Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Karen Goulart.

In the first part of this two-part story, CIOs and cloud experts noted that 2014 will be the year when cloud comes into its own. Real planning, with an eye toward end-to-end solutions will take the place of piecemeal use of cloud solutions and services, they said. The second part of this story looks at the maturation of Infrastructure as a Service, a new security focus spurred by revelations of NSA practices, the renewed importance of IT service catalogs and why cost is no longer the biggest driver behind cloud adoption.

One aspect that will make the transition to cloud go more smoothly, said Ed Anderson, analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., is the maturity of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). He predicts that 2014 will see IaaS move from handling the low-risk workloads like testing and development to the mainstream…

Grazed from CIOInsight. Author: Samual Greengard.

It’s no secret that cloud computing has changed the dynamics of business and IT. But along with significant gains, there have been plenty of growing pains. Understanding pricing models and increasingly complex business agreements is at the center of the challenges for CIOs.

"Cloud has long been thought as analogous to electricity, allowing consumers to ‘plug-in’ and consume IT resources, paying only for what they need. Unfortunately, the IaaS market is far, far away from being a utility, and there is a confusing array of pricing methods, chargeable line items, metrics and pre-configured bundles," observes Owen Rogers, cloud economist at 451 Research…

Grazed from BusinessCloudNews. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

Taiwanese PC maker Acer announced Thursday that the company plans to transition to a “hardware plus software plus services company,” and develop more cloud services to complement its notebooks and desktops. The move comes after weeks of mulling a new strategic direction following several quarters of losses for the struggling PC maker, and will see the company embark on a path taken by its biggest competitors.

Acer said that it will look to combine its strengths in the PC market with new competencies in cloud computing technology, and work quickly towards developing an integrated set of hardware and software offerings in what the company is calling a “build your own cloud” or BYOC approach…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

If 2013 was the year of OpenStack adoption, 2014 will be all about "spitting and polishing" the open source framework for building public and private clouds to make it easier to deploy and use than ever. That’s the message from two veterans of the cloud hosting industry, who shared their insights recently on where OpenStack cloud computing is headed in the coming year.

In a recent call, Jonathan LaCour and Simon Anderson, who are, respectively, CEO and VP of Software Development at DreamHost (Anderson is also a member of the OpenStack Foundation board of directors), emphasized that the last 12 months have witnessed widespread adoption of OpenStack. That was true not only in the United States but also Europe, where OpenStack seemed to enjoy less momentum about a year ago at this time…

Grazed from IBM. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Emeryville, CA-based Aspera, Inc. Aspera’s technology helps companies securely speed the movement of massive data files around the world. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Licensed to clients and partners either in the cloud or on premise, Aspera’s high-speed transfer technology reduces transmission times for large files or data sets by up to 99.9 percent – potentially cutting a 26 hour transfer of a 24 gigabyte file, sent halfway around the world, down to just 30 seconds. Aspera’s patented fasp™ technology overcomes inherent bottlenecks in broadband wide area networks that slow the transfer of extremely large files, such as high-definition video or scientific research files, over distance.

Companies today are struggling to manage increasing volumes of structured and unstructured data created by everything from sensors to social media. They must accelerate the velocity of sending and receiving this data to improve competitiveness in a variety of ways – including the ability to more quickly uncover valuable business insights, bring products to market faster and improve employee productivity…

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence. Author: Matthew Finnie.

The biggest barrier to progress in businesses today is the inefficiency of IT. Many enterprises are losing time and money because valuable content is separated by a sprawling mass of incompatible legacy systems that require individual expertise and resources. This technologic chaos is the equivalent of keeping money in your mattress. Enter the cloud. And, the cloud offered CIOs the option to consolidate resources and drive greater mobility. Cloud computing effectively provides on-demand access to a wide range of configurable resources – networks, storage, computers/servers and applications. It’s faster because an outsourced network is much wider than a company one and it’s cheaper because they are only paying for what they are using.

Many CIOs are still hardwired towards internal control

However, many CIOs are still hardwired to want to control all company data internally. They are nervous about moving physical assets and data storage out of the company firewall, citing the same concerns of data security, compliance and cost they cited some years ago. But, a lot of this hinges on a lack of understanding of the cloud and its benefits. With the right cloud provider CIOs will have the security they need, alongside the on-demand flexibility that enables them to scale usage up and down at will and host data in a location that suits their needs…

Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Cisco Systems has teamed up with VMware and Citrix Systems as it launches a cloud-based desktop-as-a-service solution, aimed at both service providers and enterprises. The new service will complement Cisco’s existing on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure offering.

DaaS Service

The new Cisco Desktop as a Service (DaaS) offering will be based on the networking giant’s Unified Computing System (UCS) converged data centre solution and the company’s enhanced desktop virtualisation solution. The new cloud offering will give service providers a new service to offer their customers, while at the same time, enterprises will be able use the solution to launch a DaaS solution in their private clouds….

Grazed from BizTech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft India, today, launched a contest for independent software vendors (ISVs) and technology start-ups that is expected to result in the creation of over 100 applications (apps) and solutions for businesses and governments in six months. The contest is supported by a panel of organisations including National Informatics Centre (NIC) of the Government of India, NASSCOM, TiE, Nokia, Nokia App Campus, Intel and BarrierBreak.

ISVs and technology start-ups can win nine awards in four categories – Enterprise, MSME, Government Enablement and Citizen Services. Special credit will be given to apps and solutions that are accessible to differently-abled people and/or are created to promote social good. An NIC-backed, special award is earmarked for the ‘Best solution for social good using Open Gov Data’. 56 Indian government departments and ministries recently opened their data sets to the public and NIC is encouraging ISVs to develop applications using these data sets…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Rene Millman.

Cisco has moved to boost its mobile collaboration efforts with the acquisition of Collaborate.com. The terms of the deal were undisclosed. The deal is part of Cisco’s bid to bolster its presence in mobility and cloud computing with Collaborate.com’s mobile collaboration platform. The platform provides unified document sharing, task management and team communication capabilities.

The firm said this platform allows the mobile workforce to collaborate with team members on projects. It enables users to instantly create virtual collaboration rooms where they can chat and share documents, notes, photos and videos. The platform integrates messaging, document sharing, and task management in a mobile app for iOS, Android and web…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Michael C. Daconta.

This week, IBM took out several ads trumpeting its cloud market share. Following quickly on the heels of IBM’s announcement, Google announced the “general availability” of the Google Compute Engine, a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud. Along with the upgrade of its service from beta to general availability, Google also announced three new features of its infrastructure-as-a-service offering: lower price, greater Linux support and the Docker “container-as-a-service” platform. What’s going on? Let’s examine each of these developments and then consider the ramifications.

Google dropped its prices by 10 percent for the most popular IaaS compute instances and 60 percent for disk storage. Price competition for IaaS services is continuing to heat up, with many sites calling it a “cloud price war.” In fact, 12 hours after Google’s announcement, AWS announced a 26 percent drop in prices for its Windows virtual machines…