Grazed from GlobalNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cbeyond, Inc., the technology ally to small and mid-sized businesses, announced today it placed as a finalist in three 2013-2014 Cloud Awards Program categories: TotalCloud(R) Phone System for Best in Mobile Cloud Solution (finalist), TotalCloud(R) Data Center for Best Cloud Infrastructure (finalist) and Best B2B Customer Strategy (finalist).

Identifying and celebrating excellence in the field of cloud computing, the cloud computing awards program encourages entries from across the globe. Entrants can be from organizations of any size, including start-ups. Over 200 organizations made submissions, with entries coming from Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and the Middle East…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Fears that began last year about National Security Agency (NSA) spying techniques could have a significant impact on cloud revenue over the next three years, according to some industry trade groups and analysts. But the dollar figures being quoted seem more like warnings from Chicken Little or that lad who cried "wolf."

Six technology groups wrote to the White House in December noting they believed the NSA scandal could cost upwards of $35 billion in revenue in the cloud computing sector by the end of 2016. Not an insignificant dollar figure at all, but James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Research, wrote in a blog post that $35 billion is too conservative of an estimate. Instead, Staten said the market could face a $180 billion shortfall in that timeframe. By estimates, that’s a 25 percent hit to service provider revenue, he noted…

Grazed from v3.co.uk. Author: Carly Page.

Local storage is the sixth most important factor for smartphone buyers, while it is the third most important for those purchasing a laptop, research firm Gartner has claimed, thanks in part to the rise of cloud storage solutions. Gartner told V3 that battery life and the speed of 3G and 4G cellular connectivity are more important considerations when purchasing a new handset than storage.

Of course, buyers are also wooed by factors such as a glossy, metallic casing, or a 6in screen, for example, with demand for large-screen smartphone devices due to grow by 600 percent in the next three years. While some may regard the amount of storage too important to be placed sixth on the list, this ranking can be credited in part to the growth of cloud storage. Apple offers 5GB of free iCloud storage for a new iPhone buyer and Samsung smartphones boast 25GB of free Dropbox storage, for example…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudByte, the first company to provide dynamically selectable storage performance on industry-standard hardware, announced today that the company was a winner of the 2013-2014 Cloud Awards Program in the Best Cloud Infrastructure category. Identifying and celebrating excellence in the field of cloud computing, the Cloud Computing Awards program encourages entries from across the entire globe – the US, Canada, Australasia and EMEA regions.

More than 200 organizations entered this year. Categories included Best Cloud Infrastructure, Data Innovation of the Year, "Best in Mobile" Cloud Solution, Most Promising Start-Up and Best Software as a Service. Cloud Awards organizer Larry Johnson said: "We are extremely pleased to endorse CloudByte, giving added value to its clients, disrupting business models and leveraging cloud technologies to be the best of the best."…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Bill Kleyman.

We are witnessing an amazing trend in the IT world. There are now more devices, more connections to the Internet, and more demands from devices than from people. At the same time, IT environments have a new challenge: the data all these devices produce. The average employee already utilizes, on average, three to five devices to access a corporate datacenter. As more devices come online and connect to the cloud, they will produce more data — data that will need to be managed and quantified. Let’s consider some numbers:

• According to IBM, the end-user community has, so far, created more than 2.7 zettabytes of data. In fact, so much data has been created so quickly, that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.
• As of 2012, there are more than 240 terabytes of information collected by the Library of Congress in the U.S.
• Facebook handles 300 million photos a day and about 105 terabytes of data every 30 minutes. It also stores 100 petabytes of data on one Hadoop disk cluster, according to published reports…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Frank Konkel.

A study released Jan. 28 by Meritalk highlights the pros and cons of federal cloud adoption since the Office of Management and Budget’s "Cloud First" policy mandated just over three years ago that agencies begin migrating services. The study is full of interesting tidbits from 15 federal IT leaders who have executed cloud migrations, but the general consensus is that while change is a challenge, cloud computing is the real deal in terms of savings and efficiencies improvements.

But cloud success and mastery – as with any other IT challenge -comes only from hard work and intelligent management practices. "If we had defined our expectations when we started, it would be easier to answer whether the benefits from our cloud computing initiative were less than or greater than expected," said Daniel McCrae, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Services Delivery Division…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Todd Plett.

It seems everywhere we turn there is another article espousing the value of cloud technology. Many federal, state and local agencies are publicly taking a "cloud first" strategy to new technology procurement, migrating their internal IT systems to cloud providers and creating public-private partnerships around new cloud-based applications. As technology advances and government budgets tighten, the market can expect to see more of these types of partnerships.

While partnerships between private companies and the public sector are not new, there is a new opportunity especially ripe for cloud providers that are willing to invest the dollars to work with public organizations and foster innovation. As with most vertical markets, however, partnering with government agencies requires providers to take a collaborative approach to truly understand the unique conditions and needs of these customers. Here are five tips, based on what we have learned from working with the public sector, for cloud providers looking to crack the government cloud computing market:..

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudPassage®, the leading cloud infrastructure security company, announced today being named Security Innovation of the Year for 2013-2014 by the Cloud Awards Program for its genuinely innovative approach to cloud security. More than 200 organizations entered the Cloud Awards, with entries coming from across the globe and including Europe, the US and Middle East.

"We are extremely pleased to endorse CloudPassage as a cloud technology provider giving added value to its clients, disrupting business models and leveraging cloud infrastructure to be the best of the best in cloud security solutions," said Larry Johnson Cloud Awards organizer…