Grazed from CIO. Author: Patrick Renzi.

Cloud Computing is all the rage today, and rightfully so. Businesses are readily adopting this innovative way to compute over the Internet. But before you get ahead of yourself, there are hundreds of questions you should ask before journeying into the Cloud. For starters, what is driving this initiative? How are you preparing? How are you going to control it? And most important, what is it?

There is considerably more excitement about the Cloud than understanding. Tangible, like its namesake, the Cloud can actually be whatever you need it to be. It’s simply another way to access your system, and really no different than traditional hosting. Picture your desktop. There is a typically a tower, monitor, mouse, and keyboard...

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Mike Vizard.

As part of an effort to ensure that implementations of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment are consistent with one another, the Linux Foundation, in conjunction with EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP and VMware, announced today the formation of the Cloud Foundry Foundation project.

Jim Zemlin, executive director for the Linux Foundation, says the primary goal of the Cloud Foundry Foundation is to make certain that applications developed for Cloud Foundry can actually be ported between implementations. While multiple vendors have committed to embrace Cloud Foundry, Zemlin says implementations of an open source project can vary widely...

Grazed from TopTechNews.  Author: Editorial Staff.

It's official.  The Cloud Foundry Foundation has launched as an independent, nonprofit foundation to manage the global open standards for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology. The foundation will be managed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and will be governed by a team of open source experts from founding Platinum Members EMC, HP, IBM,Intel, Pivotal, SAP, and VMware.

Cloud Foundry is currently the leading PaaS platform and has seen a 36 percent increase in community contributions over the past year, with more than 1,700 "pull requests" for contributions to the open development project. The Pivotal Cloud Foundry, IBM Bluemix, HP Helion, and Canopy Cloud Fabric are among the most notable deployments, thus far...

Read more from the source @ http://www.toptechnews.com/article/index.php?story_id=021000CJALVX

Grazed from TechRepublic.  Author: Judith Myerson.

Risk management provides a framework to help you select security controls to protect an information system anywhere in the development life cycle on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) -- it doesn't matter whether it's an engineering, procurement, or personnel system.

The security controls are implemented after the risks are identified, assessed, and reduced to a low level. The implementation criteria include cost effectiveness, technological efficiency, and regulation compliance. You must document the criteria in a security plan...

Grazed from EnterpriseTech.  Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

The idea behind cloud computing, as pioneer Amazon Web Services believed when it launched its first utility compute and storage products eight years ago, is to abstract away the underlying hardware and provide raw resources to programmers for applications to run on. This hardware is a competitive advantage for AWS, as it has been for its parent online retailer, and that is why AWS very rarely talks about its datacenters and systems. But with Google, Microsoft, and IBM all talking up their investments in cloud and the innovations they have come up with, Amazon has to lift the veil a bit.

The reason is simple. The Amazon online retail business may be a $70 billion behemoth, but it does not throw off a lot of cash. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is not interested in profits as much as he is about transforming the world around him, but the cloud computing business is one of the most capital intensive businesses there are in the world...

Grazed from CloudExpo.  Author: Bernard Golden.

Cloud computing in the form of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has revolutionized the expectations of IT. Infrastructure that used to take weeks to months to provision is now available in minutes.  Moreover, most of the traditional drawbacks associated with infrastructure have disappeared as IaaS has become more widely used.

The lengthy timeframes to add infrastructure resources to existing applications, which led to wildly over-provisioned environments, have disappeared. The heavy upfront capital investment that is required before using resources has also disappeared, supplanted by the pay-as-you-go model of IaaS cloud computing...

Grazed from IT Pro Portal. Author: Jamie Hinks.

HP has announced the commercial availability of its Helion OpenStack and Development Platform that gives businesses the chance to benefit from a combined Infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS] and Platform-as-a-Service [PaaS] solution. The company also announced its new Helion Content Depot that is designed to handle the growth in unstructured data, images and media, and the releases are the first since HP made it clear that it was supporting the OpenStack project in June.

Organisations that choose the Helion OpenStack IaaS get a solution that has predictable scalability, high availability and durability, and low operating costs. The Helion Development PaaS, meanwhile, allows users to develop and implement cloud-native apps using various programming languages and app services...

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

Amazon Web Services has a big lead over Google Cloud Platform in IaaS, but Google's PaaS predates Amazon's, and enterprises have taken notice. Google App Engine emerged in 2008, three years before Google would begin serious efforts on an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform, and three years before Amazon would launch its platform as a service (PaaS), Elastic Beanstalk.

Because of how infrastructure resources are abstracted in PaaS, services like Google App Engine tend to be "sticky" for early adopters -- they stay on the platform once the PaaS becomes a core part of developing an app. Google PaaS, with its free quotas, has also been more affordable and easier to manage for some than Elastic Beanstalk...

Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: Joab Jackson.

Earlier this month, Microsoft quietly appointed software architect Mark Russinovich as chief technology officer for its Azure cloud computing platform, formalizing a role he’s been executing for the past several years.  It was a smart appointment not the least because it may help ease any remaining concerns of system administrators reluctant to take on Microsoft’s cloud platform as part of their job duties. Among the Microsoft faithful, Russinovich has serious geek credibility. If Russinovich is behind the gears at Azure, it must be O.K.

Russinovich has long been one of the most popular speakers at Microsoft’s Build and TechEd technical conferences, thanks to his clear, cogent explanations of the company’s technologies. Russinovich joined the company in 2006, after Microsoft purchased his enterprise software company, Winternals Software, which offered a line of Windows repair tools that many found superior to Microsoft’s own...

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Overcoming any skepticism about Platform as a Service will require more of an operational focus. As discussed in our last post, there's a lot of "dev" in PaaS, but not enough "ops." Recently, JP Morgenthal, director of the cloud computing & DevOps practice at Perficient (and a long-time enterprise software thought leader), led a BrightTalk panel discussion on promoting PaaS adoption to skeptical enterprises. He was joined by Ed Anuff, Apigee; Sean Allen, OutSystems; and Sarbjeet Johal of Unified Cloud.

The first challenge is that definitions of PaaS tend to be relatively murky, and often overlap with Infrastructure as a Service. (Even the Wikipedia definition of PaaS is flagged with "multiple issues.") Helping to kick off the discussion, Allen defined PaaS as "a cloud-based service that integrates and manages all aspects of your application stack.... anything that allows you to build cloud-based applications without worrying about storage or other stack-based components."...