Grazed from CBeyond.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing has rapidly evolved from a novel trend in corporate technology to one of the most revolutionary sets of solutions available to businesses today. The advantages of leveraging cloud services for a variety of different tasks, functions and strategies are vast, and are especially pertinent for small business owners who need to maintain smart IT spending budgets. 

10 reasons for cloud deployment
When it comes to running a small business in the modern market, entrepreneurs need to ensure they are utilizing all of the technology available to them to gain a competitive advantage. The cloud can be a major driver of corporate operational improvements, and here are 10 of the most common and advantageous benefits of the services:…

Grazed from The Huffington Post.  Author: Matthew Lynch.

Cloud computing has taken the business world by storm. Climate controlled rooms full of servers are quickly being replaced by remote storage technology, whimsically referred to as "the cloud." Over half of U.S. businesses use some form of cloud computing to back up their important data and improve productivity. Instead of trying to find the capital to pay for a secure server structure, businesses are subscribing to cloud services and paying for more storage as their needs grow.

The practical uses of cloud computing technology also translate to K-12 classrooms. Simply put, cloud storage saves space, money and time for teachers, parents, students and administrators. A report by CDW Government found that over 40 percent of schools use cloud applications to store their data and by 2016, schools are expected to spend 35 percent of IT budgets on the cloud…

Grazed from Hosting.com.  Author: James Schwartz.

Yesterday, Parker Snyder of Migration Services at HOSTING shared his thoughts on what went wrong with healthcare.gov. Today, he shares his thoughts on how mission critical business applications can be developed properly, to avoid embarrassing mistakes.

Parker says to start by taking your projects end goal, in its entirety, and add every involved component together. Observe where the scope crosses boundaries of solutions. For illustrative purposes, let’s think of this in terms of an MS SQL cluster… what real boundaries does it cross?

1. Network
2. Storage
3. Hardware
4. Abstraction layers (i.e. VMware, disk replication, etc.)…

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud computing drives efficiencies in a number of ways. One of those is what Proxios likes to call the “one to many” feature.   Proxios sees this scenario often: In traditional client/server computing, software is designed with a portion that resides on the client device (desktop or laptop) and the remainder on the server. One of the biggest challenges for all IT departments is maintaining and deploying software to all client devices.

Anytime a change is needed, IT must deliver this update or addition to each client on an individual basis. Not only is this time consuming, but in many cases the IT staff has to deal with employees whose computers are inaccessible. It could be because they are traveling, or the computer is in use and the change is not something that can be accomplished as a background task…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Marissa Tejada.

Computing best practices for the cloud are at the core of what IT professionals behind the nonprofit organization Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) promote and develop. Most recently, the CSA announced an initiative called the Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) Initiative, which enforces better security architectures for firms that utilize the cloud.

An Initiative against Hackers

The CloudTimes recently covered the details of the SDP Initiative aimed to develop cloud architecture that can be created with trusted entities using end-to-end network IP addresses. In the end, it should open the door to architecting systems that can withstand attacks against applications and network endpoints accessible from the Internet. The SDP uses security such as federation, Secure Assertion Markup Language and Transport Layer Security. According to the initiative, there should be annular connectivity between devices and between users until they are authenticated and authorized…

Grazed from GreatResponder.  Author: Maria Dehn.

IBM (NYSE:IBM) succeeded in getting the contract for managing the IT infrastructure of many financial institutes in Europe including Dexia (EBR:DEXB). IBM will manage the IT infrastructure of these companies and will migrate the services in the cloud to pave the way for cloud based services of these financial organizations across Europe.

Greatresponder.com – This announcement was made public by IBM through a statement. The statement says that IBM will take charge of the IT infrastructure of many financial institutes operating in the European region to manage and transform it into the cloud based services. In this statement, General Manager Strategic Outsourcing at IBM Europe region Bart Van Den Daele elaborated the deal that “Our integrated transformational approach, the introduction of new and innovative technologies and solutions, like the cloud and analytics and our expertise in the financial sector will enable these customers to differentiate themselves in an accelerated way versus their  competitors in their respective markets”…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Jason Hannula.

As cloud computing has been making its way up the IT food chain from infrastructure-as-a-service through platform to software services, it has been disrupting standard practices in IT shops. Just as infrastructure decisions are no longer focused entirely on the internal physical server life cycle, provisioning of enterprise software options is competing with external software service vendors. Patrick Thibodeau reported on ComputerWorld that 25 to 30 percent of server shipments in 2014 are destined for cloud services providers, with projections that that figure will rise to 45 percent by 2017. Meanwhile, IT managers report that they are actively reducing the number of in-house servers they manage or, at a minimum, are reducing their rate of acquisition.

Two trends are responsible for these changes: The continual consolidation of server infrastructure and the virtualization of software services. These trends are expected to negatively affect revenue for physical server vendors by 3.5 percent next year. With advancing big data initiatives and increasing macroeconomic activity, it is unlikely that reductions in server vendor revenue is the result of a drop in total computing requirements. Instead, the increased efficiencies in utilization of existing server infrastructure is slowing the need to acquire new servers…

Grazed from DarkReading. Author: Brian Prince.

Building security into the application development process has always been a challenge. The reality of cloud computing however introduces new hurdles that need to be identified and climbed.   In a new paper, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and the Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code (SAFECode) joined forces to release guidance to help developers navigate the sometimes troubled waters of application security. The report is focuses on security considerations for platform-as-a-service (PaaS), though the authors say the advice in the paper is relevant to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as well.

"Among all of the cloud security challenges, this report is focused on the challenges faced by software developers who are developing applications for the cloud," says Eric Baize, senior director of the product security office with EMC. "Most of the activities required to develop secure software for the cloud are identical to the fundamental security practices required for any software. However, cloud has some unique characteristics that demand some customization of these practices."…

Grazed from CruxialCIO.  Author: Brian T. Horowitz.

Hewlett-Packard’s Financial Services division has announced new financing options to help companies migrate to a cloud-computing platform.  HP introduced Accelerated Migration to Cloud, which helps companies establish a way to retire and upgrade IT infrastructure. It allows companies to form a timeline on migrating to the cloud.

HP purchases customers’ assets and leases them back to customers to fund the transition. Customers’ assets are upgraded when customers make the move to the cloud.  With cloud computing becoming an important part of IT infrastructure, companies will need ways to finance the migration…