Grazed from Wired. Author: Theo Priestley.

The IT industry moves in cycles. Much like the fashion industry, trends come and go then return with a bang. It seems that cloud Computing is about to hit that cycle now and go out of fashion faster than it came in. The NSA and PRISM break out has exposed data security at a global scale that nobody was, but really should have been, prepared for. But it’s also raised eyebrows across the C-level in the enterprise as to whether they want to invest in a cloud strategy now.

An exchange one morning with an industry analyst revealed that 100+ clients think that the US Govt has screwed over every cloud vendor with what’s happening and that on-premise software is back on the menu. What’s more, 50 of those clients have put their plans on hold. It’s hardly surprising, you could tell that the writing was on the wall when Snowden hit the headlines but the turnaround is proving a lot faster…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mark Eisenberg.

There is a tendency in the technology world to assume we should use the latest innovation to solve all problems. We often express this by paraphrasing the law of Maslow’s Hammer: "If you are holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Cloud computing is no exception; everything is going to the cloud — or so we are told.

To follow the metaphor, whichever piece of the cloud the vendor has provided becomes the hammer, and all of a company’s workloads and applications become the nails. The question is which distribution model — IaaS, PaaS or SaaS — is right for your needs…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: Sam Johnston.

Today it is generally accepted that businesses large and small are actively embracing cloud computing. Speculation is over and today companies are getting down to the real business of incorporating cloud services and platforms into formal IT portfolios. Cloud is no longer seen as just a nice to have; it’s considered an enabler of business transformation – with even Gartner predicting most enterprises will have adopted cloud by the end of 2013.

Tasked with looking beyond IT that will simply get the job done, the CIO is the person driving this transformation and making decisions with the wider business context in mind. In fact, by 2015, IDC estimates that 90% of IT investments will be evaluated based on the strategic goals of a business, which means that the role of the CIO is set to become not only very challenging but much more strategically important than it is already…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: Derek Slater.

Cloud computing can save money–no question about it. But as more companies gain more experience in various cloud setups, a more nuanced understanding of the cost structure emerges. On ITBusinessEdge, Arthur Cole points out a couple such lessons, particularly with an eye toward public, private and hybrid differences.

One lesson is the simple observation that overprovisioning is expensive and wasteful. Okay–this has always been true in data centers and in IT generally. The naive view of the cloud was that its flexibility means you can scale your spending up or down so quickly that an overprovisioned situation would never last long. The realities of contracts, monitoring and unpredictable loads mean that it’s not always so simple…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Against a background where companies are coerced into recalibrating their communication applications and network infrastructure into cost-effectively supporting distributed information, cloud computing is growing in importance. Tough economic conditions have additionally reinforced the need to upgrade network infrastructure in a cost-effective, yet compelling way. While there remains an overwhelming tendency to resort to cuts in capital expenditure during periods of economic and financial crunch, companies are fast waking up to the fact that arbitrary scaling back of IT spending is not necessarily the most rewarding in the medium to long term, thus inspiring more thoughtful, and complete plans.

Against this process of re-evaluating platform strategies, devising innovative ways of creating competitive advantages, and strict monitoring of IT expenditure (both capital and operational), poised to benefit are technologies that reduce expenditures and step up competitiveness…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

IT departments implement process controls to keep operations running as needed, and best practices, like ITIL, emerged because we need standardized ways to operate our IT practices so they run efficiently, reliably and securely. But, self-service public cloud computing has changed the IT management landscape.

Analysts with a credit card, some data and an interesting problem no longer need to wait for IT to respond to their ticket request for a server and analysis software. A developer who wants to test a new idea can upload source code and data to a cloud provider and be back to coding in minutes, without having to contend with bureaucratic procedures. The democratization of access to computing resources is no doubt a positive factor for businesses, governments and other organizations, but we need to retool our management procedures and governance practices to accommodate the way we work with cloud computing…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

VMware (VMW) beefed up its analytics capabilities for machine data in its vCenter Log Insight product by releasing seven new content packs from various technology partners. The content packs were developed to enable vCenter Log Insight to consume unstructured data from a wider variety of sources while at the same time providing customers with more valuable insights into their data so they can more precisely and accurately identify and troubleshoot issues in virtual and cloud environments.

"Now our partners can target the broad VMware vSphere install base by augmenting VMware’s analytics capabilities, and customers can go to our marketplace and get up-to date domain or purpose-built content packs for their specific deployments," said Ramin Sayar, senior vice president and general manager of cloud management at VMware, in a prepared statement…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ryan Lawler.

Organizations need better tools for managing their product development, and the legacy options that they have today aren’t well positioned for today’s distributed teams or agile workflows. Jama Software offers a cloud-based product that is designed to help teams finish projects faster and also to keep an entire organization on the same page. And it’s raised $13 million to go after that opportunity.

Jama Software provides a SaaS-based platform that helps to accelerate product development within large, globally distributed enterprises. It works by tying together all the requirements and procedures that teams need to move projects forward and putting it together all in one place…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Salman Ul Haq.

When you can crunch your Big Data on the Cloud with Amazon EMR, for example, why not shift weather simulation on the Cloud as well? CloudCast does pretty much this with their local weather prediction. Cloud’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) architecture is best suited for leveraging third party services for making them accessible on cross platform structures which can be further extended using the capacious capabilities of cloud computing to facilitate both enterprise level users and individual entities. Cloud is now being used for the facilitating people in their daily lives and CloudCast is the best example, a cloud based application that forecasts local weather for the next 15 minutes.

CloudCast originates from the ECE department at UMass as a research project (publication) and claims to successfully deliver localized weather forecast for the next 15minutes to your mobile device. It’s a new application for short-term, localized weather prediction. CloudCast has multi-platform support and its back-end functionality relies on Cloud virtualization, enabling users to get weather forecasts for short spans since the team claims that extremely bad weather incidents are isolated and local. CloudCast is of immense usability keeping in view the disasters taking place around the world and extreme weather conditions resulting in a great number of human casualties and financial losses…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Opscode has extended the capabilities of its Chef IT configuration and automation platform beyond just compute to cover networking and storage infrastructure in a new release called Enterprise Chef. The firm also announced it is working with Microsoft to better integrate Chef with the widely used Windows PowerShell tool.

Available immediately, Enterprise Chef builds on the existing capabilities of Chef for automating the provisioning and configuration of servers, based on reusable definitions called cookbooks and recipes that are written using the Ruby programming language…