Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Amazon Web Services remains the top IaaS public cloud computing provider, offering the widest breath of services of any vendor in the market, Gartner concluded in its annual Magic Quadrant report. In addition to having a broad range of cloud-based services, AWS also has the largest capacity to handle cloud-based workloads. Its cloud operation is estimated by Gartner to be five times larger than a dozen of its top competitors in the market combined. “AWS is the overwhelming market share leader,” the report reads. “It is a thought leader; it is extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market. It has the richest IaaS product portfolio, and is constantly expanding its service offerings and reducing its prices.”

Each year Gartner compiles its Magic Quadrant for public cloud vendors by examining the estimated 15 largest market players based on estimated market share, then it ranks them based on their understanding of market needs and the company’s ability to execute…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Jared Wray.

Just a few short decades ago, the most expensive IT resources were computers, and human operators were interchangeable. Now the roles are reversed — technology assets have become a commodity while organizations place a premium on people.

To that end, the adoption of cloud computing brings with it a series of changes that directly impact the IT workforce. Failing to account for those changes can reduce the value of the cloud and increase IT costs and dysfunction. There are at least four major areas of human cost to assess when planning a cloud strategy and selecting a cloud provider…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

8KMiles, a leading global cloud computing company, today announced that the company is now offering the FuGen Multi-domain Identity Services Platform (MISP™) to help enterprises rapidly set up identity federations with minimum friction and cost ownership, establish a delivery infrastructure for scaling, automated partner testing and monitor deployments through real-time compliance certification.

The FuGen MISP™ supports more than 15 government profiles, process templates for establishing large federation communities, and more than 200 pre-configured and validated SaaS applications including Salesforce, Office365, Dropbox, NetSuite, Concur, Citrix, and many more. Customers can leverage these capabilities for rapid federation deployments to keep in compliance with government policies and regulatory mandates. Enterprises can also take advantage of onsite/offsite support for business partner onboarding and pre-qualification, policy review, SaaS partner certification, partner interoperability testing and reporting services…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Adaptive Computing, the largest provider of policy-based optimization software for private cloud and High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments, today announced that it has joined the OpenStack Foundation to bring its vast expertise in policy-based optimization to the OpenStack community. Adaptive Computing’s Moab OpenStack-based solution provides open and flexible policy-based optimization that enables enterprises to use their existing management tools to automate service performance and cost optimization for OpenStack-based environments.

Adaptive Computing has implemented initial proof of concept OpenStack-based solutions with multiple customers allowing these early adopters to experience the power of policy-based optimization in their cloud environments. Adaptive Computing will be showing a sneak peek of these capabilities at VM World in booth No. 516 from Aug. 25-28, 2013…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Are your customers experiencing access issues when they connect to private and public clouds? If so, Aryaka may have a solution for you. The vendor, which specializes in WAN optimization as a service and application delivery as a service, is diving into the cloud network-as-a-service market with an offering designed to optimize and simplify access to both public and private clouds.

Aryaka Cloud Network-as-a-Service is intended to help solve some of the accessibility and optimization issues found in cloud services such as Microsoft (MSFT) Office 365, Google (GOOG) Apps and Amazon (AMZN) Web Services. Aryaka called out those three by name, but the company noted those are only examples. It’s not an exhaustive list, by any means…

Grazed from ChannelNomics. Author: Larry Walsh.

Amazon.com became the fourth major site and/or Internet service to go dark in the past week. The sudden outage that lasted 15 minutes meant millions of online consumers couldn’t order “50 Shades of Gray” or the latest John Mayer CD.

More importantly, though, this string over service outages is drawing attention to the fragility of the Internet and cloud-based services. While cloud computing is still evolving, it has become an indispensable part of our daily work and personal life. Consider what’s happened in the past week.

• Microsoft’s Outlook.com – the recently rebranded cloud email service – was dark for many users for days. Microsoft has issued an apology to users and has restored service. However, the outage comes as Microsoft is touting the high uptime for Office 365 and other cloud services.
• The New York Times – the gray old lady and bastion of traditional journalism – was offline for several hours last Wednesday due to technical difficulties. The Washington Post described the scene as people “surging out of their offices in a blind panic” because they couldn’t catch up on the latest news trends…

Grazed from VMTurbo. Author: PR Announcement.

One of the top priorities of one of our IaaS provider customers is the ability to right-size their subscribers’ virtual machines as part of the migration process from legacy VMware managed service platforms to its IaaS platform. In the legacy environments, the service provider currently has hundreds of bespoke configurations of virtual machines. In the IaaS environment, there are a total of 13 standard virtual configurations that are offered to subscribers.

As part of their initiative, the service provider wanted to determine how to transform subscribers’ legacy virtual machine configurations to the most appropriate configuration of the 13 standard options on offer for IaaS—based on the actual workload demand. Their subscribers commonly under- or over-provision virtual machine resource capacity because they have limited insight into the true workload demands of newly-deployed virtual machines. Through this capability the service provider believes it can help its subscribers maximize the ROI from the ongoing investment in their IaaS offering, while also reducing its internal costs through standardization of the service it provides to subscribers…

For private consumers and companies investing in Cloud solutions, study after study has revealed their number one concern of moving to the Cloud is security. The vast majority of concerns take shape in the form of data security, i.e. how secure is data stored in a server housed in a data center the world away and data accessibility, i.e. strong data encryption matched with even stronger access keys.

But, if you drill into the Cloud security issues data more, you begin to see one pattern emerge time and time again. That pattern: internal security leaks vs. external security hacks. Time and time again, studies reveal the largest concerns of IT professionals and COO’s moving their company to the Cloud isn’t external data hacks; it’s actually internal data leaks.

But why is this? Why are more and more security professionals and CEO’s concerned with internal Cloud security issues over external Cloud security risks? The answer is found in the corporate Internal Cloud infrastructure.

Grazed from ADTMagazine.  Author: John K. Waters.

Java-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Jelastic last week announced another update of its rapidly-evolving Java-and-PHP cloud hosting platform. Version 1.9.2 comes with a number of enhancements, including auto-deployment capabilities for users of GIT and SVN repositories, FTP/FTPS access to database servers, and support for PHP 5.5.

Jelastic is a Java- and PHP-based cloud hosting platform designed to run any Java application in the cloud without code or language changes, and without the need to write for specific APIs. It supports any JVM-based app, including apps developed with Java 6, Java 7, JRuby, Scala and Groovy…

HotLink Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for hybrid virtualization management, today announced its latest product, HotLink DR Express, the industry’s first disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) solution that leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) to economically protect all types of VMware vSphere virtual machines, and not just mission-critical ones. HotLink DR Express provides a dramatically simple plug-in solution for VMware vCenter users to integrate robust data protection with day-to-day operational management of VMware Windows and Linux workloads. Within minutes of a failure, IT administrators can automatically recover to a DR/BC site within AWS for the cost of basic backup.

HotLink DR Express addresses the market need for a cost-effective business recovery solution for workloads that could never sustain the exorbitant cost of a replica DR site, a luxury only justified for a handful of critical applications. Until now, basic backup and/or replication have been the only affordable options, but those recovery processes require standby, available hardware and a time-intensive effort to restore the VMs.