Grazed from Forbes. Author: Kevin Chew.

Even if you’re not a technologist, I want you to understand that hybrid cloud computing is all about choice: Choice about where your data resides. Choice about how your data is managed. Choice about where your data processing actually happens. Choices can be used:

• to make economic decisions to lower the total cost of ownership of data,
• to maximize your quality of services, or
• to comply with regulatory constraints on data sovereignty.

In today’s environment, vendors are moving fast. If we wind the clock back a year, the main cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Amazon, Terremark, or Rackspace were fairly proprietary, closed environments. But they all quickly realized that IT heterogeneity is what customers want…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Market research firm Infonetics Research released excerpts from its 2013 UC Strategies and Vendor Leadership: North American Enterprise Survey, which explores enterprises’ plans for unified communications (UC), including cloud deployments, and their perceptions of UC vendors.

“The biggest change we’re seeing in unified communication deployments is the adoption of video,” notes Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics Research. “Businesses have been implementing more mobility into their UC architectures over the past year and now are looking toward videoconferencing to help drive further productivity.”…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Piyush Pant.

Cloud computing has transformed the way IT resources are utilized, but the externalization of infrastructures and applications has brought with it the perception of increased risk, which seem to swirl around visibility and control. This perception of increased risk has prevented the adoption of cloud solutions in a number of industries, so the key question is how to make decisions about moving your organization’s IT solutions to the cloud while considering the risks involved. Let’s review the key advantages of cloud computing:

* Economies of Scale: Traditional IT and IT outsourcing runs on infrastructure that is costly to create and maintain. In contrast, the cornerstone of cloud is cost efficiency, as the cloud does not require a capital investment to set up the infrastructure, or an in-house team of IT experts. Moreover, an organization pays only for the storage capacity it consumes, meaning enterprises can readily scale up and down processing and storage needs without spending a lot on overhead. Organizations end up saving time and critical resources, and can transform IT into a strategic team that focuses on more innovative initiatives…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Leonel Navarro.

Security in the cloud has been a hot topic for a long time now, yet many individuals and organizations fail to realize the implications of security, while others have not performed enough due diligence to seize the necessary solution. Cloud computing requires controls for addressing threats that jeopardize confidentiality, integrity and availability. The purpose of this article is to delineate existing cloud security implications and determine which cloud archetype is best suited for a particular business case.

Security implications change based on cloud use case and the chosen cloud archetype. The most common cloud computing use cases relate to infrastructure, since organizations leverage from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to migrate data centers to a virtualized environment. However, two more archetypes promise even more value when it comes to applications. These fall into Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and can be leveraged from cloud provider web services and even fully functional applications through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). To better understand the security implications, let’s focus on the infrastructure and applications use cases…

Grazed from TheVar Guy. Author: Editorial Staff.

OpenStack Havana, the latest version of the open source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform for cloud computing, is out. And it’s now easier than ever to deploy on Red Hat (RHT) Linux-based operating systems, as a result of official support that the company unveiled shortly after OpenStack Havana made its debut Oct. 17.

The support comes in the form of official RPM packages that will simplify the installation and deployment of the new OpenStack release on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Linux distributions based on Red Hat’s software—including Fedora and CentOS, two other popular open source operating systems for servers and the cloud…

Grazed from RedHat. Author: PR Announcement.

Today, Red Hat announced the latest release of Red Hat® JBoss® Portal. With Version 6.1, you can now deliver self-service to your customers through mobile-ready applications integrate with popular social media websites. For high-impact, self-service applications, JBoss Portal provides proven performance at scale, plus flexible integration with existing infrastructure and other JBoss investments.

What’s new?

• Integrate with Facebook, Google +, and Twitter.
• Easily redirect users to mobile websites based on their device.
• Customize menus with developer access to public navigation APIs.
• Improve developer productivity with support for Context and Dependency Injection…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

One of the big enhancement areas of the new OpenStack Havana open source cloud computing platform is security. The OpenStack Foundation launched the eighth release of OpenStack last week, and according to IBM (IBM), one of the many vendors supporting OpenStack, the organization has increased the security elements of the cloud platform.

With more and more businesses and government organizations looking to OpenStack to fulfill their cloud needs, security is becoming more important to the overall design of the cloud computing platform. According to IBM, security has up to now been the biggest inhibitor to cloud adoption, but Havana will play a significant role in differentiating cloud vendors when it comes to security…

Grazed from BusinessTechnology. Author: Joanne Frearson.

IT leaders in emerging nations are more upbeat about the cloud than the developed market and are focusing on its transformational and innovative potential, according to a Cisco/Intel study about the impact of the cloud on IT consumption models.

Emerging market respondents of the study believe that the greater use of cloud services would not necessarily marginalise IT departments and that the full-time IT headcount would increase. In addition, emerging market respondents say that the role and responsibilities of IT would increase relative to third parties in areas such as systems integrators or cloud service providers…

Grazed from CNN. Author: Dr. Chris Brauer.

With great power comes great responsibility. There is some confusion over whether this quote should be attributed to Voltaire or Spiderman. Either way, the message is the same and one that should be resonating with the inventors, companies, brands, media, policy makers and industries hitching a ride on the innovation bullet train of wearable technologies.

Our original Human Cloud research project at Goldsmiths, University of London in partnership with cloud computing provider Rackspace focused on the socio-economic impact of wearable technology moving from novelty and entertainment to health and lifestyle…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

We’re accustomed to thinking of Microsoft as a lumbering giant encumbered by its PC legacy. But think about it: What other company in the world has such a massive collection of software and services to offer through the cloud, not to mention the cloud infrastructure to deliver it? Microsoft has the resources to crush it. The question, as usual, is how well it can execute.

Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise division at Microsoft, helps oversee a big chunk of the private and public cloud portfolio: Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server, Windows Azure, and Visual Studio. InfoWorld Executive Editor Doug Dineley and I spoke with him for over an hour last week. In particular, our conversation focused on the connection between Windows Server and Azure, although we began by addressing the commitment Microsoft has made to its public cloud…