Grazed from Cloud Computing Intelligence.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Google announced on their official Google cloud platform blog that they will be taking the Google Compute Engine (GCE) out of beta and releasing a full-supported version with support for a wider range of Linux operating systems, including SUSE and Red Hat, as well as the ability to get upgrades and do maintenance while online, and lower prices

The Google Cloud Platform was released into beta June 2012 and has been popular with developers but it was limited in its use, by being hampered by a lack of OS support and the need to keep taking the solution down to do basic maintenance and upgrades. However those limitations didn’t put off names like Snapchat, Cooladata, Mendelics, Evite and Wix from building systems on the Compute Engine or businesses like SaltStack, Wowza, Rightscale, Qubole, Red Hat, SUSE, and Scalr producing new integrations with the Compute Engine…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Editorial Staff.

“One out of five organisations have discovered a secret source of competitive differentiation. It allows them to serve customers in new ways and re-imagine their business models. It can help surface valuable insights from their data and transform how they make decisions. It enables them to tap expertise from across their entire ecosystem.”

Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? And it is wonderful. Trouble is, it’s no secret any more. It’s a well-established way of delivering IT services and its called cloud computing.  However that didn’t stop IBM – in a just-released white paper ‘Under cloud cover: How leaders are accelerating competitive differentiation’ – talking up cloud computing as if it had discovered some hitherto unknown panacea for all the woes of the IT world…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

Globally more and more Governments are leveraging the benefits that cloud services can bring – the level of adoption and understanding however varies greatly across different countries and even states – one would have thought that countries late to adopt would avoid making the mistakes that some of the early-adopters made – experience shows that this is sadly not the case. With the US and the UK adopting high-profile cloud initiatives, there’s lots of experience to take advantage of.

I took the opportunity recently to sit down for a coffee with Ian Apperley, a New Zealand cloud consultant who does a lot of work in the public sector. It’s always interesting to talk with practitioners, all the more so when they’re helping organizations move to the cloud in my home country – my focus tends to be international and often I’m out of touch with what goes on at home – apart from an involvement helping get the Cloud Computing Code of Practice up and running (more information here), my domestic awareness is limited…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and the Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code (SAFECode) released new guidance for the secure development of cloud applications. The paper, "Practices for Secure Development of Cloud Applications" aims to provide practical secure development recommendations in the context of critical threats specific to cloud computing.

SAFECode and CSA partnered to determine whether additional software security guidance was needed to address unique threats to cloud computing, and if so, to identify specific security practices in the context of identified threats. The joint technical working group analyzed existing secure software development practices and secure design considerations as outlined in the SAFECode publication "Fundamental Practices for Secure Software Development 2nd Edition" in the context of CSA guidance, including "The Notorious Nine: Cloud Computing Top Threats in 2013."…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Jungah Lee & Cornelius Rahn.

SAP AG (SAP), the biggest maker of business-management software, plans to step up cooperation with Samsung Group to overcome a slump in Asia and speed its transition to cloud computing. “Cloud is one of the future trends that we are trying to bring into Korea,” co-Chief Executive Officer Jim Hagemann Snabe said in an interview in Seoul today. “Samsung plays an important role in making sure that their handsets are optimized for SAP software.”

The Walldorf, Germany-based software giant is also in talks with local Samsung rival LG Electronics Inc. (066570) and mobile operators including SK Telecom Co. and KT Corp. to speed the adoption of its next-generation Hana database technology and cloud service in South Korea…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud hosting platform provider DigitalOcean has unveiled a new Amsterdam data center to expand its footprint in Europe and offer its shared private networking technology to the region. With DigitalOcean’s shared private networking feature, previously only available in the company’s NYC2 datacenter, customers gain "the ability to create a virtual server containing both a public and private address, where any communication that happens over the private address happens over a private network," DigitalOcean CEO Ben Uretsky told Talkin’ Cloud.

The company’s expansion throughout Europe remains a top priority for Digital Ocean, Uretsky said. "We’ll continue to invest heavily in our infrastructure as more datacenters are added throughout the world," he said. "We are looking to add capacity throughout Europe…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

IBM is looking to jumpstart cloud adoption by launching a catalog of applications aimed at specific vertical industry segments as part of its larger effort to deeply embed IBM services inside business processes. The expansion of the IBM Cloud Consulting portfolio announced today represents a concerted effort to help organizations make the shift to the cloud using turnkey application solutions that can be quickly deployed on top of the SoftLayer cloud platform that IBM acquired earlier this year.

According to Sanjay Rishi, global leader for IBM cloud consulting services, organizations of all sizes are looking for help in moving to the cloud because they lack the internal expertise required to build, deploy and manage cloud applications. IBM plans to address that need via a series of applications developed by its consulting group that customers can then customize as needed. In particular, Rishi says IBM has developed a massive amount of analytics expertise that will increasingly be delivered as a service within social networking and mobile computing applications. Rishi says the convergence of social networking, mobile computing, analytics and cloud computing, which IBM collectively refers to as SMAC, is requiring organizations to look for external help to capture the millions of dollars in value that those applications can represent to the enterprise…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steve Ranger.

These behemoths of computing might not be as exciting to young developers as cloud and mobile projects, but mainframes are still the power behind many business applications. According to a survey of CIOs more than half (55 percent) of enterprise applications call upon the mainframe to complete transactions. And that shows little sign of decline – nine out of ten of the CIOs surveyed said their mainframe workloads are increasing, and distributed applications have caused a 44 percent increase in workload over the past five years.

Nine out of ten said new customer-facing applications are accessing the mainframe; however this combination of old and new technologies is adding to the CIOs’ headaches – three quarters of CIOs said the complexity of applications working across distributed and mainframe environments is making problem resolution take longer…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CSA Congress 2013 – The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization which promotes the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, today announced the release of the Software Defined Perimeter Report, a new white paper report that explains the Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) security framework and how it can be deployed to protect application infrastructures from network-based attacks. Bob Flores, former CTO of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), will unveil further details of the SDP initiative at a fireside chat keynote this afternoon, at 4:00 pm ET, hosted by CSA Executive Director Jim Reavis.

The Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) Initiative is a new CSA project aimed at developing an architecture for securing the "Internet of Things" by using the cloud to create highly secure and trusted end-to-end networks between any IP addressable entities, allowing for systems that are highly resilient to network attacks…

Grazed from AwesomeCloud. Author: Dan Farrell.

If you’re considering offering cloud services to your clients, or you already are, you’ve likely heard of the benefits (reduced CAPEX, on-demand access, metered service, etc.) that go along with cloud computing. Those benefits can be a huge win for your clients and also create a recurring revenue stream for your business. What about the perceived risks of cloud computing?

In this blog post, we’ll review some of the most common cloud computing security risks expressed to our channel partners and cloud resellers by their clients(end-users) when they are considering a move to the cloud. After reading this blog, you’ll be more prepared to answer common questions posed from your existing clients and potential clients…