Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Contrary to popular belief, cloud services actually fail more often than internal data center facilities do. The cloud isn’t inherently unreliable, but like all forms of IT, cloud services have to be selected carefully and managed to achieve specific reliability and availability goals. The steps can be contractual, technical or may even involve rethinking your application architectures. Without careful consideration, you may get less from your cloud services than you expected.

SLAs mitigate risk of using cloud providers’ data centers

Protecting against cloud outages starts by assessing the reliability of cloud providers’ data centers. The majority of cloud providers have a small number of data centers, often only one, and these data centers are subject to the same kinds of failures as an enterprise. The most publicized cloud failures occur when an entire cloud data center fails, usually because of a natural disaster. To protect yourself in case of failure, you’ll either have to ask for specific data center configuration information or obtain an availability guarantee from your provider…

Grazed from DarkReading. Author: Editorial Staff.

Centrify Corporation, a leader in Unified Identity Services across data center, cloud and mobile, today from NetSuite SuiteWorld 2013 announced Centrify for NetSuite. Centrify for NetSuite is a free, comprehensive solution for Active Directory-based NetSuite single sign-on, user provisioning and mobile management for NetSuite. With Centrify, organizations can secure NetSuite for employees, reduce helpdesk burden, improve access controls, and leverage their existing Active Directory infrastructure and skillsets.

NetSuite’s SuiteCloud is a comprehensive offering of cloud-based products, development tools, and services designed to help customers and commercial software developers take advantage of the significant economic benefits of cloud computing. SuiteCloud Developer Tools provide a comprehensive cloud customization environment, whether users are extending NetSuite to fit their business needs or developing completely new applications. SuiteCloud Developer Tools include workflow management, scripting, analytics, web services and more…

Grazed from FortMills Times. Author: Editorial Staff.

CloudBees, Inc., the Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) innovation leader, today announced a new office in Brussels, Belgium, as well as another record-setting quarter in Q1 2013 of new account acquisition and revenue growth. In 2012, CloudBees’ business increased by 350 percent. That success, along with an expanded presence in Europe, will lay the foundation for even greater growth in 2013.

CloudBees is increasing the size of its European operations by investing in top local talent in Europe, beginning with Michel Goossens, vice president of worldwide sales, who was hired in 2012. Since the opening of the Brussels office in early 2013, the office has expanded rapidly, becoming the hub for European sales, marketing and business development. The new office joins existing CloudBees offices in Boston and San Francisco…

Grazed from IT News Online. Author: PR Announcement.

CohesiveFT has been shortlisted for the 6th Annual International Datacentres Award. CohesiveFT is nominated in the award category for Public Cloud Services & Infrastructure. "The need for business application-layer security remains universal, and largely unanswered by IaaS and cloud vendors," said CohesiveFT CEO Patrick Kerpan. "By combining VNS3 Overlay SDN with IaaS provider infrastructure security features, our customers are able to create and control a multidimensional security solution."

The International Datacentres Awards, called "the Oscars of the datacentre industry," focus on recognising excellence across the datacentre and cloud sector. "The quality of entry this year was among the highest ever at the 2012 event. This reflects both the growth and confidence of the datacentre sector across Europe," wrote chairman of the Judges Panel, Ashley Davies…

Grazed from Talkin Cloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) is the latest company to make an investment NoSQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider Cloudant. The Rackspace investment of an undisclosed sum follows three months after Samsung Ventures made a similar strategic investment in the company.

According to a blog post by Pat Matthews, Rackspace’s senior vice president of Corporate Development, the investment in Cloudant has been made to reinforce the important of DBaaS and to help developers spend their time on building new features rather than maintaining databases. That’s where Cloudant’s DBaaS comes into play. The service was designed to "let developers focus on new development and not on operations."…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: David Hill.

One problem with multitenant public cloud environments is the "noisy neighbor" phenomenon, when one or more customers monopolize available resources and thus significantly degrade the performance of other customers’ systems. One way to address this problem is via storage-based quality of service that provides defined service levels to all tenants. An infrastructure-as-a-service provider, CloudSigma, is using all-SSD arrays from SolidFire to create an architecture to eliminate noisy neighbors.

CloudSigma has decided to replace all of its Tier 1 primary storage hard disk arrays with SolidFire all-SSD arrays. In addition to this significant move, the company also offers solid-state drive storage at the same price as hard disk for the same capacity. How can CloudSigma do this when flash memory is more expensive on a per-unit basis than hard disk?…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Google, attempting to build its reputation as an enterprise and developer-focused cloud computing provider, today said its cloud platform is open for anyone to signup for, and can be used with a new by-the-minute billing scheme. Google Compute Engine (GCE) is a pure-play infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering that includes both virtual machine and storage pay-as-you-go resources. The service has been in limited beta – first available through invite-only, and then more recently only with a Gold Support package, which cost $400 per month. Today, GCE is open for shop in an “open preview,” meaning anyone can sign up to use it though. (Check out Google’s cloud platform blog.)

In addition to the GCE news, Google also launched a cloud database for non-relational database, new security measures for its cloud, and support for a new language on its Google App Engine platform as a service (PaaS). “Over the last 14 years we have been developing some of the best infrastructure in the world to power Google’s global-scale services,” wrote Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president for technical infrastructure at Google, and one of its chief cloud builders…

Grazed from BizTech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

According to the new International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Black Book just released, IT spending was slightly below expectations in the second half of 2012 and first quarter of 2013.
Economic uncertainty surrounding the US government sequester, European debt crisis and weakening GDP in China has resulted in volatile spending patterns across most segments of the market, with many IT vendors reporting difficulty in closing deals at the end of Q1 2013. IDC now projects worldwide IT spending growth of 4.9 percent this year in constant currency, down from the previous forecast of 5.5 percent growth and representing a slowdown from the 5.6 percent growth recorded in 2012. As a result, IT spending will reach $2.06 trillion in 2013. Including telecom services, ICT spending will increase by 4.5 percent to $3.7 trillion.

The strength of the US dollar may continue to have an adverse impact on the reported revenues of US-based IT vendors. In 2012, IT spending increased by just 2.9 percent in US dollars, a significant downturn from 9.5 percent US dollar growth in 2011. Based on average exchange rates from Q1 2013, this year’s growth is on track to increase by 4.2 percent in US dollar terms…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The escalating number of attacks on web services in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is one of the most spammed countries worldwide, has lent impetus to the cloud computing security market in the country. The growing use of cloud services in the next few years, especially in non-traditional verticals such as retail and logistics, will drive the demand for cloud computing security solutions in the country.

Upcoming analysis from Frost & Sullivan (http://www.networksecurity.frost.com), State of Cloud Computing Security in the UAE, finds that the market earned revenues of more than $8.7 million in 2012 and estimates this to reach $72.3 million by 2019. Large enterprises are set to be the chief revenue generators for cloud security suppliers in the long run. To get more insights on Frost & Sullivan strategic recommendations for the Cloud Computing Security Market in the UAE and view a recording of the recently hosted complimentary Webinar, click here…

Grazed from WKZO.com. Author: Alistair Barr.

Apptio, a start-up that helps big companies like Boeing Co track billions of dollars in technology spending, said on Wednesday that it raised $45 million from institutional investment firms including Janus Capital Group. T. Rowe Price; The Hillman Company, the investment firm of billionaire Henry Hillman; and existing venture capital backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Madrona Venture Group, also invested.

Apptio, led by Chief Executive Sunny Gupta, has raised a total of $136 million so far. The previous funding round valued Apptio at about $600 million and this latest round was a "significant" increase on that, Gupta said, while declining to give a specific number…