Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

The business case for cloud is compelling. Even after all the numbers for the obvious things get crunched, the question is, are there any “gotchas” that could result in higher costs than originally planned for? Business interruptions and outages are obvious risks, but there’s an even more insidious set of issues that could drive up costs.

A couple of years ago, I helped conduct a survey of e-commerce application managers, and one of the key questions we asked was how they find out about slowdowns or glitches that customers may be experiencing. The answer, overwhelmingly, was that these managers didn’t find out about web glitches at their sites until a customer phoned in or emailed a complaint. When you get hung up at a website, the people at the other end usually aren’t aware of your troubles…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge.

IT automation software provider Puppet Labs has acquired Cloudsmith, a provider of development tools for rapidly building and testing infrastructure automation. The acquisition will integrate the Cloudsmith engineering team and products into Puppet in a bid to accelerate enterprise adoption of IT automation. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cloudsmith provides tools for system administrators and developers that make it easier to automate management of IT resources through intuitive GUIs and SaaS applications. Puppet Labs plans to tightly integrate Cloudsmith’s products with its flagship Puppet Enterprise offering to boost customers’ ability to automate and manage complex infrastructures…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Lynn Habor.

Increasingly, resellers and born-in-the-cloud companies are adopting subscription-based business models that generate a recurring revenue stream for the business. To help manage their billing needs, San Francisco-based Aria Systems Inc. today launched its cloud-based Unified Channel Billing product.

According to the vendor, Aria Unified Channel Billing provides end-to-end Software as a Service (SaaS) billing and reporting across business partnerships and distribution networks — simplifying any level of complexity for channel partners, including direct, indirect, VARs or independent software vendors…

Grazed from BroadWay World. Author: Editorial Staff.

Virtustream, Inc., the leading enterprise class cloud software and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, today announced that it has won the award for Best Public Cloud Backup and Recovery Implementation at the 2013 Asigra Cloud-Based Data Recovery Awards. Winners were announced at the Asigra Cloud Backup Partner Summit in Toronto on July 9.

"With our continued focus on quality, our service provider partners continue to exemplify the leadership that only the best can provide," said David Farajun, chief executive officer at Asigra. "The partners named in the Asigra 2013 partner awards program showcases partners who have demonstrated their ability to excel and win in the competitive backup and recovery market. We applaud the winners and encourage others in our partner ecosystem to showcase their successes as we grow our businesses together."…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud security is still a top-of-mind issue, even though cloud vendors and partners have been good about allaying customers’ and potential customers’ fears, but even as security continues to increase, there are still risks in any kind of IT. Breaches still happen, regardless of whether they end up in headlines, and national information security risk assessment firm Digital Defense has come out with a short list of the some of the key ways hackers are hijacking cloud services.

In its recent blog post, Digital Defense outlined what it calls "the back door on the side of your server." The blog is a bit technical at times, but the gist is that there are "critical IPMI (intelligent platform management interface) vulnerabilities" in rack servers that pose a significant threat to organizations and the cloud services they run on those servers, as well as the data those apps touch. IPMI-based attack vectors can be "extremely damaging," the firm noted. It broke the vulnerabilities down this way:…

Grazed from PCPro. Author: Editorial Staff.

One reason why PCs sales continue to slide year-on-year is that software no longer blackmails us into upgrading our hardware. The system requirements for Windows haven’t been upgraded since the launch of Vista; my five-year-old home laptop is just about capable of running anything I ask of it. Why bother upgrading when there are plenty of other ways to squander what’s left of my disposable income?

That’s not always been the case, of course. When I first rocked up at PC Pro in 1998, barely a week passed without some piece of software pushing the boundaries of what was possible on then-current hardware. Whether it was a new version of Windows, the latest Office suite, or – as was most often the case – the latest games, there was always some justification for an expensive upgrade. Intel and Microsoft even used to publish an annual recommended spec for the next year’s PCs, to give upgraders a target to aim for…

Grazed from Fujitsu. Author: PR Announcement.

Fujitsu today offers business customers of all sizes a fail-proof, global cloud-based backup and recovery service, with the immediate availability of Fujitsu Backup as a Service (BaaS). Incorporating best-in-class EVault technology, Fujitsu BaaS is agile, scalable, simple to use, and with end-to-end security, it provides safe storage for sensitive business data. This offering is a key component in the company’s end-to-end cloud portfolio, which is designed to provide businesses with the choice they need to modernise IT structures and innovate new types of services.

Organisations today need to navigate changing and complex data backup and recovery requirements, and so they are looking for solutions that provide flexibility on data location and storage. Fujitsu BaaS combines technology from Fujitsu and EVault to offer new levels of choice for companies seeking reliable backup that supports the changing regulatory requirement landscape as well as multiple traditional and cloud platforms…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

Say you want a private cloud, but you also want to be able to expand out into the public cloud when you must? What can you do? One answer is use Eucalyptus 3.3, which can work hand in glove with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Eucalyptus is an open-source program for building AWS-compatible private and hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds. It pools together existing virtualized infrastructure to create cloud resources for computers, network, and storage. The program also works with AWS, thanks to its support of AWS application programming interfaces (APIs) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and other AWS services…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Martin May.

Cloud computing has quickly evolved into an umbrella term, describing a variety of different computing concepts that involve a large number of computers (increasingly mobile devices) that are connected to one another. At the core of all cloud computing applications lies the concept of a converged infrastructure with shared resources and shared services, says Martin May, regional director at Enterasys Networks.

Up to now, the emphasis has been on the ‘private cloud’, an infrastructure operated for (or by) a single organisation, whether managed internally or by a third party, and hosted internally or externally. The key benefit of a private cloud is recognised as its ability to pool and dynamically allocate IT resources across any number of business units, allowing services to be deployed quickly – and even scaled to meet growing needs…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Rackspace thinks Amazon Web Services drastically overplays its claims for dedicated instance price cuts (and for its dedicated instances in general.) Specifically, Rackspace CTO John Engates notes that, unlike you-know-who, Rackspace doesn’t charge a separate fee for every region where a dedicated server runs. And, in a blog post, he contends that AWS defines dedicated computing differently than the rest of the world.

Given Amazon’s sheer size, competitors watch its every move like a hawk. These rivals, which include Rackspace, HP, Microsoft and others — want to wrest more of that public cloud business for themselves. And most of them also tout private cloud capabilities that make their offerings more enterprise-worthy than AWS — a claim that AWS heartily contests…