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…

Grazed from dZone. Author: Omri Erel.

I talk a lot about various business aspects of SaaS, and I talk about marketing and I even recommend SaaS solutions on a regular basis. But, I think it’s about time I tap my inner software guy, and talk about SaaS optimization today. Unlike some of these articles, this is intended more for SaaS creators than consumers, and the purpose here is to recommend some basic design practices that make it more efficient, expedient and all around more effective.

SaaS optimization is important, and it sounds like something that’d be very complicated. Well, it doesn’t need to be. I will assume you know what a few terms are, going into this, so for my non-designer readers, I apologize for the small amount of jargon contained herein…

Grazed from RedHat. Author: Ashesh Badani.

About a decade ago, my wife and I moved from Philadelphia to San Francisco. We had both finished with graduate school in the Northeast and we decided it was time to strike out west. In retrospect, showing up in the the Bay Area in 2001 may not have been well-timed…but what did we know! The folly of youth. In any case, it was still hard to find an apartment though I am guessing a lot easier than right now. We found Noe Valley to be a great neighborhood and moved in fast. And it was especially quick given all we seemed to have brought from our university 1 BR apartment was a 4 person scratched-up round table, an old TV, and a couple of mattresses.

So, we figured we needed a couch at the very least. We went to a furniture store and found one that we really liked. And then the sales person said we had a choice. We could buy the really nice, handcrafted, leather sofa from Italy at about $5000. It would be customized so we could pick the color and grade of leather, and it would show up in about a couple of months according to our specs…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Shamus McGillicuddy.

French cloud network management and orchestration vendor Lyatiss is offering a free tool that discovers and maps IaaS resources that an enterprise has in Amazon Web Services. CloudWeaver Discovery is the first product available from Lyatiss’s suite of CloudWeaver tools, which will include analysis and orchestration modules in future releases. "There’s always been a concern about Amazon sprawl," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.

"Instead of going to the finance department to figure out who’s got instances up on Amazon, with this you are able to take a more holistic and corporate-wide view and understand who’s using it and how they are using it." CloudWeaver Discovery finds Amazon resources and provides a topology map for IT administrators. The Web-based product delivers real-time, graphical flow maps and reports for virtual machines and network services such as load balancers…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

The third platform, which includes social media, cloud computing, mobility and analytics, will play a key role in expanding information and communication technology (ICT). A new report by International Data Corporation found these new technologies will drive ICT growth to new levels.

New Game in Town

Social media, cloud computing, mobility, and analytics are all becoming necessary for firms, especially midsize firms, to remain competitive and realize the growth they seek. IDC’s latest report, recently featured on ITP.net, found that because of the proliferation of these technologies, information and communication tech spending will skyrocket 75 percent from 3.7 trillion USD to more than 5 trillion USD over the next decade…