Grazed from FCW.com. Author: Frank Konkel.

In its lawsuit against the federal government filed in July, Amazon Web Services claims IBM’s protest of its $600 million cloud computing contract with the CIA was "untimely" and "meritless," and that’s just a snapshot of a 79-page document sitting before U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Thomas Wheeler.

The lawsuit, unsealed Aug. 20, blasted the Government Accountability Office’s June decision to uphold portions of bid protests filed by Big Blue as irrational and against federal contracting law — a "flawed" decision that AWS argues is based on a technicality and contends would not have changed the CIA’s decision…

Grazed from DZone. Author: Brian Prince.

I just stumbled upon an industry report by Cloud Spectator (www.cloudspectator.com). It ran a test on the top IaaS providers, looking for who had the best performance for the buck. As far as I know, Windows Azure and Microsoft had nothing to do with this report.

The abstract of the report:

With a lack of standardization in the IaaS industry, providers freely use unique terminology to describe their VM resource allocations. How do you compare an ECU to an HPCCU to a vCPU? This report examines the performance and pricing of 5 of the world’s largest IaaS providers over a 5-day period, and provides a process to clearly determine the price-performance value of a cloud provider, addressing the issue of standardization in the marketplace…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Addressing the global cloud skills gap is the number one priority to help accelerate the successful adoption of Cloud. To help close this gap the Cloud Credential Council is releasing the Professional level series and offering this at European and US conferences in September 2013.

Companies are recognizing the potential of cloud computing to transform their business, and they are searching for talent with the necessary skills to help them maximize their investment. The Cloud Credential Council addresses these needs by involving leading cloud organizations to help develop corporate guidance and cloud certification standards. The CCC is releasing five certifications at the Professional level:…

Grazed from International Business Times. Author: Jessica Menton.

Nero AG, best known for developing Nero Burning ROM, could rival tech giants Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) by looking towards the future convergence of technology by syncing devices in a new way.

“We have basically two branches that we work on. There’s still a PC based product that’s our legacy product. That’s where we focus more on the capability of syncing, but not necessarily using the cloud. We have functionalities that also connect through the cloud, for example Google Drive, Drop box, in order to be able to use the content,” said Stefano Miotto, technical director EMEA & APAC at Nero AG…

Grazed from Sciencemag.org. Author: Vijaysree Venkatraman.

If data driven discovery becomes the norm, more scientists will need to upgrade from their desktop computers to more powerful, scalable computing systems. As director of research–physical sciences at the eScience institute at the University of Washington (UW), it’s Jeffrey Gardner’s job to help researchers with that migration.

In addition to being a facilitator of computational work, Gardner is a computational astrophysicist. He has run code that utilized all 100,000-plus computer processing unit (CPU) cores and 10,000-plus hard drives of the supercomputer Kraken at the National Supercomputing Center at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. He works part-time at Google, as a visiting scientist. Before joining UW, he was senior scientific specialist at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. So, he knows about resources for scientific computation…

Grazed from PCWire. Author: Alex Woodie.

Cloud-based supercomputing is, theoretically, a great idea, but the trend has not taken off as some in the HPC field believed it would. That isn’t stopping the folks at Cycle Computing, who say its Amazon-based supercomputers are not only helping scientists and researchers get real work done, but freeing their brains to ask the really big questions.

Scientific creativity is being hamstrung by the finite resources of traditional fixed-size supercomputing infrastructures, Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe said in a recent video. While all kinds of advances are being made in the HPC arena–particularly on the software side–all too often, scientists and researchers can’t adequately explore their ideas or ask the big questions due to a sheer lack of HPC capacity…

Grazed from Diginomica. Author: Phil Wainewright.

Business users love the convenience of being able to sign up for new applications on-demand and use them on any device, any time, any place. IT and security managers are less enamored. A proliferation of Web apps, a boom in mobile working and the persistence of unsafe browsing habits are causing more and more headaches for those entrusted with safeguarding enterprise data. When security breaches occur, it’s IT that carries the can. No wonder they want to get more control and oversight of what users are up to.

During July and August I’ve posted a total of six articles on the topic of identity and access management — three vendor interviews and three customer case studies. Taken together, they provide a useful snapshot of enterprise adoption of these technologies to help manage cloud and mobile apps, along with insight into their future evolution…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

We’ve been hearing about it for several years now: that IT departments will shrink or disperse as cloud computing takes hold in enterprises. A new survey, however, suggests that IT departments are actually expanding, and IT leaders are taking on elevated roles within businesses as a result of cloud.

The survey of 4,226 IT leaders across the globe, conducted by Cisco Consulting Services, in partnership with Intel, finds that while cloud adoption within enterprises is growing — now accounting for 23 percent of IT spending, and expected to rise to 27 percent over the next three years — there is no discernible reduction in on-premises IT taking place. In fact, a majority, 57%, see the size of IT increasing in terms of full-time IT headcount…

Grazed from ProfitBricks. Author: Andy Lurie.

Earlier this week, Nine Lives Media ranked ProfitBricks ranks among the world’s Top 100 Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), according to their third-annual Talkin’ Cloud 100 report. ProfitBricks ranked 75th on the overall Talkin’ Cloud 100 list and first on the list of 25 Fastest Growing CSPs. Being named to the Talkin’ Cloud list is a clear indication of how far ProfitBricks has come in a short time.

The cloud industry has grown tremendously over the past few years and the growth shows no sign of slowing down. Now, as the IT channel, particularly VARs and MSPs, ramp up their customer deployments, Cloud Computing 2.0 technologies like ProfitBricks, make it easier and more profitable for growth to accelerate. On-premise server sales will continue to decline as cloud computing infrastructure becomes faster, easier to use and more profitable to sell. Read more about the award in our press release…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Michael Endler.

Office 365 continues to rake in business from companies and government agencies, bolstering Microsoft’s goal to become the enterprise cloud market’s key player. Last week, Microsoft announced that New York State has become the latest government entity to sign up. The deal is also, according to the state’s CIO, a testament to the simplicity and savings that cloud services can bring to large organizations.

More than 120,000 employees across New York’s executive agencies are scheduled to move to Office 365 by the end of the year. Currently, the state employs more than 27 systems for email, word and data processing. The move to a standardized platform is expected to save approximately $3 million in annual license, hardware, maintenance, energy and personnel costs…