Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Linthicum.

You can’t go more than a few weeks without hearing about new features from larger cloud providers such as AWS, Google or Microsoft. They constantly add database services, new provisioning features, new management capabilities, new types of storage and many other services. A case can be made for a minimalist approach to cloud; one that takes advantage of public cloud services that don’t have all of the bells and whistles.

Late March price cuts across the board for cloud services from these providers made it clear that the public cloud wars were on. It was the functional equivalent of carnival barkers, all trying to attract your business at the same time. Once you’re in their tent, it’s very hard to leave…

Grazed from HuffingtonPost. Author: Edward J. Black.

TV watchers and anyone who cares about cloud computing as a proven engine for economic progress should be paying close attention to the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday. It is considering what may be its most important intellectual property case this year: a dispute between ABC and other broadcasters against New York-based tech startup, Aereo. Aereo allows users to "watch live TV online… no cable required." But innovative Aereo has seen plenty of legal strings attached since its February 2012 launch in New York City.

Traditional broadcasters have fought unsuccessfully to put Aereo out of the business of enabling the public to more easily access what’s broadcast on the public’s airwaves. The resolution of this plot in the Supreme Court this month matters immediately to millions of TV viewers, but it will also foreshadow the future of access to legal content stored on the Internet…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Dedicated cloud instances are something of an oxymoron. The traditional understanding of cloud computing is that it runs stuff from many users runs on shared infrastructure. Dedicated instances, by definition, aren’t shared and thus could appeal to a class of users who worry about the drag that neighboring workloads can have on their jobs — the so-called “noisy neighbor” problem. They also may suit those who see shared infrastructure as not compliant to various industry regulations.

There are enough companies worried about such things that Amazon Web Services launched dedicated instances in March 2011 and significantly cut prices on them in July. Since that price cut — which amounted to nearly 80 percent in some cases — the use of AWS dedicated instances has risen significantly, according to Cloudyn, which monitors AWS and Google cloud usage for customers…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Embotics®, a leading provider of enterprise-class Cloud Management Software, today announced it is releasing a set of new multi-cloud cost management and financial analytics capabilities within its latest release of the Embotics vCommander™ software. The new vCommander 5.1 release is generally available this month, April 2014, and will expand on the company’s mission of helping enterprises and service providers to better analyze, orchestrate, govern and broker across multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud environments.

Support for IBM SoftLayer®, Microsoft® Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Rackspace® Public Cloud has been added to vCommander 5.1, allowing Embotics’ users to model and compare the economics of running their workloads across one or more hypervisor and cloud platforms. These new platforms are in addition to the support within vCommander for VMware® vSphere®, Microsoft Hyper-V, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the OpenStack® based HP Cloud…

Grazed from BizTechMagazine. Author: Matt McLaughlin.

A move to cloud computing is a marathon, not a sprint, so any organization considering the cloud should take a slow approach, says Shane Zide, CDW’s sales leader for cloud and managed solutions. Businesses considering the cloud should take care to determine what they need and the best way to get it. “The cloud isn’t one size fits all,” Zide says. “It is very customizable, actually, in terms of what you want and what your comfort level is.”

The different flavors of cloud — private, public and hybrid — offer different benefits. For example, a business may want to keep its most sensitive data and applications in a private cloud while moving enterprise functions such as email to a public-cloud provider. A key benefit to cloud computing is that outsourcing IT operations to a service provider allows an organization to focus on its core mission…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Warwick Ashford.

Cyber attacks on cloud environments have almost reached the same level as attacks on traditional IT, with increased adoption of cloud-based services by the enterprise, a study shows. The 2014 Cloud Security Report by security-as-a-service provider Alert Logic is based on an analysis of data from cloud and on-premise infrastructures of 2,200 customers.

In the past year, brute force attacks on cloud environments climbed from 30% to 44% of customers, and vulnerability scans increased from 27% to 44%, the study found. Brute force attacks typically involve a large number of attempts testing multiple common credential failings to find a way in, while vulnerability scans are automated attempts to find a security weakness in applications, services or protocol implementations that can be exploited…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CliQr Technologies, the leader in cloud migration and full application lifecycle management, today announced it has been recognized as one of the "Cool Vendors in Cloud Management, 2014(1)" for its CloudCenter(TM) technology by the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, Gartner, Inc. Each year, Gartner publishes a series of research reports in key technology areas that highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services.

"We’re honored to be recognized as a ‘Cool Vendor’ by Gartner. We believe this inclusion validates our application-centric approach to cloud migration and management — an approach that is already resonating with the market," said Gaurav Manglik, co-founder and CEO of CliQr. "Businesses today have come to realize that the ultimate benefit of cloud computing involves the ability to fluidly move and manage applications and data to and across a variety of users, and private and public clouds depending on workload criteria. This is the true promise of the cloud — and to accomplish this in any scalable fashion organizations require the ability to liberate applications from being bound to diverse cloud infrastructures and services. And this is exactly what CliQr delivers."…

Grazed from EnterpriseStorageForum. Author: Drew Robb.

The follow-up article to our hybrid cloud storage buying guide provides tips, advice and cautions for those seeking to implement a hybrid cloud storage environment. Some companies are already well on their way to building a sophisticated internal cloud. Others have gotten their feet wet in the public cloud and know the ropes there fairly well. So there is no one-size-fits-all way to go about implementing a hybrid cloud. It all depends on where you are right now.

Hybrid Cloud Storage: Starting Points

Building a hybrid cloud storage deployment could just as easily start from a public or private cloud focus. “Because a hybrid cloud combines public cloud and private data center principles, it’s possible to plan a hybrid cloud deployment from either of these starting points. Picking the better starting point, however, will make it easier to address business goals,” said Molly Rector, Chief Marketing Officer, at Data Direct Networks (DDN)…

Grazed from NPR. Author: Steve Henn.

You hear the term "the cloud" or "cloud computing," and you picture something puffy, white, clean and quiet. Cloud computing is anything but. Even from a distance you can hear the hum of a modern data center. Last week, I visited one of the largest in Santa Clara, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley. It’s called SC1, is owned by DuPont Fabros Technology and is about a quarter-mile long.

"It’s about the same size and length as a Nimitz aircraft carrier," says Paul Hopkins, a regional vice president for the company, shortly after buzzing me through the door. The entrance is guarded, and employees need fingerprint scans to get in and out. Hopkins has agreed to show me around…

Grazed from MSPAlliance. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud security company Total Defense has gone through a rebranding and will now go by the name of iSheriff. The name change goes along with the company’s sale of its consumer division to Untangle. As a result, iSheriff, will now be dedicated to creating cloud security solutions for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs).

“Over the last few years, the Total Defense brand has become synonymous with comprehensive protection of the digital assets that we’ve all come to rely upon, in both corporate and consumer settings,” said Paul Lipman, CEO, iSheriff. “This transaction is a win-win for both our consumer and corporate partners and customers…