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…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Adrian Riglian.

Platform as a Service has been pitched to development teams as a way to handle the operations work so that developers can focus on simply writing code. As Jérémy Hérault, a France-based Java developer, has put it: With PaaS, developers can spend "100% of the time on development." But that’s really just one aspect of a PaaS system.

Different platforms are designed for differ­ent things, and while all PaaS providers share the same underlying principles, not all excel at the same tasks. Vendors often focus on different aspects of the application lifecycle — some on continuous integration and delivery and rapid deployments; others on managing apps once they are deployed…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Frank Konkel.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has terminated its five-year, $36 million cloud computing contract with HP Enterprise Services, citing a material change in the agency’s requirements. The deal, signed in November 2012, was to eventually move 600,000 VA employees to Microsoft government community cloud e-mail and calendaring services.

Yet only test accounts — no actual users — from VA actually made it to the cloud, despite the agency having the capabilities in place to do so. Those test accounts have since been removed by VA, according to a statement from the agency to FCW. "VA has decided to terminate the cloud email contract for the convenience of the government," a spokesperson for the agency said…

Grazed from eCommerce Times. Author Ed Moyle.

For most technologists in the enterprise nowadays, cloud is a pretty big deal — and securing it can be an even bigger deal still. Security was the top concern of 46 percent of respondents to a recent survey by North Bridge Venture Partners (The Future of Cloud Computing). While this number is actually down from last year’s 55 percent, it does underscore the relative importance of security in these efforts.

This is a natural reaction. It is human nature for people to view as more risky what they cannot control directly, an arrangement many cloud efforts require. So despite some recent evidence that service provider environments might not be as problematic as folks have thought (i.e., data from Alert Logic demonstrating a lower threat diversity and lower incident occurrence rates in service provider environments), the fact of the matter is that the proposition is still pretty scary. Recent events like the revelation of the NSA PRISM program haven’t helped in this regard…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Adam Hausman.

Ever since the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, the dream (or perhaps more accurately, fantasy) of creating a successful start-up and striking gold on the Internet has continuously drawn in new entrepreneurs seeking both fame and fortune. Constantly looking for a new market to conquer (or create), entrepreneurs tend to be drawn to sectors that are either innovating quicker than anywhere else, or that are lagging sorely behind the times. As cloud computing is incrementally being introduced as a useful technology in classrooms across America, entrepreneurs have begun to flock to education technology start-ups, quickly making it one of the fastest-growing areas of new development in technology as a whole.

The appeal of pursuing a start-up in education software or web services is multifaceted. Aside from the limited amount of existing education technology companies (obviously changing now), many school districts (specifically in urban and suburban areas) are beginning to spend large amounts of money upgrading their classrooms and buildings to make them useful for education in the 21st century…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CyberFlow Analytics, Inc., a cyber security company that protects the intellectual property (IP) of enterprises from corporate espionage and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), has secured $2 million in funding from Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) in a seed round of funding.

This brings initial funding to $2.6 million for CyberFlow Analytics as it develops ground-breaking approaches to cyber security. Its SaaS software increases network intelligence to create an early warning system for cyber attacks to an enterprise network or core data before they disable, destroy or steal data…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Jordan Novet.

Lots of businesses have been sold on the idea of paying a little bit each month for Software as a Service (SaaS) that doesn’t need to be hosted behind the corporate firewall. But managing all those logins and user access on many devices can be tedious, which is why it makes sense to have a single sign-on system in place.

Ping Identity provides that service, and investors are giving the company $44 million in new funding. DFJ Growth and W Capital Partners led the round, announced Tuesday, along with contributions from previous investors Appian Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, General Catalyst Partners, Triangle Peak Partners, SAP Ventures and Volition Capital. Debt from Silicon Valley Bank is also part of the mix…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

Enterprises that want a choice between cloud service providers have several multi-cloud management software offerings to choose from, though workload migrations after initial deployments remain rare. Vendors such as RightScale Inc. and CliQr Technologies Inc. offer multi-cloud management software, which gives users the ability to deploy workloads without modification to different clouds, as well as the ability to move workloads between clouds at will.

We don’t have to tie up to any particular cloud. We can basically profile to see which one is providing the best performance for the best cost and then we can direct our customers to that. Enterprise IT pros who have put these products into production said that, so far, they have helped them migrate workloads to their choice of cloud service providers…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Heather Clancy.

It’s got to be tough fighting the name-brand recognition of the biggest cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers. So, global IT solutions and services firm Dimension Data recently commissioned a study by benchmarking firm, The Tolly Group, to compare its offering with those of several other venerable options.

As you might expect because I’m writing about it, Dimension Data’s public cloud service, officially branded as the Public Compute-as-a-Service fares just fine, thank you, when compared with the other services that were tested: IBM Smartcloud, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud…