Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

Google, like other companies offering online storage, still faces doubts about the security of cloud computing following last summer’s revelations about the reach of the National Security Agency. But it’s doing its best to reassure customers and to attract new ones. Following a declaration this month by Eran Feigenbaum, director of security for Google Apps, that "the cloud can be as safe as — or in many cases, safer than — storing data on-premise," Google is making a financial case for the cloud.

The company lowered the cost of Google Drive storage substantially Thursday. "Today, thanks to a number of recent infrastructure improvements, we’re able to make it more affordable for you to keep everything safe and easy to reach on any device, from anywhere," Google product management director Scott Johnston wrote in a blog post…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Jessica Guynn.

Aaron Levie, the 29-year-old chief executive of Box Inc., walked the red carpet at the Oscars this year in a dark suit and tie, pressed white shirt and his trademark neon blue sneakers. "I asked about the sneaker dress code," said Levie, who like many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs doesn’t like anything slowing him down, least of all a pair of dress shoes. "Apparently it was not a problem."

It was the movie industry’s biggest night and Levie didn’t waste any time talking up cloud computing to Hollywood stars including Harrison Ford. "He seemed to get it," Levie said of the 71-year-old actor. Levie, whose 8-year-old company is gearing up for the most hotly anticipated technology initial public stock offering to come out of Silicon Valley this year, has been spending a lot of time in Hollywood lately…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Gail Dutton.

When a business picks a cloud-based operating system for its data and communications, it’s pretty much stuck with that provider. That’s because cloud systems, which operate through the Internet, aren’t compatible with each other, so switching providers — or “cloud hopping” — is very difficult. “Our ability to move to another provider is very limited because there are no universal standards for cloud interoperability,” says Paiman Nodoushani, vice president of engineering and CTO for Continuum Managed Services, an application service provider.

“To change providers, data centers must develop a system to change codes and processes,” he adds. “Development can take between two and five months.” But cloud hopping may soon become much easier. The ability to move information among cloud providers is improving as developers start to think about common industry standards. The process is similar to what happened in the early days of the Internet…

Grazed from Zacks. Author: Editorial Staff.

Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (CHKP – Analyst Report) recently announced a partnership with VMware, Inc. (VMW – Snapshot Report) to provide cloud-based security services. With this partnership, Check Point will enrich its virtualization, automation and cloud-based portfolios.

Through this collaboration, Check Point will combine its security solution Virtual Edition (VE) with VMware’s vSphere or the new VMware NSX network virtualization platform that provides private cloud-based service to make the cloud-computing environment more secure, simple, flexible and efficient…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudSigma, a public cloud IaaS provider with advanced hybrid hosting solutions, today announced that it has partnered with software analytics company New Relic, Inc. to provide customers with new levels of real-time insight into the health of their applications and server infrastructure. Tightly integrated into CloudSigma’s existing public cloud infrastructure, New Relic’s software-as-a-service application performance management solution gives CloudSigma customers the confidence to deploy more mission-critical workloads into the cloud, knowing that their applications and services are running at peak performance.

With New Relic’s advanced feature set, CloudSigma customers can now get full visibility and insight into their end-user, application and server performance. Presented on a New Relic dashboard, which is accessible in CloudSigma’s Web console, all of the performance data is presented in an easy-to-understand way that makes it actionable, so customers can not only identify the root cause of any performance degradation, but also how to remedy it. For instance, customers can easily monitor server resource loads and even dive into code-level application performance metrics to pinpoint the exact bottleneck in the stack…

Grazed from OpenStack. Author: Hui Cheng.

With the rapid growth of Sina Weibo, which now has over 350 million registered users around the world, and its affiliated services such as Weibo open API and the WeiGame platform which are now the most popular social and online gaming platform in China, we needed a robust and flexible infrastructure to host those applications and platforms.

In the early 2011, we initiated Sina Web Services (SWS), the first public IaaS cloud based on OpenStack in China. Thanks to the extensible architecture of OpenStack and the help of the OpenStack community, we were able to build up our IaaS platform and push it into production in a very short time…

Grazed from RapidScale. Author: PR Announcement.

RapidScale (http://www.rapidscale.net), a leader in Cloud Computing solutions, has announced that CloudOffice, its Desktop Virtualization platform for small to medium businesses, is now available on the Samsung Solutions Exchange™. The Samsung Solutions Exchange addresses the needs of line of business owners by creating holistic mobile solutions on a robust portfolio of enterprise-grade Samsung Mobile devices.

CloudOffice is a ground-breaking all-in-one SMB cloud solution that brings together core business applications, business vertical applications, and key business drivers such as Microsoft Office Professional, Microsoft Lync, unlimited storage, 24x7x365 “We Care” support, the Adobe Suite, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft SharePoint, and Citrix ShareFile. Furthermore, CloudOffice provides an unmatched user experience, is budget-friendly, and can be used on any Samsung smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. RapidScale has established one of the most expansive and comprehensive cloud solution sets in the market today and will be featured as a premier Desktop as a Service (http://www.desktopasaservice.us) provider for Samsung…

Grazed from Clustrix. Author: PR Announcement.

Clustrix, provider of the leading scale-out SQL database engineered for the cloud, today announced a partnership with Joyent Inc., the high-performance cloud infrastructure and big data analytics company. As a result of the partnership, ClustrixDB, the industry’s first and only scale-out database for real-time analytics on live operational data, will be available to Joyent customers who need scale-out SQL and real-time analytics.

New cloud-scale applications have unpredictable workloads with rapidly growing and varied data. Poor application performance can result in the loss of customers, reduced employee productivity and a decrease in revenue. Joyent’s public cloud ensures companies can create and deploy dynamic applications that scale effortlessly for millions of users. With the introduction of ClustrixDB, Joyent’s high-performance computing platform will further increase and maintain application performance in cloud computing environments…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Keith Dawson.

Companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook don’t just innovate with products: Just look at their data centers. The designs and operations playbooks of these new centers aim to lower costs, increase reliability and maintainability, and improve agility, while reducing energy use and carbon footprint.

As big data and cloud computing push the limits of traditional data centers, new trends in data center innovation have followed. Google started the ball rolling when it scaled up its search operations starting in the late 1990s. By 2001, Google, still three years away from its IPO, was building its own servers from piece-parts, seeking not only economy but also reliability and ease of maintenance. Prior to 2003, Google was investigating putting large numbers of servers in a shipping container. That year it applied for a patent on the idea of the modular, drop-in-place data center…

Grazec from InformationAge. Author: Ben Rossi.

The beauty of the cloud is that it seeks to enable a business to become more agile, efficient and competitive, yet compliance seeks to restrain it. And this is what is preventing some businesses from making the most of the cloud. Recent research from NTT Com Security revealed businesses across the globe are wary of the using the cloud. A worrying 86% admitted that issues around data protection, legislation and regulation are responsible for cloud computing being adopted more slowly than they would like.

You only have to look at the publicity surrounding the NSA and PRISM revelations and compliance, data sovereignty laws and regulation requirements from authorities like the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). With these increasingly complicated data laws, it’s becoming something of a minefield for businesses looking to embrace, or experiment with, the cloud…