Grazed from CIO. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud-storage and cloud-backup services are so popular today that it can be difficult to decide which provider is right for you. Do you just want to backup data or do you also want to sync files across different devices? Will you need more storage space than the 5GB or 10GB that are typically offered for free? What about security?

Nextadvisor.com, which bill itself as an “independent research” site for consumers, took a close look at a number of popular cloud providers and came up with a helpful comparison chart that lists eight options. (Four of the eight providers are listed in the chart below.) It’s a good idea to keep the following points in mind when considering cloud-service providers:…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

VMware’s dominant share of the cloud platform market among top Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers is eroding mainly as a result of gains by open source OpenStack and CloudStack platforms. According to Strategy Analytics Business Cloud Strategies (BCS) service report, "Business Cloud Platforms Powering Top IaaS Service Providers: Open Source Software Alternatives are Driving Change," VMware powers one-third of all services revenue from the top IaaS cloud providers with $100+M in revenue as of 2012, more than any other platform including Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, VMware’s share has been trending downward over the past several years as cloud service providers consider open source and commercial alternatives from Microsoft, OnApp, 8×8 and others when choosing to buy rather than build their own cloud platforms.

"Flexibility and agility are critical elements of cloud computing not only for customers but for service providers as well. With cloud market opportunities still looking hazy regarding what services to offer and how significant public and private cloud solutions will be for their businesses, cloud service providers are looking to choose the cloud platform that will keep their options open and deliver the biggest return on investments," commented Mark Levitt, Director of Business Cloud Strategies research at Strategy Analytics…

Grazed from Help-Net-Security. Author: Mirko Zorz.

Dan C. Marinescu is the author of Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice. He was a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana from 1984 till 2001 when he joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Central Florida.

In this interview, Marinescu outlines interesting a variety of interesting facts about cloud security, illustrates how the cloud has shaped enterprise security, and provides insight into key future trends. How has cloud computing shaped IT since it stopped being just a buzzword?…

Grazed from BusinessTimes.  Author: Amit Roy Choudhury.

Grazed from IT Jungle.  Author: Dan Burger.

Owning and managing IBM midrange hardware is moving from on-premise IT departmental responsibility to service providers. This is not a question. It is happening. The furniture movers have arrived. But to what extent remains mostly unknown. Companies are picking and choosing their managed service providers and, if that works out, they are adding pieces of infrastructure and applications to the cloud. They may be saving money and they may be outsourcing skills that are in short supply.

It’s always been true that the decision to move hardware, infrastructure, and applications off site requires a load of trust. For IBM i shops, remote systems management has been a part of the landscape for years. You can throw a smartphone in any direction at a technical conference like COMMON and hit at least one entrepreneurial, work-at-home, systems guru tending to one or a handful of organizations with on-site hardware but no one to run it. The IBM i reseller channel is also a good place to look for companies large and small that have a healthy and growing business built around managed services, although some prefer the term hosted services to describe what they do…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM announced a series of wins that indicate wider adoption of Big Blue’s cloud, big data and services solutions in emerging markets.  In a series of recent wins, IBM demonstrates how its cloud technology, systems, storage and outsourcing services are helping organizations worldwide – particularly in emerging markets — to make a smooth transition into the digital era, harness big data and improve their overall infrastructure.

IBM recently announced that Capitalonline Data Service Co. (CDS), one of China’s leading Internet data center (IDC) service providers, tapped Big Blue to develop an infrastructure for delivering enhanced cloud solutions. As part of a multi-million dollar engagement, IBM will build and manage CDS’s public cloud service based on IBM SmartCloud technology…

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

Citing studies from both Forrester and Paystream Advisors, AmeriQuest’s recent blog deals with the changes in attitude regarding SaaS solutions for a variety of areas within an enterprise. Many medium-sized businesses have been willing to adopt the technology for specific areas, like customer relationship marketing CRM and HR. But AmeriQuest delves into why this type of solution is especially applicable to the accounts payable invoice approval process.

For many medium-size companies, there is always conflict over which department can get access to IT staff. Low value-added projects and tasks are given low priority, and that includes accounts payable tasks. Thus, any process that minimizes IT involvement is an excellent solution for AP. Paystream Advisors’ “e-Invoicing Adoption Benchmark Report,” released in 2012, found that “Minimal IT Involvement” got the largest response to the question, “What do you see as the biggest benefit of cloud services or software-as-a-service for AP processing?”…

Grazed from eCommerceTimes. Author: Jeffrey Kaplan.

I’ve been charting the evolution of the corporate app store idea in this column for more than three years. Until recently, most of the focus has been on how various service providers and other institutions can establish app stores to resell apps to their customers. Now, enlightened CIOs are discovering they can also implement internal app stores to control the consumerization of IT and satisfy their corporate constituents.

I was first intrigued by the notion of banks and other institutions becoming commercial app store providers in 2010. Innovative companies like Bank of America and Staples have deployed online marketplaces with varying success…

Grazed from Computing.co.uk. Author: Danny Palmer.

Major cloud providers such as Google, Amazon and Facebook will "gobble up" the competion as smaller providers struggle to compete with what the giants have to offer. That’s what Josko Grljevic, information systems director for TheTrainline.com told Computing ahead of next month’s Computing Data Centre Summit, where he’s going to be one of many high profile speakers.

"I think you’re going to have a lot more of these mega-data centres, with the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft building massive facilities," he said on the subject of the future of data centres.  "They’re probably going to gobble up the smaller guys over time," Grljevic continued, pointing out that the competition will struggle to compete with the low-cost solutions on offer…

Grazed from Windows IT Pro. Author: Michael Otey.

When I talk with different businesses about their hurdles and reservations about moving to the cloud, the one thing that always comes up is security. Many businesses have trust issues with the cloud and they feel uneasy about the level of protection that their data and other computing resources may have in the cloud. While in a sense that may seem a bit overly paranoid because cloud vendors will all tell you that their data centers are far more secure than your data center ever will be, and that they have security specialists who rigorously follow all the security best practices.

Even so, in another sense from the personal perspective you can see that it really does require a big step of faith and a lot of trust in your cloud vendors to entrust them with your data. After all, you would be moving the data—which is essentially one of your organization’s most valuable assets—from your on-premise infrastructure which is 100 percent under your control to an off-premise hosting environment that is 100 percent not in your control. That requires trust…