Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Technologists working with cloud need a range of specific skills, from Java or .NET framework to REST API development to knowledge about Amazon Web Services. But businesses are also crying out for people who can take leadership roles in moving operations into the cloud world.

When it comes to leadership, it’s the "soft skills" that matter, as cloud often requires the ability to look at the big picture, marshal organizational resources and funds, and sell new ways of doing things to skeptical line of business managers. Bill Kleyman, writing at Data Center Knowledge, provides several pointers for imporving cloud skills:…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Wharfedale Technologies Inc. (WFT Cloud), a leading SAP Infrastructure and SAP Cloud consulting firm, has made significant gains within the cloud computing domain by focusing on cost savings and faster ROI for customers when they deploy or migrate SAP Applications to a Private Cloud.

Understanding the true cost-saving and benefits for customers moving SAP landscapes to a Private Cloud, WFT releases the Vblock™ based on-premise Private Cloud Solution for SAP customers to meet the rapid and evolving market demands. Features of the Vblock-based Private Cloud on customer premises:…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud security newcomer FireLayers is emerging from stealth today with the launch of a policy-based security platform that enables IT departments to deploy pre-defined and customizable rule sets for popular applications like Salesforce.com (CRM), Microsoft (MSFT) Office 365, Yammer and Workday, among others.

The San Francisco-based company is a venture-backed initiative that aims to provide policy-based security, compliance and IT governance for cloud applications. As the company noted in its announcement, cloud apps have become critical business enablers, but they also expose those same businesses to risks and vulnerabilities…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Editorial Staff.

An increasing amount of companies are moving their processes and applications to the cloud and there are a large number of reasons for this. This HP whitepaper looks closely at those and seeks to help companies that are considering a cloud migration.

Cost savings

With the cloud, you have the ability to lower capital expenditure by not having to purchase and maintain expensive hardware. A cloud service provider can host your data on their own high performance systems, and you will no longer have the expense of maintaining and upgrading them either. Instead, cloud users can concentrate on improving their own products and services. In addition, there is also the potential to either reduce headcounts in areas of server and application management, or to re-allocate those staff to research and development or more strategic business roles on the technology side…

Grazed from BusinessCloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

The issue of security has been consistently talked and written about, ever more so since businesses first took the decision to migrate to the cloud. Regardless of the well-documented benefits of cloud computing to businesses — flexibility, agility, improved capabilities — every company looking to outsource key operations or storage has to have assurances about the safe keeping of its information.

The latest survey carried out by OnePoll on behalf of Interactive Intelligence conducted last year found that 43 per cent of respondents cited perceived concerns around data security as being the greatest barrier to cloud adoption. Even if that figure has improved in the last six months, there are still a significant number of businesses looking for more reassurance before moving their operations to the cloud…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

In September 2012, the European Union released its “Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe” document, aiming for a yearly 160bn Euro (£127.6bn) boost to the European GDP by 2020 and a gain of 2.5m by the rollout of cloud. A full 15 months later, the response by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) was published. The ‘Cloud Standards Coordination’ report, requested by the European Commission, aimed to analyse Commission VP Neelie Kroes’ opinion there was a “jungle of technical standards.”

ETSI asserted that cloud standardisation was “much more focused tha[n] anticipated” and added the landscape was “complex but not chaotic.” The executive summary outlined the state of play in the key areas. Important gaps in standards had been identified, with new standards encouraged, whilst the legal environment for cloud computing remains “highly challenging.”…

Grazed from TheGuardian. Author: Editorial Staff.

Last year saw a whole host of news – from the NSA revelations around data and privacy breaches, to examples of lost customer data – that caused businesses and consumers to question governments, technology and, more specifically, the cloud. As the cloud has risen up the agenda over the last few years, I thought we’d left behind arguments about the perceived negatives, particularly security.

So I was somewhat surprised to also read an article from Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Central, late last year, who said she was "reluctantly and unhappily" moving to the cloud. Onwurah said that she doesn’t think cloud computing is "fully ready for the mass consumer market", and that she, like many others, has worries over security and data protection…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

The primary drivers for moving data into private, public, or hybrid clouds are the efficiency and capabilities that clouds can bring. Enterprises have never seen such efficiencies and capabilities in traditional database technologies, including those from Oracle and IBM. What databases in the public cloud offer is hugely compelling: Elastic scalability, universal network accessibility, integration with mobile platforms, pay-per-use efficiencies, avoidance of capital costs, and the ability to work with widely scattered structured and unstructured data (that is, big data).

As a result, there’s been a massive migration to cloud-based databases, aka data-as-a-service — one that seems to have escaped notice perhaps because it seems such an obvious step to take. The cloud is just too cheap, too fast, and too compelling. We’ll see this massive migration continue this year as well…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

OW2, the global community for open source infrastructure software, announces the program of the first of its Open Cloud Forum Series, organised at Cloud Expo Europe in London on February 26-27. The Open Cloud Forum at Cloud Expo Europe 2014 is the first event in Europe exclusively dedicated to explore the trends shaping the future of open cloud computing.

The Open Cloud Forum Series are events dedicated to promoting open source cloud projects and market offerings as well as awareness for interoperability in the cloud. The Open Cloud Forum Series leverage OW2’s open source expertise and its support for many open cloud projects. The next two events in 2014 will be organised in Paris and in Brussels…

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud. Author: Rene D. Svendsen.

In a series of six blog posts, I will focus on how a migration from traditional development environments to ones that leverage the cloud impacts developers, their applications and the programming models they use. These blog posts will be based on my own experience as well as work conducted by the IBM Academy of Technology and the Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC). I also encourage you to read A reference model for moving your applications to cloud by Joydipto Banerjee and Migrating Applications to the Cloud: Roadmap for Success.

Background

Hosting in the cloudCloud computing promises benefits often historically reserved for specialized solutions and hosting, based upon the virtualization of physical resources, and delivering operational efficiencies through automation and standardization. The pure virtualization of infrastructure is rarely a concern for developers and it represents the first obvious step in migrating an existing physically hosted application to the cloud. However, the popularity of cloud computing has given rise to a misconception around the cloud provider magically offering boundless elasticity, resiliency and performance. In reality, applications are either authored with the cloud in mind or need to become more cloud-friendly…