Graze from ZDNet. Author: Mary Jo Foley.

Microsoft’s Windows Azure team has typically held its momentum and sales numbers fairly close to the vest. But this week at the TechEd conference, execs did share a couple of interesting data points. First things, first. There’s a new Windows Azure General Manager (GM) at Microsoft as of a couple of weeks ago. Steven Martin is the new GM on the business, Microsoft officials told me this week.

Bill Hilf, the former GM for Azure Product Management — who also served previously as the GM of Technical Computing, Windows Server and Open Source and Platform Strategy — left Microsoft rather abruptly to join HP’s Cloud Product Management Group, I’ve heard from several of my sources. Microsoft isn’t commenting about where Hilf went or reasons for his departure…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Ellen Nessmer.

IBM is conducting research that involves making use of the open Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in a cloud-based setting as a way to provide dynamic services, especially to mobile devices. If the research project works out, it might be considered “the operating system of the future for both embedded systems and the cloud,” said Jan Rellermeyer, IBM research staff member at IBM Research in Austin, Texas, who explained the intent behind the research at this week’s Design Automation Conference.

JVM is the well-known open software created at Sun that facilitates write-once, run-anywhere applications. The idea behind trying to establish JVM as a software stack in the cloud is to facilitate a “continuous platform experience” between JVM-based applications running in the cloud and mobile devices, Rellermeyer noted…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.

Organizations that have chosen true Platform as a Service have done so because it can deliver production applications for a small fraction of the cost and manpower of doing it themselves — on-premises or on IaaS, they say. But a PaaS cloud architecture is still encountering enterprise hesitance.

Choose Digital in Miami offers a digital marketplace platform that customers white-label as part of loyalty and affinity programs. When the company was founded three years ago, it evaluated some early PaaS options, and found that CloudBees integrated tightly with its continuous integration tools, including Jenkins test and the GitHub source repository, and enabled the firm to get its products up and running very quickly…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Charlie Osbourne.

The rise of mobile applications and BYOD schemes has caused a number of headaches for IT professionals in the corporate world. 10gen works with IBM to provide MongoDB cloud images for the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, an enterprise-ready infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The firms have announced a new collaboration to establish a standard for the Global 2000 to more easily embrace mobile computing.

There is a disconnect between rapid scalability of databases used to handle mobile data and the often rigid structures of legacy databases used within the enterprise — the gap that 10gen and IBM hope to bridge. If successful, then businesses will be able to harness new, mobile technology without negative impact on databases which already handle corporate data…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Microsoft has been bitten by the cloud computing bug in a major way. You only have to look at its latest announcements from the TechEd conference in New Orleans this week to see that the firm is pushing cloud as the way forward for delivering enterprise IT services.

Of course, the tech giant isn’t the only vendor to see the advantages of cloud and to start positioning itself to be the provider of choice. Amazon has been delivering its public infrastructure as a service (Iaas) to anyone willing to pay for the best part of a decade, while VMware has evolved its server virtualisation software into a private cloud platform used in many enterprise data centres…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Shawn McCarthy.

Today’s accepted wisdom is that the federal government is steadily expanding its use of cloud-based computing. But the reality is a bit different. Although the long-term growth potential for government cloud solutions remains high, we are currently experiencing a significant lull. Many federal agencies will spend less money on cloud solutions during fiscal 2013 than they did in 2012.

The for the slowdown range from sequestration to challenges relating to closing large data centers, to the complexity of standardizing and merging similar applications — especially when it turns out those seemingly similar applications have dissimilar data structures and business rules. According to the Office of Management and Budget, federal spending on software as a service (SaaS) will drop from $764.8 million in fiscal 2012 to $739.8 million in fiscal 2013. Platform as a service (PaaS) spending will drop from $317.3 million to $315.1 million…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Rebecca Grant.

OpenStack system integrator Mirantis has raised an additional $10 million in strategic investment to accelerate development for its Fuel product. OpenStack is a cloud operating system that enables any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware. Software and service providers are turning to these systems because they allow for greater flexibility and scaleability. Mirantis’ role is to smooth the transition to an OpenStack platform.

Fuel is described as “Do-it-Yourself” kit for OpenStack so businesses can deploy and manage the architecture on their own. Mirantis also announced a major update to Fuel today that offers an improved user interface with a single control panel. Fuel tools are currently free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Mirantis plans to released Fuel Enterprise later this year…

Grazed from Host Review. Author: Cave Johnson.

Do we still miss the days when one used physical hard drives for computing? The industry trends are changing very rapidly and cloud computing is becoming an obvious option to run the show with more efficiency and productivity. Secure cloud services are trending cloud computing to the next level where you can trust this reliable and secure service for all your computing needs.

These secure options are available for all major industry trades including e-commerce and various other services. In fact, it is most commonly observed that choosing such virtual computing services often relieves from many perpetual problems in day-to-day computing tasks. With secure cloud services, you get the freedom of expression and liberty from carrying your data in a physical form. All your precious data sits on servers of the service providers and you can access it through secured gateways. Therefore, these services also address the biggest concern of sending large sized files to someone who is connected to the internet. The virtual drive is available in numerous configurations and is very handy and economical option. The cloud computing industry is growing rapidly and has more in store to offer…

Grazed from TechDay. Author: Heather Wright.

With cloud computing’s paradigm of shared infrastructure, DDoS attacks on a specific target can quickly affect many or all tenants. Nick Race, Arbor Networks New Zealand country manager for Arbor Networks explains why availability should be the top priority, and how resellers can help customers prevent and mitigate these attacks.

The growing popularity of the cloud computing model has been accompanied by a great deal of discussion, and some concrete action, regarding security concerns related to the use of computing, storage, networking and services infrastructure which, by definition, is shared among multiple end customers…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Butler.

Amazon Web Services may have just lost out on a $600 million contract to supply cloud computing services to the Central Intelligence Agency, after the federal government upheld a protest that IBM had made related to the awarding of the contract.

Amazon Web Services reportedly secured a four-year, $600 million contract to provide "commercially managed" cloud computing services to the CIA. IBM filed a protest with the federal Government Accountability Office, and the GAO today agreed with IBM and recommended that the CIA rebid the contract. Federal Computer Weekly first reported this news today…