Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Linda Musthaler.

Any time a company decides it wants to host its applications in the cloud, or use a SaaS application where the company’s data will be stored in the cloud, the IT security professionals have to ask a series of questions. Can we encrypt the data? If so, who will have access to the keys? How will we perform key rotation? Can we sort and search on data that is encrypted? Is the cloud vendor using a proprietary encryption technology that prevents us from moving our data to another vendor? If we use 10 SaaS applications, will we have to manage 10 different sets of encryption keys?

These questions are tough enough to answer when the data and encryption technologies are in a company’s own data center where it has complete control over everything. Things get much more complicated when the company has to factor in third party hosts like Amazon and Rackspace or SaaS providers like Google Apps, Workday and Salesforce…

Grazed from TheDrum. Author: Tony Walford.

An M&A story I saw on The Drum earlier this week (Wednesday) really got me thinking about something – something someone said back in the 1990s, at the birth of the internet. This week’s story ran thus: Glasgow-based cloud computing specialists Iomart Group announced its acquisition of Backup Technology Ltd (BTL), a Leeds-based data recovery provider, for £23m (£19m in cash, £3.5m in shares).

But why does it matter to anyone else? Almost 20 years ago someone at Sun Microsystems – I can’t recall exactly who – said that the desktop PC was doomed, and that everyone would access files and programs through a “dumb” terminal. They wouldn’t need an expensive machine with a hard drive full of software; everything could be located on remote servers…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: HP.

The convergence of mobile technology, social media, big data, and the advent of cloud computing are driving a dramatic shift in the ways enterprises deploy and use IT. This shift requires new means and approaches for IT to help organizations accelerate progress towards solving their most pressing challenges—including speeding innovation, increasing efficiencies, enhancing agility, and improving financial management.

Today, many IT organizations have reached a high level of maturity with regard to virtualization and are starting to look into the automation, flexibility, and self-service capabilities that a cloud solution can provide. They see that this strategy provides them opportunities to develop and deploy new business strategies and delivery models that can enhance their ability to survive and thrive in a demanding and unpredictable world—a world where the cloud is a key component of their ability to accelerate innovation, to become significantly more agile and efficient, and to optimize costs across the enterprise..

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Joe Panettieri.

I’ve been waiting for this: The MSP market is finally converging with the OpenStack cloud market. An example: Blue Box is making noise as an MSP that allows customers to deploy hosted OpenStack private clouds. So where do managed services enter the picture?

Blue Box says its platform manages the underlying OpenStack orchestration, including monitoring and release management, allowing customers to focus on using OpenStack instead of managing it. OpenStack is an open source platform for building public and private clouds…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

8×8, Inc., provider of innovative cloud communications and computing solutions, today announced it has sold its dedicated server hosting business to The IRC Company, Inc. (dba Black Lotus Communications) for $3 million in cash. The transaction signed and closed on September 30, 2013.

The dedicated server hosting business, acquired by 8×8 in May 2010, provided managed hosting services on dedicated servers to 288 customers as of June 30, 2013. For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2013, this business generated revenue of approximately $3.8 million and $753,000 in the first quarter of fiscal 2014. 8×8’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) cloud hosting business is not included in this transaction. The Company will report a gain of approximately $1 million related to this transaction in the second quarter of fiscal 2014…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudPay, the pioneer of SaaS-based payroll automation for multinationals, announced today that it has been shortlisted as a finalist for the Payroll World Awards 2013, for the Implementation Project Award and International Payroll Team Award.

The Payroll World Awards aim to recognize payroll technology and solution providers that deliver cutting-edge innovation, bring significant cost savings and show their commitment to improving the payroll profession. Due to CloudPay’s highly experienced team of payroll professionals dedicated to facilitating the way its clients conduct their global payroll activities, the company was named a finalist for the two categories it entered.
The Implementation Project Award recognizes effective implementation of a payroll system, judged by return on investment, cost savings and achievement of significant business benefits or management information.

Grazed from TheServerSide. Author: Jason Tee.

If your enterprise got picked for a makeover on a reality TV show, one of the first things the judges would probably do is ask why you haven’t moved to the cloud. Streamlining your ALM, ditching unnecessary infrastructure, and reducing maintenance costs can be so slimming. But the fact is that not every single app in your wardrobe is going to be a good fit for a SaaS or PaaS based solution. Let’s take a some cloud adoption strategies, while focussing on a few scenarios where keeping an app out of the cloud might be the wiser choice.

Migration versus total transformation

Before we dive in, we should probably point out that industry experts at Forrester say you shouldn’t move your existing apps to the cloud at all. Apparently, re-architecting isn’t enough to solve the problem. "If your traditional applications are an architectural mismatch with cloud platforms, it’s an expensive and costly route to try and rearchitect them for the cloud." Instead, "Cloud applications should be built from the ground up for cloud."…

Grazed from Ed Tech Magazine. Author: David Weldon.

From government to finance to education, it seems that everyone wants to work in the cloud these days — even robots. As cloud computing captures the public imagination, it also has become the latest area of serious study in robotics on numerous college campuses, including Philadelphia’s Drexel University and the University of Minnesota.

James Kuffner, a research scientist at Google, purportedly coined the term "cloud robotics" in 2010 to describe "a new approach to robotics that takes advantage of the Internet as a resource for massively parallel computation and sharing of vast data resources," writes the University of California, Berkeley’s Ken Goldberg…

Grazed from StreetInsider.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

Verizon Communications, Inc., announced Verizon Cloud – its new cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform and cloud-based object storage service. With this service, Verizon is fundamentally changing how public clouds are built. Large enterprises, mid-size companies and small development shops will get the agility and economic benefit of a generic public cloud along with the reliability and scale of an enterprise-level service with unprecedented control of performance.

The public beta for Verizon Cloud will launch in the fourth quarter of this year. "Verizon created the enterprise cloud, now we’re recreating it," said John Stratton, president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions. "This is the revolution in cloud services that enterprises have been calling for…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Maxwell Cooter.

The world of cloud seems a long way from the world of high finance. Sure, there have been some institutions who have turned to cloud for some of their IT activity, but these are few and far between – and certainly none of the major finance houses have gone down that route; the twin problems of legacy systems and compliance will serve as a barrier to cloud adoption for some time to come.

And yet, it’s not true to say that finance and cloud are truly incompatible. There is one area where there’s a connection and that’s with the idea that cloud can be traded as a commodity. In a world where everything has a value, is it any surprise that he financial masters of the universe are looking at cloud?…