Grazed from CMSWire.  Author: David Roe.

Cloud computing is growing up. It has matured from an easy solution to a difficult on-premises IT deployments that saved a few bucks of initial capital investment and now, finally, to one of the core elements of an organizations’ IT strategy.

What’s the Story?

But it has not finished with its growing pains, and in the coming years, enterprises will have to plan and develop strategies around their cloud environments if they are to reap the obvious benefits…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

That bastion of journalism, the Huffington Post ran a story on cloud computing and the emerging markets. You pretty much know what these stories say before you read them: Cloud computing is ready-made for emerging countries, is the great equalizer, and all the rest. "This transformation [to the cloud] has great implications for places such as China, [South] Korea, Hong Kong, Brazil, Russia, and India. It will allow them to leapfrog outdated markets and take advantage of lower costs for building out infrastructure, as the cloud bulldozes all sorts of costly technology barriers." It’s not that simple.

Certainly, the ability to provide enterprise infrastructure and application services over the open Internet, per drink, is game-changing for many parts of the world that can’t afford to build a data center. However, many obstacles still remain, and some of these will take time and money to address…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Del Lunn.

Hybrid cloud is a popular approach to cloud computing and cloud storage services, such as backup. It allows data to be held off-site with the cloud provider, but also allows for data to be held locally. Public cloud provision allows organisations to adopt enterprise-class technologies for their environment at an affordable price point, but security, availability, compliance, performance, portability and the cloud provider’s market longevity can be a concern.

Of course, retaining everything on-site removes many of these concerns, or at least puts them in the hands of the organisation, but this will often be more expensive to deploy and operate. Hybrid cloud offers the best of both worlds by combining on-site data storage with public cloud storage provision…

Grazed from  DeveloperWeek.  Author: Event Announcement.

DeveloperWeek 2014 Conference + Festival (Feb. 15 – 21) is shaping up to be the Bay Area’s largest dev event series with 20+ city-wide events including a 2-Day Dev Conference + Expo, a 2-Day Hackathon @ Rackspace, Hiring Mixer, and partner events hosted by Google, Parse + Facebook, Yelp, Evernote, Klout, Eventbrite!

The goal of DeveloperWeek is to give everyone a landscape view of developer languages, technologies, and best practices within one week with topics ranging from HTML 5 and Javascript App Development to OpenStack and API Strategy.  This years theme is Full Stack Development.

Full Stack Development is more than a job title at today’s hottest tech companies, it is also a philosophy of managing technology. Full stack development means understanding each technology in the context of every layer of the stack. How well does Node work with MongoDB? What hardware / server configuration will help us scale a Ruby on Rails app? Are our engineers designing the data model and business logic with a clear concept of the customer use cases in mind?…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

Over the past few years, we?ve covered the importance of cloud computing in the classroom and its defining nature as something to adopt and accept moving forward. Some of our coverage has been flippant while other discussions have been more serious in nature. Nevertheless we can all agree that cloud based education will be universal and the accepted method of teachings by many in the next little while.

Massive cloud based classrooms will exist, and it will be just a matter of time before older generations start sharing stories of the good old days when classrooms were built with chalkboards and desks. In the meantime, cloud based educational services will be a hot topic for many years to come? Here is an excellent infographic provided courtesy of onlinecolleges.net…

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud. Author: Thiago Viola.

Can we consider cloud computing open source? Is there a cloud computing standard? How can we work with different cloud providers? An instructor from one of my MBA classes (@AnderPaulucci) referred me to the Open Cloud Manifesto site and I did a whitepaper about this subject to explain how it works. I saw what could be a great solution for the open cloud scenario.

This document is intended to initiate a conversation that will bring together the emerging cloud computing community (both cloud users and cloud providers) around a core set of principles. They believe that these core principles are rooted in the belief that cloud computing should be as open as all other IT technologies. Some key points are:…

Grazed from v3.co.uk. Author: Michael Passingham.

Cloud computing, Office 365 and the seasonal demand for the Surface tablet contributed to a strong financial quarter for Microsoft, with the firm posting profits of $6.56bn. The company posted a 14 percent revenue increase, taking $24.5bn between October and December.

The firm’s second-generation tablet device performed strongly, netting Microsoft $893m in revenue, more than double the $400m it had generated for the firm in the previous quarter. Meanwhile, revenue for the Pro versions of Microsoft’s Windows sold direct to PC makers (OEM) increased by 12 percent while non-Pro software saw a three percent decline. Microsoft said the figures were offset by continued "softness" in the global PC market…

Grazed from CloudComputingNews. Author: James Bourne.

Cloud computing services and technology is on the cusp of mass adoption by the legal industry, according to a report from LexisNexis. Nearly three quarters (72.4%) of firms surveyed said they were more likely to use the cloud this year, with adoption levels among attorneys in smaller firms hitting 40% – a number which is 10% higher than previous surveys.

This consensus is so grounded that, for the majority (38.7%) of the over 275 respondents, cloud systems will overtake on-premise in the legal profession within five years. There was also a sense in the survey that a move to the cloud was inevitable. Almost a quarter of respondents believe that their employees are already using cloud tools, without the law firm’s knowledge of approval…

Grazed from GreatResponder. Author: Maria Dehn.

This was announced by the search engine giant last week that it has added more features associated with the collaboration of data files in its cloud computing based cloud storage service called "Google Drive". One of these new features is the activity stream, which is more focused on tracking the modifications of the data files stored on the Google Drive cloud storage. This feature enables the customers in a group to track the changes made to the files stored in the Google Drive.

In a blog post, Mr. Ian Gunn, the Google Drive Interaction Designer, wrote, "This feature generates alerts to the users of the file, which has been modified since it was accessed last time on the Google Drive," "this will keep all the users in a collaborative group aware of the changes through this activity stream" he added…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Simon Withers.

You don’t need to be a business or technology expert to see that cloud computing is having a profound effect on some of our working practices. It’s hard to overestimate the significance of this culture change: just as businesses needed to evolve by the introduction of the PC or the internet, the cloud represents another decade defining shift of evolution.

Perhaps what is most interesting is that we’re seeing business ambitions start to outstrip the technology and services on offer – cloud is still in its nascent phase but we’re already visualising increasingly ambitious ways to apply the services delivered by cloud computing technology. Practices such as remote working, accessing work data from any device and allowing access to real-time data streams are only possible with cloud computing technology. And now, with mobile web usage set to outstrip desktop use in 2014 it’s clear that cloud adoption is more vital for businesses than ever before…