Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Tom McShane.

We’ve all heard the benefits the cloud can bring to businesses and computing in general – it’s almost something of a broken record. But the thing about this frequently repeated statement is that it’s a one-size-fits-all phrase that doesn?t really get into the nitty gritty.  Sure, cloud computing can help big businesses and small businesses, as well as various types of consumers and professionals, but it doesn’t serve them all in the same way – the benefits differ, as do the end results of cloud adoption. In this guest post, courtesy of cloud and hosted exchange providers Giacom, we look at how it’s specifically relevant to those start-up SMBs.

Scalable Organisation & IT Setup

Imagine a central on-site server for your company – whether you?ve got 50 employees or 200, it’s an expensive setup to have. In addition to the costs of the hardware you have the complexity of updating an infrastructure as a company grows, as well as the large cost of a dedicated team of IT technicians to deal with the upkeep of your data centre…

Grazed from FederalNewsRadio. Author: Jason Miller.

In the rush to the cloud over the last three years, most agencies have tempered their desires and excitement because of security concerns. Agency chief information officers have struggled to satisfactorily answer a number of questions regarding data ownership and protection, and how do the existing cross-agency cyber initiatives fit into the cloud structure.

A new white paper by SafeGov, an industry organization promoting safe and secure cloud computing, makes 12 recommendations to help agencies move to an integrated cloud and cyber approach and away from one that is fragmented and ad hoc in many respects. Karen Evans, a co-author of the report and a former Office of Management and Budget administrator for e-government and IT, said this paper is a deeper dive into addressing the growing challenges of integrating cloud and cybersecurity…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

In lieu of launching its own public cloud lineup, storage giant EMC has decided to resell the cloud products of its VMware subsidiary, Network World has learned. Despite being one of the biggest enterprise IT companies, EMC has not been seen as a major player in the public cloud market.

However, the company now plans to resell VMware’s private, public and hybrid cloud products in an effort to take on industry giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS). VMware’s cloud products will be EMC’s preferred sales option, although EMC will continue to sell other service provider options as well…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Walter Bailey.

Lenovo has finally acquired IBM’s low-end server business, after a deal spanning over a year has finally come to a close. The final acquisition price came to $2.3 billion, making it the largest tech server acquisition by a Chinese company. IBM has been trying to shift its x86 server business for a few years now, with more companies switching to cloud computing technology from traditional server-side infrastructure. IBM is looking to invest more money in high-margin servers, which still generate impressive revenue.

Lenovo has more reason to own low-end x86 servers, given their high reputation in China, it will be easier for the company to sell their servers to Chinese companies, who are looking to nationalize their servers with the recent U.S. surveillance outbreak. Lenovo may be able to boost revenues and margins on the x86 servers if they invest heavily in China. Most Western companies are now either moving to high-end servers, their own or cloud based infrastructure, adding more benefits to the user…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: James Laird.

Cloud computing is everywhere. In its various forms, it’s being adopted across the full technology spectrum, from consumers using it at an alternative to traditional storage to enterprises employing it as an end-to-end infrastructure solution. After visiting Bett 2014, it’s also obvious that education stands to benefit from cloud deployment.

In many ways, the needs of schools aren’t that different from those of the modern SME: simplified resource management and the efficient, reliable provisioning of key services. Indeed, the increasing importance of cutting-edge tech in education is reflected by the number of blue chip firms looking to enter the space – major vendors like Acer, Google, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Misco, Sony and Toshiba were all out in force at Bett…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: William Bain.

The use of in-memory data grids (IMDGs) for scaling application performance has rapidly increased in recent years as firms have seen their application workloads explode. This trend runs across nearly every vertical market, touching online applications for financial services, ecommerce, travel, manufacturing, social media, mobile, and more. At the same time, many firms are also looking to leverage the use of cloud computing to meet the challenge of ever increasing workloads. One of the fundamental promises of the cloud is elastic, transparent, on-demand scalability — a key capability that has become practical with the use of in-memory data grid technology. As such IMDGs are becoming a vital factor in the cloud, just as they have been for on-premise applications.

What makes IMDGs such a good fit with cloud computing? The promise of the cloud is a reduction in total cost of ownership. Part of that reduction comes from the ability to quickly provision and use new server capacity (without having to own the hardware). The essential synergy between IMDGs and the cloud derives from their common elasticity. IMDGs can scale out their memory-based storage and performance linearly as servers are added to the grid, and they can gracefully scale back when fewer servers are needed. IMDGs take full advantage of the cloud’s ability to easily spin-up or remove servers…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud is accelerating the implementation of a rapid continuous delivery model, with 25.9 per cent of developers active in Cloud development releasing updates or new versions at least once a day, and 63.3 per cent releasing at least once a week, as Evans Data’s new Cloud Development Survey shows.

The survey, conducted in November – December 2013 with 436 active Cloud developers also showed that 51 per cent feel that Cloud computing in general will improve coordination between development and operations, which will also help to enable continuous delivery. However, opinions and practices diverge across segments…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Red Hat has updated a number of its products for running private clouds, better preparing them for the complex ways of the enterprise. "The journey to the open private cloud has got multiple stages. We’ve got offerings to help you along every single step of the way and today we’ve refreshed all these offerings so you can take these capabilities into your environment and get to an open private cloud sooner rather than later," said Radesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat’s general manager for virtualization business, in a Wednesday webcast detailing how the new products could be used in enterprises.

The company Wednesday released Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is Red Hat’s commercially supported edition of the OpenStack cloud hosting software. The new version is based off of the Havana version of OpenStack, released in October…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Wyatt Kash.

If you spend any time listening to what government IT executives are talking about in Washington these days — besides the NSA’s data-collection practices and what everyone should have learned from HealthCare.gov — it’s hard to ignore at least some discussion about secure cloud computing and a federal program called FedRAMP.

Talk to IT executives outside of Washington, however, and it’s evident that discussions about FedRAMP and its impact on cloud service providers are reaching far beyond the Beltway and rippling through the boardrooms of IT services providers. As Amazon Web Services VP Teresa Carlson said in a recent interview: "Cloud companies won’t be able to participate in any [government] procurement or award without being able to achieve the FedRAMP standards."…