Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

IBM is in the middle of a huge transformation and will issue a progress report – its quarterly results – after the market closes on Wednesday. It will go into that call with analysts with a piece of good news: A new, $500 million cloud computing contract. That’s nice news compared to some of the challenges IBM has had in the past few months.

IBM sold one of its computer server businesses to Lenovo and said it is investigating other divestitures. It began shedding employees from its global workforce, too, as it did last year. IBM hasn’t said how many jobs it is cutting, but did say it plans to spend $1 billion on 2014’s cuts, "plus or minus $100 million," (the same as it spent in 2013), and confirmed that layoffs took place in the first quarter. One analyst estimated that IBM would shed "at least 13,000 heads" worldwide. At the end of 2012 it employed 434,246 people…

Grazed from FireHost. Author: PR Announcement.

The Stephens Group, LLC, has led a $25 million Series E funding round in FireHost, a secure cloud company. The funding will allow FireHost to invest in all aspects of secure cloud computing, including providing further separation in technology required to protect customers from evolving security threats.

FireHost, the secure cloud company, today announced a $25 million Series E funding round led by its longtime investment partner, The Stephens Group, LLC. The latest round fuels FireHost’s global growth as the leading secure cloud provider, helping customers with compliance and security needs – from healthcare to retail companies – protect critical applications and data…

Grazed from USAToday. Author: Kathleen Day.

Could we be on the verge of witnessing a shakeup in the cloud? That’s the question looming over the $47 billion cloud-computing industry: whether the booming industry is having what Silicon Valley refers to as "a BlackBerry moment," when doubts about a technology’s adequacy threaten sales to the point that a company is doomed.

The answer? Maybe. Because big changes are forecast for the American side of the cloud-computing industry. Most people picture cloud computing in terms of email — using Gmail (cloud-based), say, rather than Outlook (desktop software). But that’s just the retail — and arguably less important — side of the business…

Grazed from Spanning. Author: PR Announcement.

Spanning Cloud Apps, the most trusted provider of data backup and recovery for cloud applications, today announced that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, and to provide education on the uses of cloud computing to help secure all other forms of computing.

Spanning was founded to help companies protect and manage their data so they can be fearless in the cloud. By providing enterprise-class, cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery solutions, Spanning helps organizations of all sizes avoid significant business interruption that can result from lost data in SaaS applications, including Google Apps and Salesforce. The company collaborates with a broad range of customers including major enterprise brands, non-profits and universities…

Grazed from Utilizer. Author: Editorial Staff.

Recent reports on NSA spying have eroded trust in US-based cloud providers. This is especially true for non-USA-based customers that use cloud services offered by US companies. They see using an American cloud provider as a risk because they assume their data could be accessed by the NSA and other government organizations. This perception has caused companies such as Google, AT&T and Cisco to lose non-US business.

The Snowden leaks spotlighted the risk. The information that was leaked revealed that some of the biggest cloud providers had their users’ data accessed by the NSA, including Google and Yahoo. In some cases, this happened with the companies’ knowledge and in others, without…

Grazed fro TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

High-performance fiber optic network solutions provider FiberLight is getting into the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business through a partnership with Cirracore, a provider of VMware (VMW)-based cloud IaaS solutions for disaster recovery and business continuity.

The public cloud and hybrid cloud IaaS offering is intended to provide customers with a viable business continuity and disaster recovery solution for data transport, processing, storage and distribution. According to the companies, the new IaaS product enables customers to easily scale out infrastructure while reducing their technology spending by taking advantage of the scale of cloud computing…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Xform Computing Inc., pioneer of the AlwaysOnPC Cloud-streaming mobile Apps and services, today announced that the company has received an investment from Parallels, Inc., a global leader in hosting and cloud services enablement and cross platform solutions. Xform and Parallels are collaborating across their technical, marketing and product teams to accelerate Xform’s AlwaysOnPC platform to address new applications and expand into more global markets and channels.

This collaboration also includes an investment by Parallels that will boost the next phase of Xform’s growth. "With its expertise in virtualization technology and cloud computing, Parallels is an ideal investor for Xform," said Kroum Antov, CEO of Xform. "Xform is building the next generation of Cloud App Streaming services and has a unique opportunity with Parallels for collaboration, especially in the areas of highly scalable infrastructure, and creating industry-leading user experience."…

Grazed from SysConMedia. Author: Paige Leidig.

Cloud computing security can be a conundrum. The point of using the public cloud is to outsource certain infrastructure and application needs to third party providers, after all. How can you secure your data once it leaves your perimeter and your control? As puzzling as it may seem, there is hope.

Luckily for organizations looking to adopt the cloud, securing sensitive information outside the corporate perimeter isn’t as daunting (or as impossible) as it may appear. Technologies exist to enable cloud computing security strong enough for companies to remain in compliance while taking full advantage of the flexibility, agility, and economies of scale of the cloud. Avoid these common pitfalls for a secure cloud experience…

Grazed from RealWire. Author: PR Announcement.

As the adoption of cloud computing continues to grow across the world, security, privacy and regulation of data in the cloud are becoming more prominent and relevant than ever before. This year’s Cloud World Forum conference and exhibition will provide a platform for leading solution providers and delegates across multiple industries to examine the risks, and explore the solutions to these growing concerns.

In a recent report by cloud security specialists Sky High Networks[1], nine out of ten cloud services put European businesses at risk. The report analysed one million users across 40 companies and found that enterprises use an average of 588 cloud services of which only 9% of those services in use provide enterprise-grade security. This brings to the fore concerns surrounding the regulation of privacy in the cloud…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tim Worstall.

This is pretty quick for a product that is so new. Cloud Services have only been around for a few years as the technology to make them possible began to exist (specifically, cheap enough servers and broadband) but they’re already just about to become, quite literally, commodities. For the commodity markets are about to start trading a contract in cloud services:

If you thought cloud computing was complicated now, just wait until next year, when pin-striped traders will buy and sell contracts in the stuff. At least, that’s the plan of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which announced on Monday that it had signed a “definitive agreement” to build a commodity exchange dedicated to the buying and selling of infrastructure-as-a-service contracts whose value will be determined via a technology from cloud measurement firm 6fusion…