Grazed from Forbes. Author: Karsten Strauss.

We knew this was going to happen. We’d heard about the “forthcoming era of cloud computing” as Bill Gates stepped away from Microsoft MSFT +0.46% in 2008 and the company’s then mission seemed to be to adjust to post-PC realities. Steve Jobs tried to sucker Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston into selling him the cloud-sharing company in 2009 prior to Apple AAPL +1.47%’s eventual release of iCloud.

Now that we’re knee-deep in the cloud, some users are getting a little bit nervous about having their data stored somewhere else, overseen by who knows who. It’s this uncertainty and nervousness that StoAmigo’s CloudLocker is built on. For those for whom Google GOOG +0.27%, Amazon, Microsoft and Dropbox’s server farms are too far away for comfort, CloudLocker gives you your own private cloud…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

The technology landscape has truly evolved over the past few years – and with that evolution comes a new demand for the future of IT administration. IT managers and engineers are tasked with knowing more, understanding further components within their own environments and must have the ability to truly be creative. The old days of IT saw engineering dedicated to one process. Rare interaction between teams was seen as an exception rather than norm. Cross-IT team collaboration would be usually done at the management level, and even then it wasn’t always successful.

There is a new breed of engineers being born from the era of cloud computing. New job titles are being created with demands being placed on engineers who are unique and have the ability to communicate. In this post, we’ll outline some of the traits which are in high demand from this new type of IT professional. Among many new traits and personality qualities that an engineer may have, the following are beginning to emerge as truly defining characteristics of the new IT pro:..

Grazed from The Register. Author: Jack Clark.

Heroku has released the public beta of a platform API to help its developers build apps and services that sit on top of its PaaS, which in turn sits on Amazon Web Services. With the platform API, Heroku is letting developers "automate, extend and combine Heroku with other services," the company wrote on Thursday. This lets you build a service which sits on a platform (Heroku) that sits on a virtualized infrastructure cloud (Amazon).

Potential use cases include automating workloads, combining Heroku with other services, and building apps for controlling Heroku environments from smartphones and tablets. A handy way of thinking about this is that Heroku is a pilot fish to Amazon’s great big shark, and now Heroku has made an API available that could let developers build little complementary Heroku fish…

Grazed from Business News Daily. Author: Chad Brooks.

Businesses looking for a leg up on the competition need to look more to cloud solutions, new research shows. A study by Forbes Insights, the strategic research practice of Forbes Media, revealed that cloud solutions accelerate business results, enable more efficient business processes and spur innovation.

Specifically, the research found that more than 60 percent of executives believe cloud-based collaboration tools help businesses execute faster than would be possible otherwise, which can lead to faster responses to competitive challenges, as well as the ability to get products to market faster and speed up product upgrade cycles. In addition, 58 percent of those surveyed think cloud computing has the potential to improve business processes, including purchasing, manufacturing, marketing, sales and technical support…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Dr. Jeff Jaffe, the CEO for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has highlighted the need for more control on global cloud computing standards, in the build-up to this year’s Cloud World Forum – http://www.cloudwf.com – at Olympia National Hall, London.

As Chief Executive for W3C, Dr. Jaffe, who is set to give a keynote address at the event on 26th and 27th June, plays a key role alongside World Wide Web inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, in the development of web standards, and has seen the rise of cloud computing lead to changes in the landscape and a variety of issues surrounding global regulations…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Mobile apps will be more dependent on cloud computing in the near future. According to a new report by Gartner, by 2016, about 40 percent of mobile application development projects will take on the cloud to function. This is a big consideration for midsize firm IT pros, who are responsible for the security of mobile applications.

The Back-End Services

Gartner’s findings, recently featured in Telecomasia, showed that companies will be using cloud mobile back-end services, which use platform as a service (PaaS) technology. Today, successful mobile applications must work well with a set of back-end services that include user management, data storage, and social business functions. However, many mobile application developers may only really understand front-end development on the client side. Through cloud mobile hosted platforms both front and back end development is linked, creating the best type of integration and scalability possible. In fact, some cloud mobile back-end services enable developers to deploy server-side code…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

CRM Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) giant Salesforce has debuted a new product that it claims will “reinvent the intranet for the mobile world”. Dubbed Company Communities, the organisation claims it will give businesses the power to connect employees to a custom intranet, featuring apps, people and content, anywhere and from any device. Like many other SaaS providers, Salesforce claims employees want to bring the experience they gain from apps as consumers into the workplace, but that legacy intranets fail to deliver this.

“Companies invest more than $2 billion (£1.32 billion) every year maintaining intranets that were created more than a decade ago. “Optimised for desktops, these intranets are not designed for today’s real-time business environment, where employees need instant access to company information and people to be successful,” the company said…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Editorial Staff.

Red Hat (RHT) is making bold statements about its IaaS Open Hybrid Cloud strategy — only a few days after VMware (VMW) launched its vCloud Hybrid Service. So what’s the reality check? It goes something like this…

VMware has a massive installed base of on-premises virtualization software. That’s a natural springboard toward building private clouds or for migrating customers to VMware’s forthcoming vCloud Hybrid Service (expected for Q3 2013). If you missed details about the VMware strategy, you can find a launch replay featuring CEO Pat Gelsinger here…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Salman UI Haq.

No one in the industry likes vendor lock-in but it is something which every enterprise has to live with, in fact, this is how the enterprise software and solutions market was originally designed to work. One of the promises of the Cloud was to break this vicious cycle of locking in with a vendor but with a plethora of Cloud offerings and service delivery models – SaaS, PaaS, IaaS etc. – and dearth of standards, there’s an acute need to federate the way in which different Cloud services talk to each other and learn to live within the same space.

Recent surveys have shown that enterprise – big and small – which have made their transition to the Cloud find it more appealing to maintain a portfolio of Cloud services from varied vendors instead of tying up with a single vendor. One reason of this trend may be the lack of turn-key solutions when it comes to SaaS offerings. For example, somewhere in the stack of a Cloud based ERP solution, you will find Amazon’s EC2 being utilized for compute but this is not the example of a hybrid Cloud deployment…

Grazed from Xtium. Author: Editorial Staff.

By now, every IT and business executive is probably aware of cloud computing’s array of potential benefits. They understand that the technology is cost-efficient and that IT management responsibilities would decline significantly, and "scalability" has almost become a household term. So has the cloud actually met those lofty goals?

A TechRepublic survey from March found that for 96 percent of organizations that are using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) models, the cloud has done exactly what was expected of it, ZDNet reported. But even that statistic doesn’t do the cloud justice. Not only has the cloud accomplished its intended goals, but decision-makers are increasingly realizing that these solutions have more capabilities than they originally realized. According to a separate study from CA Technologies, companies with more cloud experience are expected to be among the heaviest spenders on the technology…