Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Phil Turner.

It’s important to examine the current ‘state of play’ for cloud delivered solutions based on a couple of key dimensions; what is being deployed in the cloud and who is providing the IT service from the cloud. The image conjured up by the term “cloud” is that of companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft delivering large-scale computing infrastructure that eliminate the need for on-premises IT equipment and software. Since these cloud providers build their own infrastructure rather than buying from product manufacturers, it could be argued they are shrinking the market share.

The Opportunity is Larger than the Threat

However, there are other categories of service providers that balance, more than offset the reduced spend and create an opportunity: Consumer SaaS providers aggregate consumer-spend into centralised shared enterprise infrastructure. Consumer applications that traditionally consumed end user equipment are moving to the cloud triggering a need for enterprise infrastructure. While some of these service providers build their own infrastructure others leverage product manufacturers…

Grazed from BSMInfo. Author: Jay McCall.

Most VARs and systems integrators make their foray into the cloud by offering data backup, hosted Exchange, and/or selling SaaS (software as a service) offerings. After gaining a comfort level with the cloud, some service providers take the next step, which is building solutions in the cloud, a service that’s known as PaaS (platform as a service).

PaaS is an outgrowth of SaaS and offers several advantages for developers and MSPs. With PaaS, operating system features can be changed and upgraded frequently, geographically distributed development teams can work together on software development projects, and services can be obtained from diverse sources that cross international boundaries. Additionally, initial and ongoing costs can be reduced by the use of infrastructure services from a single vendor rather than maintaining multiple hardware facilities that often perform duplicate functions or suffer from incompatibility problems…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Events Announcement.

Two unstoppable enterprise IT trends, Cloud Computing and Big Data, will converge in Silicon Valley at 13th Cloud Expo – November 4–7, 2013, in Santa Clara, California.

Cloud Expo offers a vast selection of technical and strategic breakout sessions, General Sessions, Industry Keynotes, "Power Panels" and a bustling Expo floor.

For more information and registration details, please visit  http://www.cloudcomputingexpo.com/

Grazed from CIO. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

Today, OpenStack turns 3. The open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, released under the Apache license, launched in July 2010 with a seemingly simple idea: to deliver a ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. Launched in July 2010 with code donated by Rackspace and NASA, OpenStack has become one of the fastest growing open source efforts in technology: More than 500 individuals from more than 200 different companies contributed to its latest release, Grizzly.

Developers have contributed more than 1 million lines of code, and the stack currently has more than 70,000 contributions from more than 120 countries—an average of 238 contributions per month. The first OpenStack Design Summit & Conference, held in July 2010, boasted 75 attendees. The most recent conference, held in April, had 3,000, and the next one is expected to have more…

Grazed from CMO. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Cloud Security Alliance, a not-for-profit organisation set up to promote best security practices for cloud computing, has released a white paper on conducting forensic investigation in cloud environments and has formed an Incident Management and Forensics Working Group. It warns that “While digital investigations, on the surface, seem to have little to do with the competitive position or profit-and-loss of CSPs, forensic readiness cannot be ignored.”

The co-chair of the group, Dominik Birk from Zurich Insurance, said the aim of the group was to define best practices that consider the legal, technical and procedural elements of responding to security incidents in the cloud in a forensically sound way. "This initial white paper represents a significant effort on behalf of numerous individuals and marks an important first step in conducting proper forensic investigations in cloud environments following a security incident,” he said…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Software innovation, mobile devices and a host of advancements in IT are contributing to an era of profound technological change, according to Microsoft ex-CEO Bill Gates. New advances in software and increasingly more powerful hardware are paving the way for a computing renaissance, of sorts, according to Microsoft’s influential cofounder and current chairman, Bill Gates. In a June 15 address at Microsoft Research’s Faculty Summit in Redmond, Wash., Gates said "I think it’s fair to say that we’re in a golden age of computer science."

Hinting that innovations like cloud computing are finally putting within reach some his early ambitions for his software company, Gates harkened to "the original vision of Microsoft, that we ought to dream about what software could do if we had infinite computing and infinite storage." "That almost is our reality today," he added…

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Mike Wheately.

Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman recently stated that while cloud computing has been much talked about over the past five years, we’re still in the early stages. Which means there’s still lots that can be improved upon with cloud storage and cloud storage security just some of the chief concerns.

Google is said to be experimenting with new methods of encrypting files stored in its Google Drive product, but with Ed Snowden’s revelations that the government is in cahoots with leading US internet firms to snoop on people’s lives, the looming question is what can people do to keep their files secure? With cloud storage replacing the use of USB sticks to keep files at the ready, some are questioning whether it is wise to use these services knowing that the government can easily take a peek at your files…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

A couple weeks ago, I discussed how cloud computing enables affordable agility. Automated provisioning and easy scalability make it possible, for the first time, for companies to experience infrastructure agility.
However, it’s a mistake to assume that agile infrastructure equals application agility (by which I mean both delivering applications into production more quickly and having those applications easily grow and shrink in terms of scale).

In fact, one commonly encounters IT personnel who assume that the mere fact of hosting an application in a cloud environment will magically transform it into an all-singing, all-dancing agile application. That’s far from the truth. Cloud infrastructure is necessary but insufficient to achieve overall application agility…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Tableau Software, the poster boy for next-generation analytics software and, now, Wall Street darling, is taking to the cloud with a new Software-as-a-Service offering called Tableau Online. However, while the delivery model is new, the new product itself is really just the same Tableau Server option users have come to know and love (or not).

According to Ellie Fields, a product marketing manager at Tableau, the differences between the new offering and Tableau Server are “very minor” save for the way they’re bought and delivered. The cloud version is less expensive (only $500 per user per year) and is faster and easier to get started with, as SaaS versions of traditional software products tend to be…

[slideshow: 5, layout=top, order=middle, rotate=15, blend=0, height=100%, width=575, fit=0, nowrap=0, dir=|slideshows/5cloudstartups/|yes||Generic Photos|Aren’t they great?||]