Grazed from Stephen Lawson.

As it heads toward an estimated $250 million initial public offering, cloud storage and collaboration provider Box is thinking outside, well, itself. The nine-year-old company introduced an alternative to its traditional per-user pricing on Wednesday, as well as its first service that doesn’t rely on customers storing their data with Box.

Box has built its business on giving enterprises a place to store files for easy access and sharing by employees, partners and customers. It claims 25 million users. They can tap into the platform through Box’s own software or integrate it with desktop and mobile applications using APIs (application programming interfaces)…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Gayle Nixon.

In the latest of Trillium Software’s Hashtag chats (see #DQChat for details of the discussion) I moderated a session focusing on the rapid growth of Cloud Computing and its impact on Data Governance. We explored questions such as: How is Cloud impacting Data Governance? What are the major issues to be addressed? How can these be tackled? How does Data Governance as a discipline need to evolve to meet these challenges? Is Cloud a gathering storm for Data Governance and its practitioners or a sunlit window of opportunity?

As usual these questions generated many opinions and a few disagreements. There was however strong consensus that Cloud is radically changing the traditional Data Governance paradigm. Increasingly the storage and management of data in the Cloud, held as it is outside the traditional physical boundaries of organisations, means that Data Governance has to shift from being largely an inward facing activity to one where active involvement with external third party suppliers of IaaS, SaaS, etc. becomes the norm…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud — does it really make a difference anymore? Apparently, not as much as it once did. A recent survey of 213 executives finds there’s less concern about the origins of cloud services, and more attention to how they can expand the business and deliver competitive advantage.

That’s the key finding of a study from Cloud Connect, conducted in partnership with Everest Group. The survey finds a rise in the number of executives expressing “indifference” as to whether they prefer specific applications to be delivered by public or private cloud providers. For example, 38 percent say the are indifferent as to whether their supply chain management and procurement applications were run in the public or private cloud, up from 24 percent a year ago…

Grazed from F5. Author: Nathan Pearce.

The idea of hype in the technology industry is something we’ve talked about on these blogs a few times before. We’ve talked about it with software-defined networking (SDN), for example, and now I want to touch on the same idea with cloud computing. The point I’ve made about SDN is that, despite its relative infancy, it’s already a term that has lost a lot of its meaning, because there is no clear, universally agreed definition and there are so many different use cases. You can read more on that here.

And so to cloud computing. There is no one single thing that is known as cloud computing. It is a huge variety of services and applications and platforms provided by a huge variety of different companies. The decision to embrace cloud computing is not an all inclusive decision; there are so many different types of cloud computing that one could argue the phrase has lost a lot of its meaning…

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Aliya Sternstein.

The Pentagon has authorized Amazon Web Services to rent computing space to all Defense Department components, company officials announced on Wednesday. The decision was based on past security tests conducted through the governmentwide Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, as well as an evaluation of additional Defense-specific protections.

Any contractor hoping to sell government agencies cloud services must pass FedRAMP by June. Approval signifies a system is safe for use governmentwide and comes with a reusable set of documented tests to prove it. Some agencies that determine FedRAMP protections, such as, perhaps, antivirus scans, do not meet their security needs can add more controls. The Pentagon is one such customer…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger says virtualization and cloud computing have produced a "tectonic shift" in IT operations that will result in software-defined datacenters replacing hardware-defined datacenters. That will be the main topic of his keynote address on April 3 at the Interop conference and exhibition in Las Vegas.

"We think we’re entering an unprecedented phase of IT. The transition from client/server computing to mobile/cloud computing affects everything IT does. It’s a tectonic shift in IT. Our strategy is to build the software-defined datacenter, versus the hardware-defined datacenter," he told InformationWeek in a pre-show interview…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Deepa Seetharaman.

Amazon.com Inc will drop prices on most of its cloud computing services starting April 1, the largest U.S. online retailer said on Wednesday, a day after rival Google Inc outlined a major price cut of its own. The price cuts range from 10 percent to 65 percent, Andrew Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, told a conference for Amazon web developers in San Francisco.

This marks the 42nd price reduction for AWS since its introduction eight years ago. AWS provides the underlying infrastructure for popular Web companies such as online movie streaming service Netflix Inc and social network Pinterest. Cloud services have become increasingly popular among both cash-strapped tech startups and larger companies, which rely on computers owned and operated by the likes of Amazon and Google, the world’s No. 1 Internet search engine, instead of buying the equipment themselves…

Grazed from Enterprise Irregulars. Author: Tom Raftery.

Cloud computing is often incorrectly touted as being a green, more environmentally-friendly, computing option. This confusion occurs because people forget that while cloud computing may be more energy efficient (may be), the environmental friendliness is determined by how much carbon is produced in the generation of that energy. If a data centre is primarily powered by coal, it doesn’t matter how energy efficient it it, it will never be green.

We have mentioned that very often here on GreenMonk, as well as regularly bringing it up with cloud providers when talking to them. One such cloud provider is SAP. Like most other cloud vendors, they’re constantly increasing their portfolio of cloud products. This has presented them with some challenges when they have to consider their carbon footprint. In its recently released 2013 Annual Report SAP admits:..

Grazed from HPAC. Author: Lawrence Clark.

If you are like me, at some point, you have had a “Microsoft moment” and lost some important document or file on your computer because—in spite of all the warnings—your computer was not backed up properly. Regardless, many of us now have external hard drives and/or some sort of cloud backup.

Until only a few years ago, a lot of us had never heard of cloud computing, and now it is part of our everyday vernacular. While we talk a lot about the carbon footprint associated with HVAC systems and equipment, have you ever thought about the carbon emissions associated with cloud computing? According to IEEE, in 2012, Facebook’s data centers had greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG) of nearly 300,000 mtCO2e—equivalent to almost one-third of the cars on I-595 (greater Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) at rush hour! There are, of course, ways to reduce cloud computing’s GHG emissions, but those generally involve increased cost and reduced speed…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Devindra Hardawar.

Verizon Terremark is making its biggest commitment yet to open-source cloud computing. Today, the company announced it’s joining the Linux Foundation, an organization focused on promoting the growth of Linux, as a Gold member. The news comes several months after the launch of Verizon Cloud, its revamped cloud computing platform.

As a member of the Linux Foundation, Verizon says it will ramp up its development of open cloud and virtualization solutions. It’s a smart move for Verizon, which only recently started focusing on cloud computing with its $1.4 billion acquisition of Terremark back in 2012. Other Linux Foundation Gold members include Google, Cisco, Citrix, and China Mobile…