Grazed from NearShoreAmericas. Author: Narayan Ammachchi.

Microsoft has launched its Azure data center in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state, promising to provide fully secured cloud computing services to Brazilian companies concerned about cyber spying. The new data center will store data within the country and provide customers with better performance through reduced latency.

Microsoft Azure, formerly Windows Azure, is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. Internet security has become a sensitive issue in Brazil after news emerged that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) spied on its President Dilma Rousseff and the state-owned oil company Petrobras…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

Analyst firm Gartner recently predicted datacentre hardware spending on new types of products and big data deployments will reach $9.4bn in 2014. At HP’s annual conference, Bill Veghte, executive vice-president and general manager for Enterprise Group of HP said: “As customers look ahead, they need business outcome-driven infrastructure that enables the New Style of IT.”

Big data, mobility, security and cloud computing are forcing organisations to rethink their approach to technology, causing them to invest heavily in IT infrastructure, according to HP. The services it has launched are aimed at reducing IT complexity, Veghte said. Among the new products launched is HP Apollo, a new family of HPC solutions to address power and datacentre efficiency challenges…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Daniel Newman.

It seem like over the past couple of years the term cloud has found itself as the center of attention after a long spell of being of interest to only meteorologists and folks with nothing important to talk about. Of course, this is because over the past few years “Cloud” as a means of computing has piqued the interest of so many from tech savvy consumers to enterprise CIO’s.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Cloud Computing is that it isn’t new. In fact, the earliest attribution of cloud computing goes back to the 1960’s and a little known man name Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider who is believed to be its inventor. However, it really wasn’t until the mid 2000’s when Amazon launched its storage cloud that cloud computing started gaining wide acceptance among technologists and really until the past 2 or 3 years with the growth of Apple AAPL iCloud that the adoption grew rapidly among consumers.

Grazed from Baseline. Author: Maggie O’Neill.

Cloud computing, diversification and virtualization are among the initiatives that federal agencies could deploy to save billions, while increasing efficiency. A new report states that government agencies could save as much as $19.7 billion a year by improving their infrastructure and deploying five key initiatives that are based on consolidation, cloud computing, diversification, remote access and virtualization.

That represents more than double the $8.5 billion savings already reported by federal agencies that have partially or fully enacted these initiatives. The additional savings would be leveraged through improved operating efficiencies, processes and services, as well as reduced capital and operating expenditures, according to the report, which was issued by MeriTalk, a public-private partnership that focuses on improving government IT outcomes…

Grazed from LogicWorks. Author: PR Announcement.

Logicworks, a global leader in cloud computing and managed hosting, today announced the launch of its Managed High Availability service on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Designed for mission-critical applications, Logicworks’ new Managed High Availability service provides clients a 100% application uptime SLA with a fully monitored and managed AWS infrastructure that is highly secure, fault-tolerant, and actively tested for resiliency by the company’s top-tier team of administrators, cloud engineers, and network technicians.

"As customers across industries increasingly run mission-critical applications on top of AWS, the question of how they manage and automate the underlying infrastructure to guarantee uptime and resiliency of those applications becomes paramount," says Kenneth Ziegler, CEO of Logicworks. "Logicworks has taken the lessons-learned and industry best-practices surrounding AWS and curated them for the benefit of our clients looking to optimize and automate their AWS installation for high availability based on their specific applications and business models." …

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM today announced that it is accelerating the adoption of open technologies for cloud computing to assist companies to more quickly integrate its existing infrastructure, respond to market changes with greater agility and deliver additional value to its clients. To provide a more flexible way to build, scale and deploy applications and reduce the time and expense of cloud, IBM is announcing it is working on an open integration model with Docker and the open source Docker project community.

While the Docker open source community further advances its position toward open governance, IBM has taken steps to further integrate with Docker. IBM has taken steps to further integrate with Docker including:

• DockerHub will be hosted on SoftLayer to provide companies with greater ease of use and maintenance
• IBM and Docker will ensure that customers have access to all relevant content from the Docker data repository (or Hub Registry), including compatible portions of the 14,000 Dockerized applications currently on the DockerHub Registry
• IBM will offer a certified Docker image of the cloud optimized WebSphere Liberty Profile Application Server to provide companies with the greater performance and flexibility…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

SOASTA , the leader in cloud and mobile testing, today announced the results of its Cloud Computing Survey. SOASTA commissioned Harris Poll to conduct this online survey of 2,051 adults to discover the prevalence of cloud computing in everyday life. The results show that 39 percent of all Americans use the cloud and of those, 86 percent say the cloud has improved the lives of Americans who work. When it came to using the cloud, SOASTA discovered the following:

• The highest percentage of Americans who use the cloud live in the South (44 percent); the lowest use was in the Midwest (29 percent)
• Millennials (18-34) used the cloud the most (54 percent) out of any age group
• Households with children were more likely to use the cloud over households with no children (52 percent to 33 percent)
• Individuals who made $75,000 – $99,999 a year (53 percent) were most likely to use the cloud, followed by those who made $100,000 or more (46 percent) a year; those who made less than $50,000 (31 percent) were least likely to use the cloud
• Students were most likely to use the cloud (55 percent) followed by the employed (44 percent), and then the unemployed (33 percent); retired Americans were the least likely to use the cloud (24 percent)…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Andrew Froehlich.

At Cisco Live in San Francisco last month, I attended a panel discussion on the Internet of Things (IoT), where the participants talked of an impending tidal wave of Internet-connected devices and data that could overwhelm data centers and cloud infrastructure. But I don’t believe that IoT adoption — and ultimately cloud growth — is as absolute as many make it out to be. In fact, I feel that we’re actually in for a backlash against IoT, which could seriously impact the predictions and even stall cloud growth forecasts.

The panelists included startup entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and healthcare IT forward-thinkers, all who painted a picture a mind-blowing "everything-connected" world. In fact, most agreed that in the not-too-distant future, IoT devices will not only become more integrated into our daily lives, they will actually begin making decisions for us…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Jyoti Trehan.

Cloud computing is yet another buzzword that has been metamorphosing constantly. In other words, it continues to grow but the evolution has been very zigzag. A few decades ago, IBM used to offer its mainframes to banks, utilities and other industries on a rental basis and the billing used to be metered. Even today IBM is doing the same thing with much success thanks to the amazing performance of its mainframe servers. However there are various new forms of cloud computing that have made it a common household word.

SaaS:

Salesforce is the company that showcased to the world more than a decade ago what SaaS could do. Having said that, SaaS, with multi-tenancy and metered billing model at the heart of it, is more applicable for product and services companies that offer per use services over the net. A lot of verticals, for better or worse, are not comfortable with the fact that the data lives somewhere outside of their brick and mortar structure…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Fighting has erupted between Netflix and Verizon over who bears responsibility for the low quality of service some Netflix subscribers purportedly experience on Verizon’s FiOS broadband service. The angry banter escalated sharply on Thursday when Verizon sent Netflix a letter threatening legal action if the video-streaming company doesn’t stop talking smack about Verizon.

Verizon sells a cloud service of its own that Netflix does not use, and both companies sell streaming video services. Verizon customers who are also Netflix subscribers must access their Netflix content via their Verizon account. That seems to be where things go wrong for Netflix customers with Verizon accounts. Who didn’t see this coming?…