Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Greg O’Connor.

Cloud providers Google, AmazonWeb Services (AWS) and Microsoft are doing some spring-cleaning, and it’s out with the old, in with the new when it comes to pricing services. The latest cuts make it clear there’s a new business model driving cloud that is every bit as exponential in growth — with order of magnitude improvements to pricing — as Moore’s Law has been to computing.

If you need a refresher, Moore’s Law is “the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.” I propose my own version, Bezos’s law. Named for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, I define it as the observation that, over the history of cloud, a unit of computing power price is reduced by 50 percent approximately every three years…

Grazed from TheVarGuy.  Author: Michael Cusanelli.

VMware (VMW) announced this week that it is adding AIS (American Internet Services) to its growing list of service providers. AIS will take on the role of an Enterprise level member as the latest addition to the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP).

AIS has been a major provider of VMware-based cloud services in the U.S. Southwest since 2012, most notably with the company’s popular AIS BusinessCloud1 IaaS which utilizes VMware infrastructure, according to the press release. AIS also provides resellers with client-specific network, compute and storage resources for virtual data centers on internet accessible secure platforms, making it a prime candidate for the VSPP. "…

Grazed from CloudWiser.  Author: Eric Lundquist.

Red Hat says virtual containers will be an efficient way to distribute applications across the hybrid cloud infrastructures that are favored by enterprises.  The development of shipping containers enabled the global trade we now enjoy and made shipping your products around the world a simple transaction. As the opening paragraph in a book chronicling the rise of shipping containers (The Box) from the origins in 1956 onward stated, “The container made shipping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world economy.”

Now containers, albeit in a digital form, are being touted as the next big thing in cloud computing.  At the Red Hat Conference April 14-17 in San Francisco (which I did not attend but did watch the keynotes on YouTube), containers were a big piece of the news. “This [container technology] is one of the things that is really going to drive the future,” said Red Hat President of Products and Technologies Paul Cormier in his keynote address…

Grazed from CMSWire.  Author:  Steve Marsh.

No longer the latest IT buzzword, cloud computing has become a reality for a growing number of organizations as they seek to reduce IT costs, expand capabilities and improve their networks.

For SharePoint users in particular the cloud offers a way to replace the administrative burden and costs of managing and maintaining on-premises SharePoint platforms. Migrating to the cloud can be somewhat complex since SharePoint migration tools are limited in functionality or non-existent…

Grazed from TechAisle.  Author: Michael O’Neil.

It is stunning to see how much corporate IT realities have changed in the last five years. Today, an increasing proportion of infrastructure is rented rather than purchased, sourced with OPEX funds from remote suppliers. Agility has become the watchword for new automation projects, and acceptable timeframes are no longer calibrated in months. End-users can source applications, infrastructure and other needed services from a wide variety of online resources. And workers are tethered to the corporate infrastructure by their smartphones and tablets, not by the cables attached to their desks.

Most of these changes are attributable in part or in whole to cloud computing. Cloud infrastructure provides the basis for OPEX-based, flexible-timeframe infrastructure rentals. SaaS providers are able to deploy new automation in hours rather than months. Mobility is not really a discrete initiative so much as it is a key attribute of ubiquitous infrastructure. And IT now competes for corporate IT influence and budgets – it is no longer the “final word” on IT/business solution strategies…

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud. Author: Sarit Sotangkur.

The photography industry has been revolutionized multiple times throughout its history. In the beginning, black and white photos were recorded on plates, then celluloid film, then color film and now digital files. In each of these revolutions, we see a fundamental shift in the way photos are captured, processed and displayed. Although we are now in the digital age, I believe the cloud has only shown us a glimpse of where digital photography will go.

The cloud as photo backup

The digital age has brought us fast, compact and non-fading image permanence, but it has also brought us crashing hard drives, hackers and computer viruses. With that in mind, backups are top priority with any professional or serious photographer. And since shipping DVDs or hard drives to your relatives for off-site backups gets old fast, backing up your photos in the cloud makes a lot of sense. That’s why many commercial backup offerings like Carbonite or Dropbox have a large focus on preserving your photos and can do so at a fairly low cost…

Grazed from ChannelPartnersOnline. Author: TC Doyle.

Video. Mobility. Cloud computing. In the world of information technology, these are just three of the hottest trends today. While each offers transformative business benefits to the organizations that invest in them, they create an institutional challenge that is giving fits to CIOs everywhere.

They produce massive amounts of data — information that must be stored, optimized and leveraged in new ways. Fortunately, the technologies and best practices used for storing, managing and leveraging data have improved significantly in the last few years. While there is no one-size-fits-all answer to solve a CIO’s problems today, there are more options and capabilities to choose from than ever…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Brian Ascher.

Software-as-a-Service and cloud computing has been transformational for the software industry, but compared to what is coming next, you ain’t seen nothing yet. First, to appreciate where we are heading a quick review of where we’ve been is in order. Back in the olden days of business software a software company sold you an application which you installed on your servers and desktops which made business processes more efficient, facilitated workflow, and sped up information retrieval. As you used it this software accumulated data such as your customer records, financial results and manufacturing statistics.

If you wanted to deeply analyze this data for trends and insights you bought Business Intelligence or Analytics packages from a different set of software vendors so you could slice and dice your data, generate reports for executives, and hopefully decipher interesting trends about your business that you would then go act on. In the early 2000s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies emerged and enabled you to “rent” business applications, rather than buy them, as your employees accessed them through the Internet and their web browsers…

Grazed from Channelnomics. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing may be the marquee player in IT services, but when it comes to giving business leaders the cold sweats, security still steals the show, at least among the cloud’s newest arrivals. In a new poll of 1,300 technology service providers offered up by PSA purveyor Autotask, the IT pros say their clients are more concerned about security than they are about even high-profile matters like MDM and cloud.

Better than half (54 percent) of those queried said security was the top clients concern, followed by support for the cloud (52 percent), mobile-device management (46 percent) and data management (45 percent). Their concerns are not unfounded. In their annual Security Threat Report for 2013, Symantec Corp. said attacks on SMBs jumped 18 percent from the year earlier…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Joseph Tsidulko.

Google is stepping up its investment in cloud computing infrastructure in a bid to drive down the costs further for enterprise customers in the midst of a price war with cloud services rivals Amazon and Microsoft. Google Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora said the search engine giant intends to pass savings from lower digital storage costs to bring more customers to Google’s infrastructure as a service offerings.

Arora made the comments Wednesday during a conference call to discuss the company’s first-quarter financial results, even as Google posted lower-than-expected earnings for its first quarter. Google reported a three percent increase in net income of $3.65 billion on a 19 percent increase in sales to $15.4 billion. Earnings per share after stock based compensation charges were $6.27, down from the $6.41 Wall Street consensus estimate…