Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Editorial Staff.

"Cloud Computing" – it’s been a hot topic for the past few years. Despite the amount of press it receives, many people still don’t understand the "cloud" fully. There is a substantial amount of confusion, overlap, and even misinformation about the "cloud." First, is the common misconception that there is a single "cloud." Even worse is the assumption that the "cloud" is safe. It may be, but do your homework. While I’m not a huge fan of clichés, especially those that end in a preposition – "you get what you pay for" really applies here.

While the typical intended audience of my blog is highly technical, I decided to write this article for IT decision makers where their primary role may not be IT. Given my professional experience speaking to clients, prospects, sales staff – as well as my service delivery, technical architecture and educational background it is intended to be well rounded for the person who is familiar with business concepts and IT service management. As someone who speaks to customers and sales people regularly, one of the questions I get asked most often is:…

Grazed from Yahoo. Author: Aaron Pressman.

As the era of cloud computing begins, Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal, wants to see a more open outcome than the information technology industry is used to. In fact, he’s betting on it. Pivotal, a spinoff from EMC (EMC) and VMWare (VMW), where Maritz served as CEO for four years, is building an open cloud computing platform that can run on top of many kinds of underlying cloud servers.

“We’re coming to the end of a 30- or 40-year era in the IT industry,” Martiz said on Wednesday, speaking at the Oasis Montgomery Summit in Santa Monica, California. “This really is a very profound shift that’s happening.” That may not be what the biggest cloud providers, Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) and particularly Amazon (AMZN), are seeking. They’re battling for dominance comparable to Windows on the PC or IBM (IBM) in mainframes, Maritz says…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Derek Schoettle.

These are heady times for both cloud service providers and their customers. Never before has it been so easy to spin up large-scale applications and databases, fueling remarkably agile manuevers by companies of almost any size. In this week’s New Tech Forum, Derek Schoettle, CEO of Cloudant — bought by IBM just two weeks ago — walks us through the rapidly evolving world of cloud data management and where the cloud transition will be taking IT over the next few years. –Paul Venezia

Big bets in cloud data management

I’m not going to bore you with terms like "big data" and the capabilities of various strains of NoSQL databases. What I’d rather discuss is something that is changing drastically: how we store and access our data. As the cloud evolves beyond cheap infrastructure, the real innovation in 2014 will come from how we manipulate data stored on that infrastructure…

Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Matt Asay.

Nearly 10 years ago Excite and Jotspot founder Joe Kraus exulted: "There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because it’s never been cheaper to be one." Powerful open-source software running on cheap, commodity hardware meant that entrepreneurs could get to scale and/or profitability much faster without raising capital. Everything Kraus argued has proved to be true. It is also largely irrelevant.

As it turns out, while it’s cheap to get tens of millions of users with a free web or mobile service, building a large, data-driven business costs a lot of money, and that money is spent on the very thing that cloud computing was meant to obviate: data centers. For every 10 Instagrams that mushroom into prominence on the back of Amazon Web Services (AWS) or another public cloud provider, there is one Google or Facebook that insists upon building its own data centers to control its own destiny…

Grazed from DealBook. Author: William Alden.

Ben Uretsky, the chief executive of a cloud computing start-up called DigitalOcean, uttered what may be the ultimate Silicon Valley “humblebrag” when he explained why his company had to raise millions from venture capitalists just months after an earlier financing round. “The challenge was the rate of growth kept increasing,” Mr. Uretsky said in an interview.

That prodigious growth was enough to entice Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms, to lead a $37.2 million financing round in DigitalOcean, according to an announcement on Thursday. The start-up previously announced a $3.2 million round in August…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Cloud computing has become a massive engine helping the corporate and end-user world interconnect at new, massive scales. There is a very real reason that data center business continues to grow around the surge of cloud traffic. There are two very interesting statistic from the latest Cisco Global Cloud Index report:

• Annual global data center IP traffic will reach 7.7 zettabytes by the end of 2017. By 2017, global data center IP traffic will reach 644 exabytes per month (up from 214 exabytes per month in 2012).
• Global data center IP traffic will nearly triple over the next 5 years. Overall, data center IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25 percent from 2012 to 2017…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: William Long.

2014 is likely to prove to be a big year in data protection for many industries – none more so that the cloud computing industry with the possible adoption of the EU’s proposed Data Protection Regulation, implementation of European cyber security strategies and moves by Germany and France to set up a European Communications Network.

In a recent weekly podcast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested a European Communications Network should be set up to avoid potential access to data by the U.S. Government. In the podcast Merkel commented: “We’ll talk about European providers that offer security to our citizens, so one shouldn’t have to send emails and other information across the Atlantic”…

Grazed from ServerWatch. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Every six months or so, a new release of the open-source OpenStack cloud platform debuts. The open-source release is followed by the stream of commercial vendors, including Piston Cloud Computing, that harden the upstream bits and enhance the platform with their own solutions. Piston OpenStack 3.0 was officially released last week, and one of its key OpenStack promises is that existing Piston OpenStack users could migrate and update to the new platform without any downtime.

"We’re at the point of maturity in the OpenStack market where a lot of our customers have already tried and failed with someone else’s OpenStack product," Joshua McKenty CTO and co-founder of Piston, told ServerWatch. "So what we’re saying is that if you’re giving up on Mirantis, don’t give up on OpenStack; you should try Piston."…

Grazed InformationWeek. Author: Vikram Jain.

Cloud computing represents one of the most substantial shifts in the IT industry. This is reaching to the point where computing functions as a utility, encouraging innovations still unimagined. Yet the major roadblock to the adoption of cloud has been concerns regarding the security, compliance and privacy of information. Information security is always a priority for any enterprise—whether large or small.

Enterprises need to meet compliance requirements and protect sensitive data or information assets of workforce inside or outside the organization. Additionally, they also need to keep investment and operational costs controlled. According to Gartner, cloud-based security services market will rise to USD 3.1 billion by 2015…