Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: Jeff Reeves.

Box Inc., the latest player to ride the wave of Wall Street optimism for cloud computing, just filed its S-1 this week to go public.  But while the media circus around “the cloud” continues and another baby-faced 20-something CEO gets ready to ring the opening bell on Wall Street, investors need to start getting real about the current bubble in tech stocks.

Here’s a heaping helping of reality to get you started, direct from Box’s filing with the SEC:  “We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future.”…

Grazed from CIOInsight.  Author: Samuel Greengard.

In recent years, as organizations have embraced cloud computing, CIOs and other executives have witnessed significant gains. In many cases, their enterprises have boosted IT availability, reduced demands on internal infrastructure and notched productivity improvements along with cost savings. Last October, Gartner reported that cloud computing will emerge as the bulk of IT spend by 2016 and half of all cloud services will take a hybrid cloud approach by 2017.

But as more and more organizations drift into the cloud, one fact is perfectly clear: the risk of an outage or outright failure is real, and such an event could have significant repercussions during and after an event. Already, a number of high-profile cloud providers have endured episodic outages and failures, including Amazon Web Services, Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft Azure. In some instances, companies using these products and services haven’t just endured downtime, they’ve also lost data…

Grazed from MidSize Insider.  Author: Shawn Drew.

While the benefits of cloud computing continue to outshine any potential drawbacks, some IT managers and executives at midsize businesses still take a cautious approach with this new technology. While the needs of businesses differ, some new research, as discussed in a Forbes article, shows that employees are adopting cloud computing services en masse without IT’s knowledge. That is a reality that IT managers have to consider when thinking about the cloud, security and their business.

Significant Shadow IT Spending

The new research comes from a Microsoft survey, conducted by 451 Research, of over 2,000 executives from around the world. The focus of the survey was cloud computing and how businesses are adopting the technology now that it has grown into more than just a buzzword…

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Bert Latamore.

Today’s one-day AWS Summit in San Francisco, which will be covered by theCUBE with a day of interviews of key players, comes at a particularly interesting moment in the development of the high-growth business-to-business cloud services market. For the last two years AWS has been growing at a phenomenal rate, with no sign that that growth is going to slow anytime soon. Yet despite that incredible growth and its dominant position in the market, AWS has just cracked the surface of the potential market, and despite its success its service is far from fully formed and is in some ways immature.

This year for the first time it is facing real competition from providers with the resources to match its own, in the form of IBM and potentially HP and the Google Compute Engine. At this one-day summit and at the East Coast summit later this spring in Boston, AWS should map out its direction forward, what it is doing to strengthen is service portfolio, and how it will react to this competition to maintain its dominant position…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week made its new cloud-based Desktop as a Service (DaaS) offering generally available. The release of Amazon WorkSpaces, announced in November at its re:Invent customer and partner conference in Las Vegas, will provide a key measure for whether there’s a broad market for DaaS.

But VMware and Google also have ambitious plans with their DaaS services, which they launched last month. VMware Horizon, a DaaS offering priced similarly to Amazon WorkSpaces, is the result of VMware’s Desktone acquisition last year. Giving VMware more muscle in the game, the company teamed up with Google to enable the latter to offer its Chromebooks with the VMware Horizon View service…

Grazed from DisCo.org. Author: Matthias Langenegger.

This post is part of a series on the opportunities and challenges of cloud computing in the developing world. The previous post covered the transformative potential of the cloud and the different types of cloud services. Let us now turn to the economics behind the cloud. It’s a tough, fast-moving business involving substantial investments, and, most importantly, cloud services are effectively competing in a global marketplace.

The ‘borderless’, instantaneous nature of online communications means that cloud services can be provided from anywhere in the world, creating almost perfect markets in some areas. At least technically, competition is just a click away. That’s particularly relevant in an environment where many of the competing services are “free” to end-users (supported through ads, donations or other business models)…

Grazed from EEJournal. Author: Bruce Kleinman.

In part one of this article series, I suggested that datacenter architectures could benefit from revisiting the parallel computing innovations of the 1980s, and I waxed lyrically about the Transputer, which struck a chord with a surprising number of readers – including one reader who wrote “we built a fabulous Transputer board … didn’t sell many of them … I haven’t thought about it for decades.” It was a heartfelt email, though I am not clear if that was because of his fond memory of the Transputer or the commercial failure of his product. In any event, I firmly stand by my belief that much could be learned and leveraged from revolutionary parallel computing architectures.

In mobile computing, I observed that quad+ core CPUs are vastly underutilized in the majority of real-world applications (the notable exception being gaming). Virtually all of these apps are built on a simple client-server model, taking fractional advantage of mobile CPU horsepower…

Grazed from NIUToday. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Cloud is all around us. A swirl of data, program suites and virtual store fronts such as Amazon, iTunes, and Google Drive are revolutionizing the way that we use and store information. This revolution will provide great opportunities for experts who understand Cloud computing. Research from Microsoft shows that public and private Cloud services will generate an estimated 14 million jobs worldwide in the coming year.

In response to the demand for well-trained information technology experts, Northern Illinois University is offering a Cloud Genius Certification course at NIU-Naperville. Cloud Genius® is a Cloud computing training institution founded by computing industry experts. In partnership with universities nationwide, Cloud Genius® provides cutting-edge, hands-on Cloud DevOps training that helps students learn to assist businesses transitioning to Cloud computing…

Grazed from Toss.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

As you read this post, keep in mind there is no “perfect” solution. All options – be it an in-house network or a cloud solution – have both upsides and downsides. Your selection has to be determined on a case-by-case scenario before you can come to a complete conclusion on which option will work best for you. (Warning: Do not let a cloud expert tell you there is only “one way” of doing something.)

Some companies end up with a hybrid solution where some of their applications are in the cloud and some are still hosted and maintained from an in-house system. We discuss more about these options in our post Different types of cloud solutions explained. Here are the general pros and cons of cloud computing:…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Ann Braley Smith.

For healthcare providers, the forecast calls for more clouds. And that’s a good thing. The healthcare and life sciences industry has been slower than others to adopt cloud technology, citing (most often) security concerns for proprietary patient data. A 2013 survey (PDF) showed that healthcare was ranked seven out of eight industries for cloud adoption, just ahead of state and local governments. The trepidation is understandable. Healthcare data is arguably the most personal of data, and the industry’s diligence, compliance and privacy regulations reflect this idea.

However, the attitude toward cloud computing is shifting. In 2011, only 4 percent of healthcare IT providers had adopted some sort of healthcare cloud solution. Since then, it’s growing at a rate of 20 percent per year. Why are health IT experts changing their minds about the way we manage and store patient information? IT experts are finding that the old concerns are largely unfounded, including these five common myths for healthcare cloud deployment, which include lack of security, high cost and insufficient functionality for end users…