Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

When it comes to cloud, we’ve come a long way in three short years. Back in the stone age of 2011, cloud was this promising but relatively novel way to access services on a subscription basis. Only a handful of organizations used cloud services in a big way at the time. Now, it seems unusual if an enterprise is not using cloud services for some critical enterprise function.

A new survey of 1,358 executives confirms that cloud has passed the tipping point and is now used, basically, everywhere that matters. The study, a joint effort between North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOm Research, finds record numbers of enterprises have adopted the three primary levels of cloud computing — infrastructure, platform and software as a service (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS). And many are recognizing the potential impact on the direction of their businesses. This is the fourth year the survey was conducted…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Mike Vizard.

Conceptually, the shift to platform as a service (PaaS) makes a lot of sense. Instead of managing stacks of computing, a PaaS environment makes it simpler to manage large swaths of the IT environment at a higher level of abstraction. For that reason, Cloud Foundry has received a lot of interest. It’s an open source implementation of a PaaS environment that can run on both public and private clouds.

Originally developed by the Pivotal unit of EMC, Cloud Foundry has found a fair amount of support among vendors that see it as providing a counterbalance against the growing influence of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendors such as Amazon Web Services. The theory is that if IT is managed at the PaaS layer, then the underlying infrastructure on which that PaaS environment rests becomes just another IT means to an end…

Grazed from Automation.com.  Author: Bill Lydon.

Fluke recently introduced Fluke Connect, a system which allows maintenance technicians to wirelessly transmit measurement data from their test tools to their smart phones. The system uses the cloud for secure data storage and allows universal team access from the field. I had the opportunity to meet with Fluke representatives and try this latest offering. There is a lot of hype about the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing. To date, from what I have seen on the market, Fluke Connect is the most useful, productivity-increasing industry solution based on these technologies.

I suspect many readers have the same experience that I had when troubleshooting and diagnosing problems. I would write notes about meter readings and other test equipment data. In my field days, I carried a stack of 3 x 5 inch cards in my shirt pocket. I took notes in an attempt to correlate information and understand why systems had problems. Later, I would review the findings with others and write reports…

Grazed from TMCNet.   Author: Editorial Staff.

Heavy hitters in the cloud computing industry include the likes of tech giant IBM (News  – Alert) and retailer Amazon. They, among other prominent entities, reach out to individuals and businesses with a need for storage space, and public and private entities are flocking to the cloud like there is no tomorrow. As a recent blog post at Statesman.com indicates, even the Central Intelligence Agency has sought space for its often-highly-private data.

The post indicates that enthusiasm for the new technology is not all bad, but it also warns that such excitement for the cloud could soon fall away to the sobering face of reality. Like the wave of outsourcing that swept businesses only a few decades ago, the cloud is taking businesses along for the ride of a lifetime, yet they may find that cloud computing does not deliver all the promises of a brighter business future…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeffrey Burt.

The tech giant, which will invest $1 billion over two years in the cloud, looks to broaden the services it’s offering in its IaaS solution. Hewlett-Packard is bringing managed storage services to its Helion cloud computing platform, the latest move in its efforts to rapidly expand its infrastructure-as-a-service offerings.

HP officials this week introduced Helion Managed Storage to help organizations deal with the rapidly growing amount of data they need to store and the increasing associated costs of doing it themselves. The tech giant is offering a range of services that, like other Helion solutions, can be deployed in a hybrid fashion—on premises, in a hosted private cloud environment or in a public cloud hosted by HP or a partner…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: David Darrough.

Anyone paying attention to all the cloud technologies discussions over the last 12 to 18 month has heard of OpenStack. Companies that are looking to reap the rewards of cloud computing often will hear things such as open source, avoiding vendor lock-in, IaaS, time-to-market, flexibility, capex vs. opex and control. So where does OpenStack fit into the conversation?

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage and networking resources throughout a data center, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Herbert Lash.

A Wall Street regulator has begun to migrate its surveillance and other watchdog duties to cloud computing, which in combination with crunching big data, will dramatically boost the organization’s capabilities, two officials at the agency said. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority began using cloud computing at the beginning of this year in a roughly 30-month roll-out that will save FINRA $10 million to $20 million annually while making the agency operationally far more agile.

By moving to the cloud, FINRA will gain increased processing capacity and more space to store data, while reducing costs because the service is only used when needed, Steven Randich, chief information officer at the agency, said in an interview. Technology is key to FINRA’s mission to oversee brokerage firms, monitor the U.S. stock market and protect investors from potential fraud. Wall Street’s industry-funded watchdog monitors trading in almost 6 billion shares daily for abusive activity…

Grazed from SCMagazine. Author: Steve Gold.

Whilst this may seem a misnomer, given the cost advantages that a cloud data centre resource can deliver over its local bricks and mortar counterpart, budgets – even in the corporate cloud – are still under significant pressure. According to Ed Macnair, EMEA MD of Intermedia, the key security issue in his opinion is how to embrace the cloud without losing control of the data.

"Our research suggests that around 56 percent of companies make use of six or more SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications, whilst 76 percent of network intrusions exploit weak and stolen passwords," he told the audience, adding that – just to make life more difficult – the average business user has 25 different passwords they have to remember for internet-based services…

Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Matt Asay.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sets the pace for innovation in cloud and sets pricing. For all of the "Everything is awesome!" singing surrounding the open-source cloud-computing platform OpenStack, it still lags AWS in almost every feature that cloud customers value. Most attempts to improve OpenStack come from longtime open-source contributors like Red Hat.

But one new entrant, Tesora, is something of a johnny-come-lately to open source. Last week, Tesora announced that it was open sourcing its previously proprietary database virtualization engine as part of its commitment to OpenStack’s Trove database-as-a-service (DBaaS) project…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Aimee Chanthadavong.

Cisco Systems is confident that Australia will be the global market leader to take up its big cloud play that has been dubbed Intercloud. Speaking to a room of media this week, Cisco development and sales president Robert Lloyd said Intercloud — which the company initially announced in March as part of its US$1 billion investment to secure its position in the cloud computing market — is an "enterprise response to the multiple uses of cloud technology that is expected to unfold in the next decade".

"We have heard for a year or two about the construct of the market, and how it has been trying to respond to the complexity that has emerged in networking … [but] command line interface network units that’s expected to lead to the agility and flexibility that customers are looking for today isn’t going to be the answer," he said…