Grazed from Network World.  Author: Brandon Butler.

The public cloud computing market is becoming increasingly competitive with new entrants focusing on hybrid offerings that combine public and private clouds. That’s leaving some asking the market-leading public cloud provider, Amazon Web Services, where its private cloud offering is.

The question was posed to Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels at GigaOm Structure last month and Vogels didn’t give any indication of plans to offer customers a way to run Amazon-style clouds on their premises behind their own firewalls. Instead, he says the company offers a variety of ways for customers to build private-like cloud on Amazon’s infrastructure. Also, acknowledging that customers will not abandon their own resources, Amazon has built ways to connect existing on-premises systems with its public cloud. “We’ve been doing quite a bit for people looking for that model,” Vogels said.For example, the company has tools like:..

Grazed from HCAMag.  Author: Cameron Edmond.

Cloud computing and the opportunities that come with it have quickly swept through the business world, and most organisations wouldn’t be blamed if they weren’t quite sure where the path leads.

Although the concept of offshore data storage is anything but new, its recent proliferation has meant that an understanding of the laws and regulations involved may be further behind than anyone wants to admit…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: CJ Arlotta.

Technology distributor Avant Communications Inc. has tapped private cloud and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider Unitas Global to provide private cloud services for its partners and customers.

Avant said the partnership will customer companies with a single source solution for designed, deployed and managed complex IT environments. Avant Executive Vice President Jennifer Gallego said in her prepared remarks that Unitas bridges the gaps in various technologies for Avant customers and partners…

Grazed from ITWire.  Author: Peter Dinham.

With global spend on cloud-based integration platforms expected to reach US$3.7 billion by the end of 2018, Ovum says vendors must effectively communicate and demonstrate cost benefits and return on investment (ROI) models associated with a shift to iPaaS, or they are “risking their slice of a market forecast to grow 31% over the next five years.”…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

As cloud computing continues to materialise and mature in the fabric of today’s IT, one of the primary barriers to widespread adoption is the high proportion of legacy ICT in many companies.  That’s according to the latest survey, this time from NTT Europe polling 300 CIOs and IT decision makers on current trends, barriers and solutions.

56% of those surveyed cited the complexity of their IT layout as the biggest barrier to large scale cloud adoption, with the figure rising to 70% in the public sector.  In some cases, the reason for being so attached to older IT software is financial. 28% of respondents said their legacy systems were too expensive – or valuable – to completely trash…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced that VMworld(R) 2013 U.S. makes its return to San Francisco Aug. 25-29 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, celebrating the 10th annual event in the United States. VMworld 2013 Europe will be held Oct. 14-17 at Fira Barcelona Gran Via in Barcelona. With more than 28,000 attendees expected worldwide, VMworld 2013 will spotlight VMware and the industry’s commitment to the era of innovation and mobility through a new world of computing.

This year’s VMworld theme, "Defy Convention" focuses on how attendees will gain tools to transform conventional remedies into seamless, agile solutions that dramatically simplify operations, provide unmatched business advantages, and extend the benefits of virtualization to all areas of the data center…

Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Saroj Kar.

The Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), the global association that promotes Green IT and promote the goal IT equipment a tool for assessing the sustainability performance of suppliers of raw materials and components to manufacture, revealed in a report that increased use of cloud computing services will reduce the dependence on energy and save over US$2.2 billion.

The study entitled “The Enabling Technologies of a Low-Carbon Economy – a Focus on Cloud Computing” released by a research team from Harvard University, Imperial College and Reading University, sponsored by Microsoft Europe and GeSI examines that cloud computing has the power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 95 percent…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Phil LeClare.

Most enterprises understand cloud topologies (virtualization) and privacy levels (private, virtual-private, and public), as well as the different resource types (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS). Some enterprises embrace relatively  sophisticated technologies like cloud bursting – the dynamic relocation of workloads.  However, when it comes to current and future economic models of cloud computing, understanding lags behind.

A year ago, Forrester introduced the corporate perspective of cloud economics with James Staten’s report Drive Savings and Profits with Cloud Economics. The major cloud providers surprised us with many innovative business models, such as Amazon’s AWS Reserved Instance Marketplace last September…

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…