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…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: John Olstick.

It’s highly likely that cloud security will be one of the hot topics at this year’s RSA Security Conference coming up in February. Yes, there will surely be a lot of rhetoric and hype, but this is a very important topic for our industry to discuss as cloud computing continues to gain momentum with enterprise organizations.

While information security is still the primary concern around cloud computing, enterprise organizations aren’t holding back on deployment, albeit with non-sensitive workloads for the most part. So what are the IT risks associated with using cloud-based infrastructure? ESG recently surveyed 211 security professionals working at enterprise organizations (i.e. more than 1,000 employees) and asked them to identify the biggest risks associated with cloud infrastructure services. Here’s what they said:…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Zenoss Inc., the leading provider of unified IT monitoring and management solutions for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT, today announced that Zenoss- comprehensive cloud monitoring solution, Zenoss Service Dynamics, is an Editor’s Choice recipient in the 2014 Virtualization Review Reader’s Choice Awards.Virtualization Review is the first and only print publication solely devoted to IT virtualization and cloud technologies. The 2014 awards are chosen by the readers of Virtualization Reviewand presented to vendors in 16 categories ranging from Mobile Virtualization and Cloud Storage to Business Continuity and Virtualization Automation.

"There was a lot of consolidation this year, but there were quite a few new companies who emerged from stealth mode and debuted new products and services, showing that there is still room for innovation in this technology segment," said Virtualization Review Editor in Chief Michael Domingo. "VMware might have looked like the readers’ champion, but it has a lot to do with the solid work they’ve done with every product line. Still, some of the categories came close and we expect them to give VMware some true competition next year."…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

The command-line interface (CLI) is alive and well in the world of cloud computing and storage, despite the ubiquity of touch- and gesture-enabled devices in other parts of the IT ecosystem. Cloud hosting provider Linode made that clear this week with the release of a new CLI product as an alternative to graphical cloud administrative tools.

Released Jan. 28, Linode CLI allows cloud administrators to change DNS records, create configuration files, find information about their Linode accounts and bandwidth usage, display details on individual nodes in the Linode cloud and deploy StackScripts, Linode’s scripting tool for automated cloud orchestration. Linode CLI also offers scripting support of its own by allowing output in JSON format to automate repetitive tasks…