Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Warwick Ashford.

Transparency is the biggest challenge in moving to cloud computing, not security, according to Gavan Egan, vice-president of sales at Verizon Terremark Europe. “Most big organisations do not see security as a challenge because serious cloud providers understand security and security infrastructure,” he told Computer Weekly. Verizon, which has a long-established security tradition, encrypts all data in its cloud environment and ensures that none of its employees have access to the data. All staff are also screened.

Egan, who formerly headed Verizon’s security services business in Europe, sees transparency as a far bigger issue for organisations making the transition to cloud. “IT departments not only have to ensure that cloud deployments comply with external and internal regulations, but they need to be able to prove that compliance to auditors and regulators,” he said…

Grazed from WallStreetCheatSheet. Author: Eric Schaal.

How far can Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) go in the cloud computing game? Though Amazon Web Services is already believed to be clocking around $2 billion a year, a report indicates that number could grow to an imposing $24 billion in the next decade, which would make Amazon a terror to all competitors and possibly give the tech giant a monopoly in the industry.

A report by Morgan Stanley analysts sees Amazon in the top five and gaining fast in cloud computing, which they believe will have a TAM of $152 billion ten years from now. As for the inevitability of a world turning entirely to cloud services by 2022, that’s considered a given, and bad news for companies like NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) and EMC (NYSE:EMC). Of course, someone will need to be the host, so the market for servers won’t entirely disappear, Morgan Stanley’s analysts noted…

Grazed from BenchMarkReviews. Author: Editorial Staff.

With rapid growth and strong competition in the Cloud Computing sector, cloud service providers are looking for ways to increase efficiency to remain competitive. Learn more at this year’s Cloud Computing Expo in New York, where Innodisk, a DRAM and Flash Storage manufacturer, will be sharing their thoughts on cloud storage solutions in a special session. With more efficient hardware, cloud service providers can increase profit margins, cut costs, and boost scalability and performance of their systems.

This year’s Cloud Computing Expo is at the Javits Center in New York City from June 10-13, 2013. Please join Innodisk Senior Engineer, Edwin Lam, for a special session, "Maximizing the Small Things: Efficiencies for Cloud Hardware", on June 11th, 8:15am-9:00am, in Room 1A10. This session will focus on SATADOM, a very small form factor boot device for the cloud, and how it contributes to performance and scalability of cloud servers, as well as the requirements for tomorrow’s cloud hardware…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steve Ranger.

The network may be one of the less glamorous elements of the enterprise technology infrastructure, but it’s an essential one — and it’s getting an overhaul. New initiatives such as cloud computing and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) are imposing new burdens on the corporate network, which means CIOs are looking at upgrades, new technologies and new techniques to ensure that it can deliver the required services.

Cloud computing, for example, means that networks have to be reliable for staff to be able to access core business applications, while BYOD support allows staff to use their own devices on the corporate network, which may create additional demand — for example by increasing the amount of video traffic…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Centrify Corporation, the leader in Unified Identity Services across data center, cloud and mobile, today announced Centrify for Office 365, the industry’s most comprehensive solution for Active Directory-based single sign-on, user provisioning and mobile management for Office 365. With Centrify, organizations can simplify and speed Office 365 migrations and initial deployments within a matter of an hour for employees, reduce helpdesk burden, improve access controls, and leverage their existing Active Directory infrastructure and skillsets. Centrify is also announcing that Microsoft has evaluated Centrify for Office 365 across key user scenarios and has qualified it as a "Works with Office 365" solution.

Centrify for Office 365, an Azure-based service, delivers full support for Office 365, simplifying the deployment of federated identity, providing a rich catalog of pre-integrated SaaS apps, and delivering "Zero Sign-On" (ZSO) for rich mobile clients that require access to Office 365. Centrify for Office 365 delivers seamless integration with Active Directory in minutes — without the hassle of managing server clusters in the DMZ, creating security issues by poking more holes in the firewall, replicating identity information to the cloud, or acquiring and maintaining public certificates. The solution will be unveiled and demoed publicly for the first time this week at TechEd 2013 in Centrify’s booth No. 2418…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

We always open up with something like “Cloud Computing offers cost savings because you pay-as-you-go and because of economies of scale” or “Cloud Computing offers elasticity and seemingly infinite computing resource as long as your wallet is also infinitely flowing” in our write-ups and articles. I know I just did. This is because one of the unspoken tenets of Cloud Computing is “minimal barrier to entry and economic scaling”, so it is ingrained into everyone who knows about Cloud Computing that the main reason for moving to the Cloud is cost savings. But the pay-as-you-go model is a double-edged sword, it can also hurt you.

We call Cloud Computing as utility computing where it is treated like electricity or water, you only pay for what you use. But here is where the similarity ends, water and electricity use are not particularly variable, they are often stable. They very seldom get usage spikes even when there are special occasions in your house. So the utility bills that arrive every month will look fairly similar, only varying slightly. But the cloud is seldom predictable as usage will change depending on the time of day or external events that happen across the globe, and, so usage spikes become unpredictable…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Christine Burns.

According to Piston Cloud Computing’s CTO, the rate at which his customer’s pilot projects turn into production private clouds is pretty typical of most OpenStack-based providers – and it’s pretty low. “Roughly for every 20 pilot projects we open up, we see one of them make it into production,” says Josh McKenty, who prior to founding the Seattle-based Piston, worked at NASA and served as a technical lead on the project that evolved into OpenStack, one of three open source infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platforms vying for enterprise attention.

So why do the other 19 drop off? Good question, admits McKenty. According to analysts, developers and cloud practitioners, the answer turns on miscommunication (between corporate IT department and their potential “customers”), dependencies (on beloved features of gear sitting in the data center or on the network) and unruliness (of applications not built to run on the cloud at inception)…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Alex Williams.

Piston Cloud Co-Founder Joshua McKenty says the OpenStack customer ecosystem has four emerging market segments. On one side are the customers who hire consultants to build them a cloud. On the other side are the IBM customers who will always be IBM customers.

And in the middle are two classes of customers who have one thing in common, McKenty said. They have a data problem and with that comes deeper interest in the infrastructure, be it their own or a third-party that manages it for them…

Grazed from GoLime. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

The decisions your IT team must make when considering Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS, will affect the future path of your enterprise in regards to success and growth. Each organization has different needs. No matter what these are, your stakeholders are going to have to choose a vender that best accommodates the company. With so many vendors now out there, the decision must be approached carefully. The basic steps to coming to a final decision include:

• Research: The only way you’ll know if what the vendor offers is right for your enterprise is to research its reputation and services. Look into the type of cloud infrastructure, the storage and bandwidth, and quality of service provided.
• Longevity: Look into not only the lifespan of the provider and its services (Many providers are just getting started in IaaS, but have at least some technology expertise), but the kinds of equipment and software it uses. Also consider the future as to whether the service can be scaled with the growth of the enterprise.
• Service Level Agreements: What the provider guarantees makes them accountable for service outages and other issues, while outlining how these impact monthly fees. Availability times, performance demands, and trial period privileges are implemented here too…