Grazed from 6Fusion. Author: PR Announcement.

6fusion, the company standardizing economic measurement of IT infrastructure and enabling a global marketplace for buyers and sellers, today announced the launch of the 6fusion Marketplace, which enables users and suppliers of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to buy and sell in a standardized, yet flexible open marketplace.

The 6fusion Marketplace is based on two key technologies, the Workload Allocation Cube (WAC), the industry’s first patented benchmark to universally measure consumption and capacity of compute, network and storage resources, and compute types which represent categories of commonly occurring infrastructure consumption patterns. Leveraging the WAC and compute types, the 6fusion marketplace standardizes IaaS contracting across service providers and makes it simpler to determine the infrastructure type, quantities, timeframe, and pricing that best match business and technical requirements in the marketplace. The WAC and compute types make it simple to compare and contrast prices and terms against multiple similar suppliers improving overall IT spend efficiency…

Grazed from TheNextWeb. Author: Rich Quick.

In the third instalment of TNW’s enterprise cloud computing series, we take a look at security in the Cloud. Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, may have once claimed he’d never lost sleep over cloud security, as users just needed to choose harder passwords, but security is still the biggest roadblock to enterprise cloud adoption, with 30% of corporate IT decision makers saying it’s their biggest pain point, according to a recent survey by 415 Research. But what are the biggest risks to your enterprise’s security as cloud adoption increases?

Departments moving to the Cloud without involving IT

Despite all the technical security risks of cloud computing, the biggest risks are often human factors. IT departments are understandably cautious about moving mission-critical applications to the Cloud, due to fears about security, downtime and control. However, other departments in the same company may already be signing up to cloud services, without even involving the IT department…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Gil Allouche.

While cloud computing continues to be adopted in its various forms, it is also constantly adapting to the changing needs of businesses and providers. While organisations search for a long-term strategy to combine their internal system with the cloud, providers continue to offer greater benefits, such as big data analytics and application services, lowering the playing field for small businesses.

The rise of the hybrid cloud

As cloud computing has gone mainstream, it seems businesses have had a hard time choosing just one cloud service to stick to. In fact, a report by Virtustream found that most businesses employ multiple cloud providers to meet different demands, including a mix of public and private IaaS clouds. This amount of cloud sprawl has led to concerns about whether businesses can track their resources and spending effectively and maintain expertise on every cloud they are using. While it seems that companies won’t be scaling down to just one option anytime soon, an increased adoption of a hybrid cloud that simplifies the public and private cloud mix through a single provider is quickly becoming a popular business solution…

Grazed from ChannelWeb. Author: Fleur Doidge.

A survey by IT industry employer council E-skills UK has suggested that four key areas are suffering from a lack of expertise. The survey focused on green IT, cloud computing, cybersecurity and mobile tech, arguing that these four areas will drive the digital economy in future – yet interviews with UK employers reveal a dearth of related skills. E-skills said in a statement that its survey has found that 20 per cent of current vacancies in the industry are "difficult to fill".

The £69bn digital sector, as a future "powerhouse" of the UK economy, is being held back by current skill shortages, it asserted. "Since 2009, employment in the sector has grown more than three times as fast as the average for the whole economy," it added. "Maintaining this growth and realising the sector’s full potential will require escalating recruitment at higher skill levels."…

Grazed from BizTech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

Huawei, the information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, and Intel, the computing innovator, reaffirmed their collaboration and highlighted the incorporation of Intel’s innovative hardware virtualisation technologies into Huawei’s cloud operating system FusionSphere at the 2013 Huawei Cloud Congress (HCC 2013). The collaboration has substantially boosted FusionSphere’s reliability, compatibility, and security.

FusionSphere is Huawei’s proprietary enterprise- and telco-facing cloud computing platform, which supports integration of computing, storage, and network resources from different vendors on a datacentre. The integrated cloud platform helps customers improve IT infrastructure utilisation, increase operating and management efficiency, and reduce costs on IT system management…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: John Rath.

Brocade  has rolled out new features for its VCS fabric and VDX switch portfolio, seeking to offer an end-to-end multitenancy blueprint for migration to the cloud. New wrinkles include new VCS fabric features that provide native multitenancy, storage-aware networking and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) performance. Last May the company rolled out its software-defined networking strategy, with software innovations coming from its acquisition of Vyatta.

“As cloud computing matures and is increasingly adopted in production environments, new requirements are emerging and deficiencies in legacy architectures are becoming more pronounced,” said Jason Nolet, vice president data center swtiching and routing at Brocade. “Our continued innovation in Brocade VCS Fabric technology addresses the most challenging data center requirements, including network multitenancy, network intelligence for exploding storage growth and the emerging adoption of 100 GbE for ever-increasing bandwidth consumption.”…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Jan Stafford.

Cloud and virtualization technologies offer new options for modernizing legacy applications today. They’re just in time, because many organizations’ existing applications can’t handle the mobile- and Web-based ways people want to deliver and access information, according to Matt Brasier, IT book author and head consultant for UK-based C2B2 Consulting.

In this interview, Brasier explains both why mobile computing is putting pressure on businesses to update older applications and recent changes in ways to do application modernization.

How does mobile computing impact legacy applications today?…

Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Sarah Frier.

How’s this for bleeding edge: The average member of IBM’s (IBM) senior executive leadership team started at the company in 1985, when the Internet was still a government project and Steve Jobs had just been fired from Apple (AAPL). Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty joined IBM in 1981, two years out of Northwestern University’s engineering school, and has been there ever since.

That’s a deep and experienced bench. The question is whether the tech giant has the right managerial perspective for what confronts it in 2013. IBM finds itself on the wrong side of a major technology shift. In the cloud era, corporate clients can rent server capacity and processing power for far less than IBM charges to hire its consultants or buy its hardware…

Grazed from Bluelock.

There’s a lot to consider when it comes to the cloud buying process. Security, compatibility and managed services are just a few important offerings cloud buyers have to consider. But, what matters most to cloud consumers?

In January 2013, cloud services provider Bluelock set out to better understand the consumers’ needs and desires for an infrastructure-as-a-service offering. More than 325 individuals took an 11-question survey over a period of three months. Individuals represented companies of all sizes, industries and job titles. Despite their demographic differences the consumers were united in many of their value rankings, sentiments and use-cases. The results draw a strong picture of what matters most to the IaaS consumer now, and what they expect to care about in the future. View the cloud infographic below to learn more!

Grazed from VMWare. Author: Jung Hwang.

Imagine you are a general contractor building a house for a family. Without meeting them, you decide it should have three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a two-car garage. When the family moves in, you have to begin renovating immediately—they have four teenage daughters and a baby on the way.

We all know that adding another bedroom, another bathroom, and doubling the garage is more costly and time consuming than it would have been to build the house to fit the family in the first place. So why do IT organizations so often make the same mistake when building out the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment?…