Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

"I’m really surprised when people say they’re not doing SOA now, they’re doing ‘cloud.’ Statements like that really concern me. Because it reflects a lack of understanding that these are not in any way competing or alternative approaches to building and evolving IT enterprises. It’s the opposite."

Those are the cautionary words of Thomas Erl, co-author of the just-released book, Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture, who points out that a lot of the work that took place behind creating and building service oriented architecture is now serving to better plan and deploy cloud computing-enabled systems. I recently spoke with Thomas, who is also CEO of Arcitura Education, an SOA an cloud certification and training firm, about the evolving cloud architecture space, as well as his latest book…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ingrid Lunden.

Some consolidation in the area of cloud services for enterprises: Intuit, the business services company that targets SMEs, is buying Elastic Intelligence, creators of Connection Cloud, a product that helps SMEs create DIY cloud-based apps. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Elastic Intelligence was founded by Roger Sippl, the serial entrepreneur who also founded Informix (sold to IBM for $1 billion), Vantive (now a part of Oracle) and Visigenic. He’s also an investor in IFTTT, among other things. Sippl is joining Intuit as part of the deal.

Intuit says that it plans to integrate the Connection Cloud technology with Intuit QuickBase, its web database software platform. The idea, says Sippl, will be to attract more SMBs to the platform with the promise that apps will be easy for them to develop, “without the need for expensive developers or complex API programming.”…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Joseph F. Kovar.

Dell wants to be a major player in the cloud industry, just as long as it doesn’t involve building its own public cloud. That’s the essence of Dell’s cloud strategy since it said in late May that it is discontinuing its own multi-tenant public cloud IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) offering in favor of working with partners to develop private, public, and hybrid clouds.

It’s a strategy that Dell’s channel partners, particularly those who spent time with Dell at this year’s Dell Enterprise Forum, applauded as one more channel-friendly than one in which the vendor offered its own public cloud. Dell is leveraging its resources to help partners develop private clouds, said Joel Carlson, an account manager at Syntax, a St. Paul-based Dell partner…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Salman Ul Haq.

Virtualization brings numerous security issues apart from the enormous benefits and productivity. Most of the organizations are reluctant to migrate to the cloud just because of the massive security vulnerabilities of cloud computing. Hypervisor, which is used in any virtualization environment to elevate the virtual machine collaboration, can be easily breached if not secured optimally. Hypervisor based cloud servers are always exposed to the Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and the “single point of failure” weakness of the hypervisor based cloud servers can easy be exploited to take down the whole cloud along with its resources. We will give you some state of the art yet simple ways to secure a cloud based virtualization environment which is using a hypervisor for virtual communication. You can use any one of the tips keeping in view the organizational needs and suitability.

Depleting the emulation frequency of the hypervisor and minimizing its remote calls to the resources across the cloud is one of the most useful and easy ways to secure a cloud. “NoHype” architecture makes sure that hypervisor does not have to interact with the virtual machines constantly. Allocation of the resources, I/O calls and assigning of processor cores is done before the start of the collaboration thus minimizing the active interaction time of the hypervisor…

Grazed from All Things Digital. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison previewed a series of announcements next week concerning the company’s aims in the cloud computing and software-as-a-service business. During a conference call with analysts to discuss Oracle’s Q4 earnings results, Ellison said Oracle will next week make a series of “startling” announcements with several companies, including Microsoft and Salesforce.com.

“Next week we will be announcing partnerships with the largest and most important SAAS companies in the cloud, and they will be committing to our 12C technology for years to come,” Ellison said. He went on to name Salesforce and Microsoft among those companies…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: David Strom.

Cloud computing and data storage have quickly become tools of the trade for businesses of all sizes, and now a growing number of service providers have stepped up their game to deliver the next level of data security solutions to their customers via the cloud.

Traditionally data security was about having robust on-premises systems and software maintained by an in-house team. That’s changing. The non-profit industry group Cloud Security Alliance promotes advances in security using traditional models alongside web-based solutions…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Jack

Cloud computing has been changing the way businesses achieve greater innovation and agility, but it has also been impacting the way that actual employees interact with business tools and are able to do their work. 20 years ago, employees would typically have very powerful work stations, in the sense that the local, personal computer was where all the heavy processing and apps resided.

Today, moderately powerful workstations are the launching point for a broader mix of workloads, some local, some web enabled. Upwards of 75% of workloads employees are handling are now web-based, whether we are talking about email, CRM, analytics, etc. Some apps (I’m looking at you Quickbooks and Excel) are still local, but that’s changing, too…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

During yesterday’s Reuters cloud panel discussion, executives talked about confusion and information overload in the cloud market that might be causing a bit of a growth stall, as businesses try to figure out their next moves. I agree, if only based on a couple emails I’ve gotten lately from IT admins struggling to suss out which vendor to go with given the rapid pace of change in the market.

It was John Engates, Rackspace’s CTO, who dubbed it “analysis paralysis.” Businesses are struggling to build their cloud strategies, including which vendor to choose and how to get started. “Things are in such a state of change right now I don’t think they can feel confident they’ve made the right decision at any point,” he said. “Every day there’s so much change coming at them. It’s happening at a lot of large enterprises, they don’t know who to partner with.”…

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: John Ribiero.

Microsoft and Oracle are set to reveal details of a new partnership on Monday, one of a "startling series" of announcements Oracle CEO Larry Ellison promised next week around the Oracle Database 12c. Oracle will be announcing next week technology partnerships with the largest and most important SaaS (software as a service) companies and infrastructure companies in the cloud, who will be committing to Oracle technology "for years to come," Ellison told analysts during an earnings call on Thursday. He added that Oracle will announce partnerships with companies like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Microsoft, but did not provide further details.

Many of the SaaS vendors, including NetSuite and Salesforce.com, have long used Oracle’s database to build their services, and will likely upgrade to 12c. Microsoft offers its competing SQL Server database in many markets. A preview of SQL Server 2014 will be availableby the end of the month and the full production version will be available for purchase in early 2014…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Coverage of the PRISM surveillance program highlights only the most recent example of personal data ending up in the hands of unintended parties. While most attention has been placed on consumer public cloud services such as Gmail and Facebook, many corporate CISOs and CIOs are now re-evaluating the risks of third party access and surveillance to corporate cloud services. Regardless of whether these third parties are governments, cyber-activists, or cyber-criminals, the message is becoming clear – when enterprises put their information into shared cloud services, such as SaaS applications, they need to carefully think through the implications of giving away control of their sensitive corporate data assets.

Enterprise cloud adoption has been rapidly growing despite a historic reluctance to place sensitive data into cloud applications. Today, corporate IT security teams face extraordinary pressure from business units such as Sales, Customer Support, Marketing, HR and IT Service Management, to allow information into cloud applications…