Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Whether you’re building an enterprise private cloud or buying a public cloud service, the underlying architecture of what you end up with will have an impact on what you can do. "People have a tendency not to think about architecture," noted David Linthicum, senior VP at Cloud Technology Partners in Cambridge, Mass. and a speaker in the Cloud and Virtualization track at Interop New York 2013. And cloud vendors, including Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine, tend not to disclose much about their underlying architectures.

Clouds may have some elements in common, but the specific goals behind the selection of their parts and their method of assembly actually differ greatly. "The architectural differences can show up in a big way," Linthicum warned. When little information is available from the vendor, he added, potential cloud users may have to "play private detective to discover what is going on behind the scenes."…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Ideaca, a Canadian IT consulting firm, announced today that they received Gold for Best Cloud Computing Solution at the 2013 CDN Channel Elite Awards. Ideaca has consistently been a finalist in previous CDN Channel Elite Awards, and was a finalist for the Best Mid-Market Solution category in 2013.

CDN’s Channel Elite Awards recognizes IT Solution Providers for their innovation, leadership and commitment to creating value for their customers. Solution Providers owned and operated in Canada were invited to submit solutions to 10 different award categories. Channel Elite Award medalists and all finalists were recognized at CDN’s Channel Elite Awards Gala on Sept. 11, 2013 at the Paramount Conference & Event Venue in Toronto. All winners and finalists have been posted on www.computerdealernews.com and winning solutions were profiled in CDN, Computing Canada and Direction Informatique. Winning solutions also receive the CEA Seal of Excellence and position themselves as a leader in the growing Canadian IT industry…

Grazed from MarketWired. Author: PR NewsWire.

ActiveState®, whose software enables developers and enterprises to innovate from code to cloud, today announced the launch of the Stackato® Connector for Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager 2.1. With the Stackato Connector for CloudPortal Business Manager, IT can now more efficiently access their Stackato private PaaS through a self-service catalog.

Organizations see the cloud as an important component to increasing productivity and delivering applications to market faster than before. As one of the cloud service catalog offerings available for the Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager, the Stackato Connector is part of the Citrix-Ready Partner ecosystem designed to unify and simplify the commerce, user management, service provisioning and operational aspects of a cloud…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Eric Lunquist.

The red cloud has finally fully enveloped Oracle. After years of an off-again, on-again relation with the cloud computing concept, Oracle acknowledged the necessity of being a full-service player in the cloud and is offering its entire range of database, compute and applications in cloud configurations.

While Oracle is offering up its support for cloud capabilities, it is not yet discussing prices or delivery dates for the full range of cloud services. The cloud announcements were scheduled to be made by Larry Ellison at the company’s OpenWorld customer conference. However, when Ellison had to decide between appearing on stage to make the announcements or watching his team’s boat compete in the final rounds of the America’s Cup races, the boat won…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

IBM made waves in the cloud computing market when it acquired SoftLayer for $2 billion in early June. Three months into the integration process, SearchCloudComputing spoke with Dennis Quan, IBM’s vice president of SmartCloud Enterprise, to discuss Big Blue’s plans for its new Infrastructure as a Service property.

Quan is responsible for the technology platform underlying all of IBM’s cloud services. His involvement in cloud computing started in 2007, when his team built IBM’s first cloud with Google and the National Science Foundation, and he has held numerous technical leadership positions with IBM over the past 14 years…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Michelle McNickle.

As the use of cloud computing grows, so do the threats that endanger a cloud environment. Seungwon Shin, Ph.D., assistant professor at the graduate school of information security at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, recently developed a framework that uses OpenFlow to implement more granular security monitoring for cloud service providers.

Shin detailed the creation and implementation of this framework in his research paper, CloudWatcher: Network Security Monitoring Using OpenFlow in Dynamic Cloud Networks, which he completed as a PhD student at Texas A&M University. We asked Shin to expand on the challenges network administrators are facing today with regard cloud security, and how CloudWatcher uses OpenFlow to enable security in multi-tenant cloud environments…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Tony Kontzer.

Calling the IT mega trends of cloud, big data and mobility “tremendously disruptive and tremendously opportunistic,” Joe Tucci, the CEO of storage giant EMC, delivered a keynote at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference Tuesday that aimed to position the company’s expanding technology stack at the center of those trends.

The anchor of EMC’s strategy is the so-called “software-defined data center,” which enables control layers to be abstracted from the underlying infrastructure, allowing for pooling of processing cores, network resources, storage –you name it…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: David Grimes.

The next two years will be an exciting period of innovation for cloud computing, especially as more and more businesses fully realize the advantages of adopting cloud services. While cloud’s appeal originally stemmed from the potential to reduce IT infrastructure costs, today’s cloud technology is increasingly adding value through its ability to drive business growth. The next wave of cloud is a huge turning point for businesses that now have the opportunity to transform their entire approach to IT.

We live in an era where technology is rapidly advancing and businesses need to evolve their infrastructure in order to remain competitive. Cloud adopters can immediately access the innovations that come with this next wave of cloud, and in turn improve their own operations and services. Instead of viewing each innovation as a new purchase, companies can transition from a CapEx model to an OpEx model by deploying ‘as-a-Service’ solutions. This allows businesses to continuously iterate their products and services…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Charles Costa.

Cloud computing has allowed professionals at midsize businesses to stay connected while on the go; as reliance on cloud services increases, however, data center architects are scrambling to find suitable locations for new data centers. Although it is logical to assume future data centers will be built near high-population areas, a recent article from Fast Company discusses how cloud services might literally be housed in the clouds — or just above them — in the near future.

For the sum of $100 million, data centers could be constructed at a low orbit, providing midsize companies with affordable access to archival storage where high-speed access is not required. Some of the most notable cost-saving features unique to space data centers include solar power and full automation and self-healing of the server hardware…

Grazed from Wired. Author: SUJATHA PEREPA.

It’s no secret that cloud computing is transforming businesses across industries and creating a paradigm shift by delivering hosted services through the internet with unabated cost benefits and business innovation. But while the private sector is building on cloud computing’s myriad benefits, government organizations have also aggressively begun to capitalize on them.

As an IBM solution architect and a trusted advisor to many of our government sector customers, I’ve seen how the financial constraints of the past five years have deeply affected how agencies deploy their solutions. These agencies are pressed to seek optimized business models while measuring their performance and service deliveries more closely — hence their inclination towards shared services…