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…

Grazed from Cloudera. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloudera, the leader in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop™, today announced that Dick Williams, president and chief executive officer of Internet security firm Webroot, a global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider of internet security products for consumers and businesses, has joined the company’s board of directors. Currently an outside director of 3VR and LogRhythm, Williams brings more than four decades of executive and operational leadership experience working with high technology, software and digital media companies, to Cloudera’s board.

"Cloudera is well-positioned to achieve its next phase of growth with an industry leader like Dick Williams joining its board of directors," said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer, Cloudera. "As Big Data projects go mainstream they will increasingly need to be compliant, secure and trusted sources of decision making. Dick brings a strong security skillset to both our board and company…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

GigaSpaces Technologies is introducing additional layers of integration with OpenStack clouds in the latest version of its Cloudify, which is an open source framework for deploying, managing and scaling applications in a cloud environment.

Available for free, GigaSpaces Cloudify was designed to be an application management platform that is meant to enable the seamless migration of applications to OpenStack-based clouds. As OpenStack continues to gain traction in the customer, partner and vendor worlds, it’s critical to have platforms that integrate with the system, and migration to OpenStack clouds is of great importance. But this is something GigaSpaces has provided in Cloudify for awhile, so what’s new?…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

One of the largest potential savings of cloud computing is the ability to shut off the hourly-charge meter when the server instance isn’t being used. But many users sign up for a cloud server as if they plan to use it every minute of every day for the next year. That’s one finding from the statistics from RightScale’s PlanForCloud, a free tool customers can use to forecast anticipated cloud spending.

RightScale, a front end cloud workload management service, acquired PlanForCloud, an Edinburgh, Scotland, firm, last year and has kept its free online service available at www.planforcloud.com. On July 23, the company announced that PlanForCloud had completed cloud cost forecasting for 9,500 deployments with an expected cloud service use amounting to $1,016,619,975…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The after-effects of PRISM means that companies are much less likely to use US-based cloud service providers (CSPs), according to a survey from the Cloud Security Alliance. 56% were less likely to use US-based providers, with one in 10 going as far to say that they’d cancelled a project which used US CSPs as a result. Only 3%, interestingly, said their confidence in US vendors had increased.

It’s noticeable that, from the vendors’ perspective, their confidence had not been diminished. 64% said the incident had not hindered their prospects of conducting business outside the US. Yet in terms of general security policy, respondents did not feel at ease about governmental transparency and legitimacy. Almost half (47%) of those polled said that their country’s processes in obtaining criminal information were “poor…there is no transparency in the process and I have no idea how often the government accesses my information.”…

Grazed from MoneyMorning. Author: David Mamos.

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX) is currently the number two provider of cloud computing. The company has been under the microscope lately as its stock has dropped nearly 45% year-to-date. But the microscope is not just fixated on Rackspace, it’s also focused on the entire cloud computing sector. This sector is growing rapidly with analysts speculating enthusiastically that the overall cloud market could reach anywhere from $40 billion to $70 billion by 2016 or earlier.

But with extreme growth comes extreme competition. This competition is not coming from the under $6 billion market cap companies similar to Rackspace. The company’s competition comes from the largest names in tech – Microsoft and industry leader Amazon. For those unfamiliar with the term "cloud computing" the business is quite simple to describe…

Grazed from Digi-Key. Author: PR Announcement.

Digi-Key has announced the signing of a distribution agreement with Electric Imp, a company which supplies cloud services and associated wi-fi-enabled hardware platform to connect devices to the Internet. Two versions of the Wi-Fi-enabled Imp hardware, the small user-removable card (imp001) and solder-down module (imp002), are available.

The systems runs the proprietary Imp OS and the platform also features a customisable API, allowing users to control their devices over the Internet and access external web services “Connectivity is the name of the game in today’s technology-driven society,” said Mark Zack, vice president, global semiconductor product at Digi-Key. “Electric Imp is blazing a trail,” said Zack.

Grazed from CSO. Author: Editorial Staff.

‘Slowly, surely, stealthily but siloed’ is the current state of cloud computing according to Logicalis Australia from a recent mid-level poll of IT professionals around current and planned cloud uptake. The survey suggested an alarming trend: a increasing lack of control by the technology department with IT spend shifting to other departments resulting in a rise in siloed skills and resources.

IT professionals feel they are appropriately skilled for cloud computing but that unauthorised use of hosted apps and services (‘IT by stealth’) is direct result of senior management policies and attitudes that ignore the potential of cloud services. Interestingly, almost 70% believe that the new delivery model promised by cloud computing fundamentally affects the role of the CIO…

Grazed from EcoSeed.org. Author: JJ Moore.

Cloud computing has revolutionized the IT industry for the past decade and is still developing creative ways to solve current problems. Innovations such as cloud storage and non-native applications are unimaginable 10 years ago but a reality nowadays. Companies and research institutes are slowly moving to the cloud to address their computing needs. Services and applications are also common in the cloud right now. So why is the cloud attractive to the public and private sectors?

Time and Money

The cloud takes advantage of a centralized system and updates information real-time. Businesses with time sensitive data are quick to grab this opportunity and harness the efficiency of the cloud. For example, medical researches that needed months of in-house number crunching moved to distributed systems, significantly reducing computing time and expenses…