas that underpin cloud computing — ideas that are remaking the way the world runs software and stores data...

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

People have always feared that cloud computing is inherently lacking in security because of the distribution methods used, allowing it to be more public than necessary. But research and reports indicate that it is not less secure than enterprise computing as they actually both suffer from the same types of attack. And it does not matter if you are a small organization or a large one you will still be the target of cyber-attacks as most of them are opportunistic in nature.

While organizations and businesses are the target of online attacks, the real entryways for these attacks are unsecured personal computers. These form the backbone of the cyber-criminal’s arsenal. Hijacked computers referred to as zombies or bots are being used to make brute force attacks on different networks both within the cloud infrastructure and on-premise infrastructure. No one is actually safe, whatever kind of infrastructure that they are using. Others might be more privy to attacks due to the nature of their service like banks or the possible wealth of information that they bring, like government networks and industry leaders in technology research...

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Jeremy Kirk.

Amazon.com has added a file-syncing feature to its online storage product, Cloud Drive, putting the service on par with competitors such as Dropbox and Google's Drive. The syncing feature will allow users to view an up-to-date file across several devices. Cloud Drive is a desktop application for Windows and Mac, and Amazon.com also has a version designed for Android, just for photos. Amazon.com also offers a Web-based upload panel if users don't want to download the desktop application.

Online storage applications are a very competitive market segment. The services allow users to spread the same version of a file across several computers and prevent the loss of a file in case a computer is lost or stolen or breaks. But it is also an area where technical glitches and performance issues are a concern...

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Users of cloud services report that Software as a Service and Platform as a Service create more application integration problems than Infrastructure as a Service -- or even private IT. That can’t continue if cloud services are to reach maximum potential. Hybrid clouds can help by creating a uniform platform for deployment of integrated applications, facilitating the use of deployment/integration tools, and guiding application development and application lifecycle management practices to optimize integration. However, if hybridization isn't done right, the result could be worse than before.

Application integration is the process of linking application components to connect workflows and to optimize user access to productivity tools. Nearly every enterprise uses application integration with their internal IT assets, because most applications today are componentized in some way -- at the minimum they are presented from an application server through a Web server and to a range of browsers or mobile applications...

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Jordan Novet.

In 2010, the founders of Midokura set out to become the top provider of public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds in Japan, but they realized networking challenges stood in the way. So they decided to focus on networking, and in the meantime the software-defined networking (SDN) space got hot. Now Midokura is trying to rack up more large-scale customers, particularly existing IaaS clouds, to validate its software’s capabilities.

Toward that end, the company has secured $17.3 million in Series A funding, bringing the total the company has raised to $18.6 million. The Innovation Network Corporation of Japan led the round, which also included participation from NEC Capital Solutions and NTT Docomo Innovations Ventures...

Jamcracker, the leading Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB) enablement company, today announced the results of the third annual report on cloud adoption and usage. The explosion of cloud services offerings over recent years has presented a tremendous market opportunity for solutions that simplify the complexity associated with delivering and consuming multiple cloud services from disparate providers.

The largest segment of cloud adoption continues to be software-as-a-service (SaaS), followed by infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), as organizations of all sizes are shifting from an "operation" focus to an "aggregate" IT delivery and consumption model. Cloud adoption by small and medium enterprises is increasingly happening through CSB providers, such as telcos and traditional IT distribution channels. Large Enterprise and Government IT cloud adoption is gaining traction, driving an interest in on-premise as well as hosted Internal CSB deployment models. Additionally, Jamcracker observed collaboration and messaging applications accounted for nearly 50 percent of cloud sales, suggesting that organizations are consuming services that accommodate the "bring your own device" and mobile workforce trends...

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Archie Hendryx.

If you were to ask EMC or VMware whom they consider their major threat and competition you'd be easily forgiven for being mistaken to think it was NetApp, HP or offerings such as Hyper-V. With many terming us to now be in the third era of corporate computing, with mainframe and the client/server being the first two, the current cloud era has undoubtedly been spearheaded by the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook. It is here where EMC and VMware face their biggest challenge of remaining relevant and cutting edge in a market that demands automation, simplicity and speed of deployment.

Despite major marketing campaigns of "Big Data" and "Clouds" that have seen airports littered with exorbitant amounts of posters and adverts, as well as numerous acquisitions of various companies that have extended already huge product portfolios, both EMC and VMware have struggled to release themselves from the shackles of being deemed just a Storage and Hypervisor company. So in light of this it's no surprise to see both companies spin off a new and independent venture that will address this very challenge, namely the Pivotal Initiative...

CloudSigma, an international, customer-centric, pure-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, today announced at SNW Spring 2013 that it's upgrading its public cloud storage offering to an all solid-state drive (SSD) solution, powered by SolidFire. Abandoning magnetic-based, hard-disk drive (HDD) storage altogether due to its inability to keep pace with the randomized, multi-tenant access of a public cloud, CloudSigma's new, all-SSD offering enables companies to realize the scalability, flexibility and cost-savings advantages of a public cloud while ensuring the reliability and performance of their storage.

"With SolidFire's SSD technology, we have radically improved the performance of our entire cloud," said Robert Jenkins, CloudSigma CEO and co-founder. "After pioneering public cloud SSD technology two years ago, we have seen the value of SSD's ability to successfully remove storage bottlenecks and inconsistent performance in the cloud for critical systems and applications, especially when backed by an SLA. And now with SolidFire, we expect to see even greater performance improvements and growth for our customers."...

New York startup DigitalOcean says that its cloud server platform may be leaking data between its customers.  The company aims to fix this problem, but the snafu preys on many of the fears that so often prevent people from moving to cloud services — shared online services that provide instant access to computing resources, including processing power and storage space.

A low-cost competitor to giants such as RackSpace and Amazon, DigitalOcean sells cheap computing power to web developers who want to get their sites up and running for as little as $5 per month. But it turns out that some of those customers — those who were buying the $40 per month or $80 per month plans, for example — aren’t necessarily getting their data wiped when they cancel their service. And some of that data is viewable to other customers...