Grazed from Fortune. Author: Clay Dillow.

Last year’s revelations of the National Security Agency’s sweeping data collection programs were not particularly good for U.S. technology companies. Following the Edward Snowden leak, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation predicted that U.S. cloud computing companies could lose as much as $35 billion in worldwide sales over the next few years. Analysts at Forrester projected losses for Internet service providers as high as $180 billion by 2016 in the wake of the scandal.

For most cloud storage and data sharing companies, that suggests rough sailing ahead. For BitTorrent, it suggests opportunity. BitTorrent — the same company behind the eponymous and somewhat infamous peer-to-peer file sharing protocol — has developed a solution for file-sharing between systems and devices that solves a lot of the problems inherent in cloud-based file sharing systems like Dropbox or Box. Sync updates shared files and folders across devices just like those services — but it does so without ever storing that data on remote servers…

Grazed from SourceSecurity. Author: Editorial Staff.

Genetec, a leading provider of unified IP security solutions recently announced new features and a reduced pricing plan for Stratocast, its cloud-based video surveillance-as-a-service (VSaaS), powered by the Microsoft Azure cloud-computing platform. Stratocast is designed to meet the needs of small and midsized businesses that require a reliable and cost-effective video surveillance solution without the expenses and complexities typically associated with installing and managing on-premise surveillance systems. \

The new features and pricing model are expected to be available mid-April 2014, including support for multi-channel encoders, a health-monitoring dashboard, integrator branding options, and geo-redundant storage. Genetec demonstrated Stratocast at ISC West 2014 (Sands Expo & Convention Center, Las Vegas – Booth #23027)…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Adam Ritchie.

Investments in space technology have produced many spinoff inventions that we now take for granted in everyday modern life. Advances in comfort, such as memory foam and shoe insoles, and life-saving technologies, such as smoke detectors and safety grooving in roads and runways, were all inspired by NASA research.

The popular open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform OpenStack also originated from a NASA program. At the Ames Research Center in 2009, NASA established its own private cloud computing environment – and became the first federal program to do so. NASA then teamed up with Rackspace and together they released OpenStack in 2010…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

As it rolled out tools and features for coders at its Build developer conference Thursday, Microsoft showed that it is ready to embrace technologies and platforms not invented within its walls. Rather than relying solely on internal tools, the Azure cloud services platform has incorporated a number of non-Microsoft technologies, including popular open source tools such as the Chef and Puppet configuration management software, the OAuth authorization standard, and the Hadoop data processing platform.

The company has also taken steps to incorporate open source into its product roadmaps, by releasing the code for its new compiler and setting up a foundation for managing open source .Net projects. "Clearly Microsoft’s message is its support of multi-platform. It will take any part of your stack, it doesn’t have to be just Microsoft software," said Al Hilwa, IDC research program director for software development. "This is good for Microsoft and good for the ecosystem."…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

The cloud computing boom is fueling an unprecedented level of interest in DevOps — to the point that close to two-thirds of organizations have now adopted this practice. That’s the word from RightScale, Inc. which just released a survey of 1,068 IT managers and professionals, exploring the impact of cloud computing on IT operations and practices. Along with greater adoption of DevOps, there’s a parallel movement to self-service IT, that long-sought-after holy grail of user-centric computing.

Overall, the survey found that when it comes to cloud, everybody’s doing it. Ninety-four percent, in fact say their organizations surveyed are running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service, and 87 percent of organizations are using public cloud. These numbers are much higher than most I’ve seen (typically in the 30 percent to 50 percent range), and may incorporate those people running pilots or merely noodling around with cloud services at this point…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Don Simpson.

Last month, I wrote about this concept, framed by the assertion that users must actually adopt a product in order to realize its true value. This month, I want to look at the other side of this problem, specifically from a cloud computing perspective. How can professional services firms help government customers achieve adoption of cloud products and services?

The inspiration for this blog came from a recent article that I read from the Technology Services Industry Associated (TSIA) by Bo DiMuccio, PhD, entitled The State of Professional Services: 2014 (login required). In general, traditional professional services companies are experienced at delivering product-attached, deployment-oriented services. The kind that greatly helps with realizing product value such as installation, configuration, training, health checks, and support. The problem, as I see it, is that this puts the product on a pedestal without focusing on whether or not the pedestal is in the right location. For us propeller-head engineers, this is like building the best widget in the world only to realize through unit and system testing that it does not actually do what is necessary to achieve the business value … a “forest for the trees problem.”…

Grazed from Virtual.com. Author: Dustin Smith.

While cloud computing solutions continue to grow in popularity, many companies are still asking, “Is a public or private cloud the right option for me?” According to Cloud Tech News, the cloud market is expected to grow to $121 billion by 2015, which suggests a 26 percent annual growth rate.

A good chunk of this growth is expected to be in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service sector (IaaS), where businesses host their own SaaS environment and other critical infrastructure or application environments. This private cloud computing option has many advantages over public cloud computing, especially for larger companies who can afford the expense. With public cloud computing, you’ll need to worry about…

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Maria Deutscher.

Andy Jassy, Amazon’s vice president of cloud computing, dedicated his entire keynote address at last week’s AWS Summit to the needs of corporate customers and his firm’s efforts to address them. That speaks to how far the online retailer has come in its public cloud journey, which started in 2006 with the launch of what was then a bare-bone infrastructure-as-a-service platform aimed primarily at developers.

Today, AWS has over five times more compute capacity deployed than the 14 nearest competitors combined, Jassy highlighted after stepping up to the podium. A sizable portion of that is in use by enterprise users who are growing increasingly frustrated with traditional on-premise approaches to provisioning IT resources, the first of the four factors Amazon views as the key drivers of cloud adoption…

Grazed from DemacMedia. Author: Editorial Staff.

“The Cloud” has become a mainstream term used to associate a virtual place where data and information is stored. But did you know, there are 50,000,000 physical servers around the world? “The Cloud” actually refers to large data centres situated around the globe with primary locations in the United States and Europe. See why 60% of CIO’s state that cloud computing is their #1 priority.

View the infographic and read more from the source @ http://www.demacmedia.com/infographic/cloud-computing-demystified/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cloud-computing-demystified

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Grazed from Kotaku. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft’s talked about how their next-gen cloud infrastructure is going to change things for video games. Today, they finally showed what that looks like. Back when Microsoft was revving up to launch the Xbox One last year, cloud computing access was one of the features they trumpeted as a big differentiator for their console.

The basic idea was that game developers would be able to offload processing chores for things like AI behavior to remote servers, letting the local hardware focus on different tasks like rendering an environment. Representatives from Microsoft showed it to the press at E3 last year and we described what it looked like. But now you can finally get a look at this important feature in action…