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…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Margaret Jones.

Because cloud technology changes and evolves so quickly — and has so many acronyms — it can be tough for IT administrators to keep up with new cloud file-sharing definitions. More and more employees are using cloud-file sharing services for work, so IT, vendors and marketers are responding in kind with new tools, such as IDaaS, SaaS and EUC platforms. If you’ve never heard of those terms or you don’t know the difference between SoMoClo and SoLoMo, you’re not alone. Check out these cloud file-sharing definitions to start sorting things out.

IDaaS
Identity as a Service is a kind of single sign-on for the cloud. It’s an authentication infrastructure that a third-party service provider builds, hosts and manages. Usually, companies buy IDaaS as a subscription service. For an additional fee, cloud file-sharing service providers sometimes also host apps and give subscribers role-based access to certain apps or virtual desktops through a secure portal…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mark Fontecchio.

Oracle announced that it added more than 500 new Software as a Service (SaaS) customers in the last quarter, though an analyst thinks most of them are existing Oracle customers and those gained in acquisitions. The Redwood Shores, Calif.-based IT company reported quarterly earnings on Thursday, announcing that total revenue was up 2% since the same quarter last year, and software revenues were up 5% year-over-year.

However, most of Oracle’s growth is its "existing client base and acquisitions (more) than net new standalone sales," according to Chad Eschinger, research vice president at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. That said, Eschinger added that Oracle continues "to be a strong provider with a growing presence in SaaS."…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

Three quarters of companies are using a cloud platform of some type, according to the third annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey. This represents an increase of eight per cent compared to 2012. The survey of 855 respondents, most of whom were c-level executives, showed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products remain the most popular. Sixty three per cent of organisations said they used this type of cloud service, compared to 55 per cent last year.

However, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), while not yet as popular, is growing faster. Usage of this type of solution has risen from 35 per cent in 2012 to 45 per cent in 2013. The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market, while not yet on the same scale as SaaS or IaaS, is expected to grow sharply over the next five years. Seventy two per cent of respondents said they expect to be using a PaaS offering in their business by the end of 2018…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

New Relic, a provider of software analytics solutions, has announced a new application performance monitoring, or APM, software-as-a-service platform. The new New Relic offers more than 50 plug-ins, including plug-ins for services Amazon Web Services (AWS), MySQL and Rackspace Hosting. And New Relic users can discover or easily build plug-ins to customize the monitoring of their unique and evolving modern app environments.

With the new APM SaaS solution, data from any component of the application stack, including database, caching, networking, queuing, and platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud services, will be available in a single location to streamline and automate workflows. Software builders can have a single, consistent interface for all the monitoring metrics of their choice. There is no need to log in and out of different solutions to manage the performance of different components of their app environment…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Jeffrey Swartz.

The large brokerage firm Fidelity Investments is running private clouds based on the OpenStack open source environment with an eye toward eventually bursting to public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. Kevin Finn, group technology VP at Fidelity, on Wednesday gave the nod to the company’s OpenStack initiative at the GigaOM Structure conference during an onstage interview with Rackspace CTO John Engates. Also on the panel was Jim O’Neill, CIO of HubSpot, a marketing services startup that is using OpenStack for private clouds.

While Finn didn’t provide significant detail about Fidelity’s OpenStack implementation, he indicated it was still early on. Finn did say Fidelity has participated in the open source collaboration efforts of the OpenStack Foundation and has attended its summits, the most recent one being held in Portland back in April…

Grazed from ECManaged. Author: PR Announcement.

ECmanaged – a new powerful online Cloud management tool – was awarded “Best Solution” and will represent Spain in the 2013 EuroCloud Europe awards next October. “We are very proud for this recognition and are ready to showcase our application at European level in Luxemburg next fall”, says Juan Carlos Moreno – CTO at ECmanaged.

ECmanaged was able to stand out because of its key features and user-friendliness. ECmanaged is the first Cloud management tool allowing users not only to deploy and monitor new platforms and applications but also enabling daily maintenance of platforms trough automated management tasks and monitoring. “ECmanaged allows users to take full control of their Clouds”; says Moreno…