SendGrid, the leader in email deliverability, today announced it has joined the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program as a Technology Partner. SendGrid is the first non-native email solution available to Google App Engine customers as part of the partner program, giving developers a trusted third-party option for adding transactional email management and delivery to their applications. 

The collaboration provides a scalable transactional email platform and set of services that allow developers to focus on building exceptional applications rather than committing time and resources to ensuring app-triggered emails reach their users.

CloudShare, the leading provider of virtual environments in the cloud, today announced the general availability of two new plugins. One for Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and the other for Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012 (TFS). These tools combined with the already easiest-to-use cloud for development and testing, allow developers to spend less time building development infrastructure, and more time using it for development.

As is true with all productivity tools, .NET developers who use Visual Studio want to spend more time utilizing the tool than setting it up. The new CloudShare Explorer for Visual Studio allows developers instant access to virtual machines in the cloud directly from the Visual Studio interface. When connected to a TFS Build Controller, code deployments can happen with a click of a button to cloud environments, and access to those environments via RDP with another click.

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Another private cloud storage offering based on OpenStack hit the channel in recent days as SwiftStack announced the general availabililty of its Swift object storage system. The solution, an example of software defined storage, is poised to challenge alternatives running in the public cloud, which SwiftStack says it can match in scalability and beat in price.

The Swift object storage system is a software defined storage platform that runs on commodity hardware. That strategy allows the company to keep costs low while still delivering scalability, flexibility and extensive control over data stored in the cloud…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Pravin Kothari.

In the last five years, organizations have increasingly embraced cloud applications to help them innovate and transform their business. Applications that automate sales processes, HR management, collaboration, email and file sharing are growing fast and enabling organizations to meet their needs in a shorter timeframe than ever before.

Cloud applications are ubiquitously employed across all industries. However, there are increased concerns about security and compliance of sensitive information, particularly in banking, insurance and in the public sector. A wide range of regulations and privacy laws make organizations directly responsible for protecting regulated information, but when this data is stored in the cloud, they have less direct control over leaks, theft or forced legal disclosure…

Grazed from HealthITSecurity. Author: Jennifer Bresnick.

The rise of cloud computing has created a host of new challenges for patient privacy and data security, according to two Seton Hall School of Law professors. In a white paper released last month, Frank Pasquale and Tara Adams Ragone assert that government regulators need to issue new laws to specifically protect health data security as data transfer and exchange becomes more facile and ever more prevalent.

Whatever their merits in other areas of business, cloud models have come under scrutiny when used in the healthcare arena,” Pasquale and Ragone say. “Patients are rightly concerned about critical health data being lost or inappropriately accessed. On the one hand, cloud service providers may reduce those risks by deploying their unique expertise. On the other hand, the more entities access data, the more chances there are for something to go wrong. Risks along many dimensions—legal, reputational, medical, among others—need to be addressed.”…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Butler.

Oracle had a busy couple of weeks at the end of June, rolling out a new version of its database software and announcing partnerships with Microsoft, Salesforce.com and NetSuite. In doing so the company – who’s CEO Larry Ellison at one time bemoaned cloud computing – has almost overnight become a major player in the industry. Here’s why.

The moves are not just significant for Oracle; the partnerships that the company has garnered are significant to the partnering with Microsoft and Salesforce, too. And they’ll also reverberate across the industry to competing companies such as Amazon Web Services and SAP, predicts Holger Mueller, vice president at Constellation Research who recently published a report about these developments. “The bottom line: Oracle technology will play a fundamental role accelerating cloud adoption,” he writes…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

OpTier, a pioneer in analytics-driven, SaaS-based Application Performance Management (APM) and transaction-based Big Data Analytics, announced today that its new application monitoring solution continues to capture new market share, netting 300 customers in just two months on the market.

OpTier SaaS, the cloud-based version of the companys award-winning APM and IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) solution, is quickly gaining favor in the marketplace due to its simple, two-click application monitoring capabilities. The solution utilizes end-to-end transaction tracing to provide visibility into application bottlenecks, end-user experience, and infrastructure consumption…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

CloudBees Inc., the Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) innovation leader, today announced the acquisition of FoxWeave, a provider of cloud-based data integration services. The acquisition brings native data migration and synchronisation services to the CloudBees Platform, and simplifies the way developers can compose services and weave them together with PaaS-hosted application logic – or what CloudBees calls app-centric integration. The acquisition continues the company’s strong growth with the addition of a key platform investment.

Applications today are increasingly part of the "subscription economy," making use of data from many sources and interacting with hosted services. This is particularly true of new applications being built in the cloud.
Connecting to many data sources and services, migrating and mapping data between them, and keeping systems in sync is an ongoing source of pain that the FoxWeave technology relieves, often without having to write any code…

Grazed from Channelnomics. Author: Chris Gonsalves.

As predicted, the events surrounding the leaks of NSA surveillance activities by Edward Snowden are having broad repercussions in the IT industry as companies rethink their cloud computing deployment plans amid security and privacy concerns, according to a new survey.

The data from the Cloud Security Alliance indicates growing reluctance to engage cloud services providers, particularly outside the United States, where concerns raised by the Snowden leaks about the integrity of data center assets housed in the U.S. are at an all-time high…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

IBM has shifted its cloud computing strategy by throwing its weight behind the Pivotal platform-as-a-service (PaaS) initiative that is being led by the subsidiary of EMC. Recently spun out as an independent business unit of EMC, Pivotal is developing a PaaS platform called Cloud Foundry that can be deployed on top of any infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, including private clouds managed by internal IT organizations.

According to Chris Ferris, IBM engineer and CTO of Industry Standards in the Software Group Standards Strategy organization, with Cloud Foundry emerging as an open PaaS platform, IBM decided to adopt Cloud Foundry as a natural extension of its support for the emerging OpenStack cloud management platform…