Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ingrid Lunden.

T-Mobile, fresh from the completion of its merger with MetroPCS and new NYSE listing, is now sharpening its focus on new customers and new products, beginning with small businesses and cloud-based, software-as-a-service phone deals. We’ve been passed a letter that T-Mobile is sending out to a selection of small companies (copied below), targeting those with 20 or fewer employees and offering them free business phone service for the remainder of 2013, with half price on phone services in 2014. The plan, called Business Connect, also has a dedicated website.

This looks to be a direct competitor to other hosted services like those offered by 8×8 and RingCentral, which effectively offer small businesses a cloud-based solution that gives them telephony features like voicemail, CallerID, conference bridges and other features that have been hallmarks of services for larger companies…

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Contel Bradford.

Imagine a cloud network as a stack of layers, each of which is akin to a consumption and delivery model for various IT needs. Those needs may be accommodated by solutions that range from software applications to physical hardware that supports storage requirements. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms are two such stacks that can deliver substantial benefits when implemented by midsize companies.

SaaS Solutions as Part of the Cloud Stack

SaaS providers offer enterprise-level applications such as CRM programs to help businesses streamline their organizational processes. They also offer applications that facilitate communication and collaboration, support social business endeavors, and provide valuable insights into marketing performance. The availability of such a wide range of applications lets businesses move many of their network operations to the cloud and reap the advantages of a more flexible environment…

Grazed from Sophos.  Author: Paul Ducklin.

IBM just released an open source software package called HELib.  The HE stands for homomorphic encryption.  Although it doesn’t sound terribly sexy or impressive, HELib is actually an interesting and important milestone in cryptography.  HE is also a surprisingly relevant topic right now, with our ever-increasing attraction to cloud computing.

Bear with me, and I’ll try to explain.  Imagine that I am your cloud provider, and I keep databases online for you.  Imagine also that I am a security-conscious vendor, so I keep all your data encrypted, both when I serve it up to you, and when I save it to disk.  That’s about as good as it gets these days from a cloud security perspective…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Ali Aldrich.

Small businesses are often aware of the advantages offered by cloud computing services, such as low upfront costs, flexible access to software and inexpensive data backup. Still, they may have questions about getting started. Common questions and concerns include how to choose the right cloud applications, how to use the applications and the security of their data when stored in the cloud, according to an article on the SmallBusiness.co.uk website.

The terminology of cloud computing is still evolving, as is often the case with new technology, and competing terms can create confusion among new users. For example, a business owner may be familiar with the idea of “online backup” (automatically backing up business data to secure servers via an Internet connection) but not realize that “cloud backup” is simply another name for the same process…

Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Saroj Kar.

Cloud computing is catching on in business, but not all alike, as recent reports say. For example, the firm RightScale that mediates between users and public cloud services announced the latest analysis on the issue and found that 75 percent of respondents are using the cloud to some extent.

Companies with more than 1000 employees seem to be a little further before small businesses when it comes to adopting cloud computing. About 77% of these large companies have adopted cloud against 73% for companies with fewer than 1,000 employees…

Grazed from PeakColo.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Although public cloud vendors first pioneered the infrastructure-as-a-service hosting model, the private enterprise IaaS cloud represents its future. Companies increasingly want to leverage the scalability and flexibility inherent in cloud environments without having to worry about the security and latency issues inherent in public hosted settings. As a result, businesses are more frequently adopting dedicated hosting environments for their IT infrastructure, Giridhar Lakkavalli, head of vmUnify solutions at Mindtree, wrote in a recent CRN UK guest post. 

Part of the issue was that public hosting environments became victims of their own popularity. Lakkavalli wrote that as more businesses opted to place their IT infrastructure in the cloud, the amount of space and speed available on a given server dwindled. Unless the public cloud provider was able to provision more processing power and dedicated servers to one client – which is never a given in shared settings – companies were not able to have the ideal hosted solution in place. As a result, a cloud service provider able to offer dedicated server space and connections became a far more attractive option to many organizations…

Grazed from Technorati.  Author: Adi Gaskell.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that Microsoft announced the demise of webmail stalwart Hotmail.  The plan was to migrate users over to a new Outlook.com service.  Microsoft announced this week that the migration was completed yesterday and that 400 million people are now active users of the new service.  They went on to say that 150 petabytes of email data was migrated as part of the transition in the past six weeks alone.

The company also revealed that it will be adding a couple of new features to Outlook.com.  The first is called SMTP Send, which will make it easier to send mail from different email accounts.  The second is a much better and deeper integration with SkyDrive…

Grazed from FCM.  Author: Mike Hettinger.

Given the growing importance of data, cybersecurity, cloud computing, mobile communications and more, the CIO has taken a more prominent role in nearly all businesses. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for government, where an increasingly crowded management structure often limits the CIO’s influence.

The Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 established a CIO at each federal agency with the intent of giving that person access to the agency secretary and enough internal “juice” to drive effective IT management throughout the agency. Some 17 years later, it is clear there is a long way to go to fulfill that original intent…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: David Linthicum.

As reported By GigaOM’s Jordan Novet, AWS did some chest beating at the AWS Summit held in San Francisco last week.  The message: Microsoft has no chance to beat AWS in the race for IaaS dominance.  This could be a valid point.

“Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Andy Jassy didn’t refer to any competitor by name when he pointed out AWS’ advantages before a crowd of around 4,000 at the AWS Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday. But it’s not hard to take a guess on who he was talking about. With Microsoft hyping its Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Amazon is trying to persuade people — Amazon faithful or not — that Azure just doesn’t compare…

Grazed from up2v.nl.  Author: Marcel Van Der Berg.

Microsoft published two very interesting documents which assist in designing and understanding  Infrastructure as a Service based on Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1.

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service Product Line Architecture Fabric Architecture Guide (Windows Server 2012).
  This 112 pages document provides specific guidance for developing fabric architectures (compute, network, storage, and virtualization layers) of an overall private cloud solution. All of the Windows Server 2012 features are discussed.
  Very much recommended reading if your task is to design a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V infrastructure.
  Download here...