Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Remy Claret..

It’s amazing to see how quickly things are changing in the Cloud arena over the past few years. Three years ago the main reasons to go to the Cloud were almost exclusively cost predictability and TCO containment. Today there is a whole new set of business reasons popping-up and rising in importance. A survey conducted by KPMG at the end of 2012 highlighted some interesting trends on why customers move to the cloud. Business process transformation and improved interactions with customers are named by more than 25% of the respondents as good reasons to go for the Cloud.

Late last year, Gartner issued a survey (around the same time) called “Buyers Tell Us About SaaS and Cloud Adoption Through 2014” with similar findings and conclusions.  Cloud went from a pure cost killing tool to an actual business value driver in a remarkably short time. In a business world where product commoditization always prowls in your neighborhood, differentiating through unique customer service is key…

Grazed from BroadwayWorld.  Author: Editorial Staff.

CloudeAssurance, Inc. an eFortresses Company today released its third quarterly Cloud Security Benchmark: Top 10 CSPs and added this report to its cloud security rating system platform: CloudeAssurance. This platform enables safe and secure adoption of Cloud Computing!  This latest release is in response to customer demand and positive feedback received from industry experts relating to the last two study reports published in January and April 2013.

CloudeAssurance 1.2 is designed for global enterprise and government customers, cloud brokerages, cloud auditors and cloud service providers that want to differentiate themselves by providing higher levels of security assurance and transparency to their customers and stakeholders…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Salman Ul Haq.

Virtualization is probably the most beneficial and transcendent factor of the Cloud where enterprise level resource allocation and consumption can be performed within reduced time and cost. However, virtualization has some operational risks which may lead to detrimental consequences for the huge data centers and information infrastructures if not addressed properly. Virtual environments have always faced the vulnerabilities of system and application based threats because of the multi level centralized architecture with common and single point of failures.

 Virtual Machine (VM) hosting architecture is beyond doubt one of the most pragmatic hallmarks of the modern day enterprise IT where you share and use the pooled resources on-demand without acquiring or wasting any resource. However, the CPU cycle bottleneck and ticket generation problems are really something to give a thought about…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: David Meyer.

Financial services giant the Deutsche Boerse Group, which runs the Frankfurt Stock Exchange among other things, is about to make a pretty serious leap into the cloud computing space. The German company said on Tuesday that it will launch a global, vendor-neutral marketplace for compute and storage capacity in 2014.

The idea of a cloud marketplace is not new, but there aren’t many serious players out there yet. Deutsche Boerse’s take is very much aimed at the corporate and medium-to-large enterprise market, as well as the public sector, and it uses infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud management software from Berlin-based Zimory to connect buyers and sellers through open APIs (the two companies are treating this as a joint venture)…

Grazed from The Var Guy.  Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Jelastic is building what it says is "the next generation Java and PHP cloud hosting platform."  Now, it has enlisted the father of PHP himself to help in that endeavor. On Monday, the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider announced that Rasmus Lerdorf has signed on as an "Advisor" to provide technical expertise for PHP cloud hosting.

It’s hard not to compare Lerdorf to Linus Torvalds, the founder of the Linux kernel. They’re both Scandinavian natives—Torvalds is a Swedish-speaking Finn and Lerdorf a native of Greenland, which makes him Danish (tangential thought: Denmark controls a huge portion of North America, yet no one seems to realize it, except maybe the Danes)—who developed open source software that has played a central role in defining computing as we know it.  Like Linux, PHP, which Lerdforf introduced in 1994, powers millions of websites around the world. It remains one of the most popular server-side scripting languages today, despite competition from newer alternatives…

Grazed from ServicesAngles.  Author: Bert Latamore.

If you are a CIO you’ve probably heard it every year. “This is the year of desktop virtualization”. Well, for IaaS provider Navisite, 2013 definitely is the year of VDI, or more precisely Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). It has found a nice growth business, primarily initially in higher education and healthcare, where it has found strong use cases based on the high mobility of end-users and the security concerns. But, says Navisite VP of Product Management Chris Patterson, the appeal is really horizontal.

For instance, “last summer we had several customers in London who wanted us just for a few weeks. They said while the London Summer Olympics were on their employees wouldn’t be able to get to their offices. This constituted a disaster for them.”  The big market drivers, he says, include BYOD and the growing use of contract workers, both on- and off-shore. And one of the big concerns is security…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web, is rebuilding its Large Hadron Collider and re-architecting its data center infrastructure on OpenStack Grizzly as it continues its pursuit of the Higgs Boson particle and other advanced physics.   At the end of the process, it will be able to collect twice as much data from a research experiment in the collider as before, and that data will be uploaded to a "federated" Grizzly OpenStack cloud. Grizzly is the name of the OpenStack project’s seventh and latest release, which came out in April.

CERN’s federated cloud will encompass 15,000 servers in two locations, Budapest, Hungary, and Geneva, Switzerland.  The collider is being rewired and rebuilt with stronger magnets to run at twice the power level at which it ran before, and that means, says Tim Bell, CERN infrastructure manager, it will generate twice as much data as it did when it was taken offline earlier this year, after a breakthrough in particle physics on March 14…

Grazed from Techradar.  Author: Editorial Staff.

No-one quite knows where the term ‘cloud computing’ came from, but it seems appropriate when you think that it’s essentially about removing data and various IT functions from your office to another plane.

Of course the data isn’t really floating in the clouds, but residing in the service provider’s data centre, which could be located anywhere between the edge of the M25 and the edge of Bangalore. The crucial points for the user is that the data is secure, stored in a way that complies with their own country’s regulations, and easily accessible…

Grazed from MIT News.  Author: Larry Hardesty.

Cloud computing — outsourcing computational tasks over the Internet — could give home-computer users unprecedented processing power and let small companies launch sophisticated Web services without building massive server farms.

But it also raises privacy concerns. A bank of cloud servers could be running applications for 1,000 customers at once; unbeknownst to the hosting service, one of those applications might have no purpose other than spying on the other 999.  Encryption could make cloud servers more secure. Only when the data is actually being processed would it be decrypted; the results of any computations would be re-encrypted before they’re sent off-chip…

Grazed from CloudPro.  Author: Jane McCallion.

Cloud service provider Oracle has launched its new database offering that the company claims will better meet the technology needs of organisations moving to the cloud.  Oracle Database 12c provides a new multitenant architecture built on top of a fast, scalable, reliable and secure database platform. The next-generation database is the first to be designed for the cloud, the company claims.

The platform is particularly suitable for organisations wishing to deploy private database clouds in addition to being of use to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors, Oracle said.   “The innovations in Oracle Database 12c were developed with our customers’ cloud requirements very much in mind," said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president for database server technologies at Oracle…