Grazed from NIST.gov. Author: PR Announcement.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published a draft document on security for cloud computing as used in the federal government. The public comment period runs through July 12, 2013. The NIST Cloud Computing Security Reference Architecture provides a security overlay to the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture published in 2011. In 2010, the Federal Chief Information Officer tapped NIST to play a major role in accelerating the adoption of cloud computing in the federal government.

Since then, NIST has held meetings, started working groups and developed the U.S. Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap and other related guidance. The 2011 NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture* provided a template and vocabulary for federal cloud adopters to follow for a consistent implementation of cloud-based applications across the government…

Grazed from SpendMatters. Author: Editorial Staff.

Mention cloud-computing in polite society and the chances are you’ll be met with raised eyebrows and even the slightly terrified shudder. The notion that your procurement data might be “out there” somewhere – you know, hosted, on some who-knows-what servers in some low-cost data center in Obscuristan— is enough to make you want to run for cover. But consider for a moment what data it is that you’re most concerned about. Is it the vast bulk of your transaction data? All that PO and AP data? Is that of real value to the opportunist or the industrial spy? Not in its raw form, I’ll wager.

What you really should be concerned about is the distillation of that raw data. The business intelligence analysis that becomes the management report. Those internal documents that inform and support your key strategic decisions. You don’t want those falling into the wrong hands, do you? So you’ve heavily invested in data security. You have hack-proof firewalls and biometrically-controlled access to the machine room. But those high-value gems of crystallized data don’t live in the data center…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Joel York.

SaaS growth isn’t a goal; it’s an obsession. The good news is that SaaS growth can be very smooth and predictable, because of the SaaS recurring revenue subscription model. The bad news is that SaaS growth can also be predictably slow the bigger you get. After a few years of rapid SaaS startup growth, it’s easy to find yourself on the short end of the hockey stick if you don’t know the right levers to push.

The Three Levers to Break Through the SaaS Growth Ceiling

At any given time, you can calculate the SaaS growth ceiling for your SaaS business with a simple formula: customer acquisition rate divided by percentage churn rate. For example, if you acquire 200 new customers each year and your percentage annual churn rate is 20%, then at 1,000 customers ( 200 / 20% ) your growth will slow to zero, because customer churn will equal new customer acquisition of 200 customers per year. New customers come in the front door, while old customers leave out the back…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

RiverMeadow Software  Inc., developer of the world’s only automated server migration solution developed specifically for carrier and service provider clouds, has been named a Gartner "Cool Vendor" in Cloud Management for 2013(1). Gartner’s annual Cool Vendors report recognizes emerging vendors who are delivering solutions into the marketplace to challenge long-held assumptions and significant investments in traditional IT. These companies are transforming the way businesses operate and consumers engage with technology.

Enterprise IT leaders and cloud architects are facing new opportunities to leverage a growing set of offerings from emerging cloud management technology vendors. In this report, Gartner analysts examined vendors providing cloud management platform and/or cloud migration capabilities, and according to the report’s key findings, "as enterprises seek to implement public, private and hybrid cloud computing, they increasingly desire cloud management technologies to assist with management, governance and migration."…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steve Evans.

Telefonica has announced the creation of a new security company — called Eleven Paths — within its Digital division that will be given the task of improving security innovation at the Spanish tech giant. Eleven Paths will primarily be run by formers workers of Informatica 64, a Spanish security company acquired by Telefonica. Informatica 64’s founder and CEO Chema Alonso will lead Eleven Paths.

He said that his role, and that of Eleven Paths, would be to radically change the way companies provided security services to customers and big corporations. "The digital world is changing the rules and security services need to adapt to this new challenge very fast," Alonso said. It seems as though the company will be left to its own devices — Telefonica Digital said the company would be run as a startup unit within the larger organisation…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mark Tonsetic and Jeremy Bergsman.

The debate around cloud computing risk continues. This isn’t because the risks that large enterprises care about have worsened (they haven’t, broadly) or because there is a new set of risks that present concern (there aren’t, again broadly). The debate continues because cloud computing technologies have introduced "buyer uncertainty" into the sourcing market. Cloud capabilities have matured enough to induce vendors to rapidly evolve offerings in an effort to capture market share — but not to promote interoperability.

The clarity of cloud’s risk-adjusted value proposition thus has yet to emerge, mostly because evaluations of risk and value remain moving targets. So what is there about managing cloud risks that should be top of mind for IT leaders in today’s environment? CEB analysis suggests that the foremost risk is not anything intrinsic to the cloud provider community as a whole, but rather the lack of a consistent framework in large enterprises for engaging with and managing cloud services…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Intel Corporation today announced the Intel(R) Solid-State Drive DC S3500 Series, its latest solid-state drive (SSD) for data centers and cloud computing. Designed for read-intensive applications such as Web hosting, cloud computing and data center virtualization, the Intel DC S3500 Series is an ideal replacement for traditional hard disk drives (HDD), allowing data centers to save significant costs by moving toward an all-SSD storage model.

Intel SSDs, including the Intel SSD DC S3500 Series, enable transformational improvements in cloud infrastructure, fostering new and enriching Web experiences. End customers experience quicker Web page loads and improved response times as a result of dramatically improved data access times and reduced latency. IT managers and cloud developers are rewarded with improved total cost of ownership as a result of reduced power consumption, more consistent performance and smaller space requirements. More than half of U.S. businesses now employ cloud computing applications, and IDC predicts that worldwide spending on cloud services will reach $44.2 billion this year(1) . Data centers powering these cloud applications need to quickly, efficiently and reliably scale to handle the tremendous growth of connected users and data traffic…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

CiRBA is aiming to tie various cloud management platforms, including OpenStack, into its capacity transformation and control software with the release of a new API. The company noted in its announcement the new API enables organizations to connect the cloud management platforms they use with CiRBA with the end goal of optimizing new workload placements within internal clouds.

CiRBA specializes in providing analytics to determine the optimal placement of virtual machines within cloud infrastructure at the environment and server levels. According to the vendor, it reduces the risk of capacity shortfalls and driving up VM density by an average of 48 percent…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Michael Kanellos.

The cloud computing era is upon us, and if you make servers, life could really begin to stink. A report today from Lawrence Berkeley Lab—which we previewed last week at Google GOOG -0.82%’s “How Green is the Internet” conference—examines what would happen if businesses around the country shifted from owning their own data centers and servers to handing responsibility for email and productivity applications to cloud providers.

The energy savings, the authors found, would be tremendous. The energy required to manage data centers (and produce the equipment used inside them) would drop by 87%, from 373 petajoules a year to 47 petajoules, a year…