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…

Grazed from HostReview. Author: Joanna Zamojta.

In fact, it is expected to grow by leaps and bounds: a recent Morgan Stanley report states AWS revenue is expected to hit $24 billion by 2023. Logic dictates competing cloud hosting providers will also see similar growth. However, things can go wrong. Issues will come up, just like anything else in the tech world, that will not only slow the growth of this infrastructure, but halt it dead in its tracks if these issues aren’t addressed. Here are three issues that could hinder the success of cloud computing, in order to lessen their chances of occurring.

1.False Advertisement
Some cloud hosting vendors are hoping you have no idea what the cloud is all about. In this way, they are able to sell you on their definition of the cloud and how their solution is going to be perfect for your company, without once asking about the applications you rely on. If those who know nothing of the cloud believe these fantasies and sign up for cloud hosting services, there is bound to be an issue that results in failure somewhere along the line. This failure will then be blamed on the cloud, when instead it was nothing more than a compatibility issue easily resolved by having a firmer understanding of the cloud and all of the options available…

Parallels Cloud Server transforms how you deliver the cloud. Parallels Cloud Server combines Parallels Cloud Storage with Parallels Containers and Parallels Hypervisor to dramatically improve server reliability, performance, and profitability.

Grazed from GeekWire.  Author: Jeff Dickey.

Jared Wray, founder and CTO of cloud computing startup Tier 3, is helping to build the future of enterprise business.  A serial entrepreneur, Wray is most excited about how cloud technologies help customers move faster and cheaper, allowing for efficient iteration and innovation. His company scored $10 million last year from Madrona, Ignition and Intel Capital, an it continues to grow fast with addition of experienced tech leader Matthew Schiltz as CEO earlier this year.

In this edition of Nextcast, Wray discusses his thoughts about cloud computing, as well as his own entrepreneurial background which he said started from being broke…

Grazed from Business2Community.  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 this morning with Ray Wang of Constellation Research 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. 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. But it’s not just Cloud vendors who are sweating…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

Given the attention and hyperbole given to public cloud computing these days, one can be forgiven for thinking that on-premises computing is destined for the history books.  However, a new survey suggests a resurgence of interest in on-premises computing, via private cloud, is underway — with today’s IT executives opting to mix and match both inside and outside IT resources in new ways.

Computing resources and applications come from enterprises’ data centers, from data centers in other business units, from outside partners and vendors, and from outside cloud-based services. Few executives foresee their organizations relying on one single source — they fully intend to mix and match all available resources for future business computing needs…

Grazed from MercuryNews.  Author: Steve Johnson.

Back in 2001, when French-born Philippe Courtot was named CEO of Qualys, cyber security was largely an afterthought at most big corporations.  But he suspected the subject would become a huge money maker, especially if his Redwood City company provided its security products via the so-called cloud, or Internet.

With 376 employees today and annual sales of about $100 million, Qualys is far from the largest company scratching and clawing for a share of the cyber security market. But it already has more than 6,000 customers. And with cyber attacks increasing in ferocity, Courtot — pronounced core-toe — believes growing numbers of other companies will turn to Qualys for help…

Grazed from TechRepublic.  Author: Thoran Rodrigues.

Of the many well-known promises of cloud computing, such as lower costs, faster time-to-delivery, and improved reliability, perhaps one of the most dangerous promises that cloud providers on all parts of the stack (infrastructure, platform and software) are making, is to make business users effectively independent from the IT department. This promise, while a key selling point for some, is in fact a huge threat not only to companies, but to cloud computing as a whole.

In trying to make business users more independent from the IT department, cloud providers have been slowly creating a shadow IT ecosystem that, instead of having its own processes, many times has no process at all, consisting of haphazardly put together sets of solutions that create significant risks for companies, many times without them actually knowing about them…

Grazed from Network Computing.  Author: Tom Trainer.

There’s no question that data center and private cloud environments have struggled to obtain highly available scale-out object storage and a seamless data management capability that extends all the way to the endpoint. Conversely, public cloud architectures are growing more mature and provide low-cost, scale-out object storage and innovative backup functionality. Data centers and private clouds need these public cloud types of storage and data management capabilities. Fortunately, there are a handful of companies stepping up to address this need.

One such company is Druva, which released a new version of its inSync managed data offering Thursday. Along with file storage, inSync now provides highly available scale-out object storage based on the OpenStack SWIFT storage access protocol and has the capability to backup both file and object storage, as well as remote data on endpoint devices (that is, laptops and handheld devices.). Druva is primarily targeting the OpenStack private cloud environment; however, it will continue to support the traditional data center deployment model…