Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Jula Holkkola.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the cloud is just how fluffy it really is. Recent news indicates that it has finally gone mainsteam. Yet at the same time, most people are still not quite clear on what the cloud really is. To get a better understanding, here’s a three-minute summary of where the clouds came from and where they are heading.

Looking at the roots of the cloud computing movement, it all really started in the late ‘90s when companies with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model started surfacing. Perhaps the most well known pioneer is Salesforce.com, the first billion-dollar company in the cloud space. Today there is a plethora of companies offering all kinds of online applications shared by the public. As a rule of thumb, if you could run something on your own computer but choose to tap into shared online resources instead, you are dealing with the cloud…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Ted Chamberlin.

With the recent announcement from the Microsoft Azure camp stating “ its commitment to price match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services like compute, storage and bandwidth, aligned with the general availability of Windows Azure infrastructure services,” the official race to zero begins in the Infrastructure as a Service market. This shot across the bow of AWS will most definitely bother AWS, but it should scare the stuffing out of the rest of the IaaS market. Particularly the providers who the traditional businesses trust a bit more for more enterprise-ish workloads should be concerned.

Providers like GoGrid, Tata, Savvis, Terremark, Rackspace Cloud and others just entering the market will face the heavier crosswinds as these behemoths engage battles. The stark reality is that hyper scale providers like Amazon use their operational acumen and scale to drive pricing down on IaaS services on a regular basis. This will create an exceedingly tougher environment for the rest of the cloud providers to compete. How is an IaaS provider to thrive, yet alone, survive?…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Software as a service (SaaS)-based cloud application performance management provider New Relic has forged a partnership with IT management software provider ScienceLogic Inc. to offer combined application performance management (APM) and infrastructure performance management data for cloud services providers and businesses, hoping to assist them with performance and business goals. Here’s the story.

According to the companies, the partnership, formed through New Relic’s Connect Partner program leverages both companies’ platforms to provide instant, comprehensive information to development and deployment teams. These teams are responsible for the management of applications running in the cloud and the data center. New Relic’s Connect Partner program was created to help the company streamline product integrations with complementary technologies…

Grazed from IT News Online. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudSigma, an international, customer-centric, pure-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, today announced that it has provided free, compute resources for 2013’s NASA Space Apps Challenge participants. By contributing servers, featuring 30 Gb of storage, 2 Gb of RAM and 2 GHz of CPU, and a specially-configured central server, CloudSigma hopes to further participants’ innovation to address today’s top challenges on Earth and in space.

Now in its second year, NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge is the world’s largest, collaborative technology development event for software, hardware, data visualization and mobile apps. With 9,000+ participants (up from 2,000 the year before), this year’s challenges included detecting near Earth objects (NEOs), revisiting how NASA offers data to the public, and more effectively curating how to tell the story of space to the world…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

If your IT team has kept up with the latest cloud computing trends, chances are it has come across at least one of the cloud brokerages participating in an expanding market. Many companies have faced challenges in working with the public cloud. General Dynamics Information Technology is changing this, however. By using Gravitant’s flexible cloudMatrix platform, it is already offering cloud management systems to local, state, and Federal government agencies which previously struggled with such deployments.

These challenges include:

• Cost savings: The idea of adopting cloud computing solutions is for companies to save money. The government’s Cloud First policy was enacted to ensure the goal of public cloud computing is to lower costs for organizations. In the past, government agencies could only use private and community clouds which do not typically result in the savings most organizations expect.
• Complexity: Managing the appropriate solutions from different public cloud providers is often complex along with finding the most efficient ways to use them.
• Standardization: If private and public clouds make up the IT infrastructure, centralized management is only efficient if there are standardized tools aiding the majority of users…

Grazed from GNC.com. Author: William Jackson.

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence still is ramping up to full operational capability, but it has collaborated with industry to produce a scheme for ensuring trusted geolocation of work being done in the cloud. This first product was published as an interagency report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to address the challenges presented when sensitive applications or computing jobs are moved into a cloud where the user does not have direct control of the infrastructure.

“We have released a demonstration of how the end user can validate that the workload is in a secure location, and trace it through a hardware root of trust,” said Nate Lesser, deputy director of the NCCOE. The draft report, “Trusted Geolocation in the Cloud: Proof of Concept Implementation,” is an example of the solutions to security challenges faced by government and industry that the center of excellence will produce. The center focuses on implementing existing technology rather than developing new ones…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: BIRT), The BIRT Company(TM) — delivering more insights to more people than all BI companies combined, today announced that they have integrated ActuateOne(R) — Actuate’s BIRT-based suite of commercial products for development and deployment of custom business analytics applications — and BIRT onDemand(TM) — Actuate’s SaaS version of ActuateOne — with Amazon Redshift, AWS’s new petabyte-scale cloud warehouse service. This announcement heralds yet another addition to Actuate’s rapidly growing stable of ActuateOne connectors for Big-Data-ready data sources that enable developers, IT departments and OEMs to deliver world-class BI applications.

When the already blazingly fast visualization and analysis features of ActuateOne are combined with Amazon Redshift’s performance, scalability and low cost (under $1,000/terabyte/year) — organizations of all sizes reap the benefits of ultra-fast access and near-speed-of-thought visualization for Cloud-based business analytics on real-time Big Data workloads of any size or complexity…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Sue Poremba.

Cloud block storage is a new way of thinking about how you store files and organise content. It allows you to abstract your infrastructure away from the implementation details specifying what hardware and operating system you need to manage to host the files your applications and organisation use.

“Cloud block storage allows organizations to focus on their content and trust the details of delivering that content to an established SaaS provider. It functions like a hard drive accessible via the Internet,” explained Troy Carl, vice president and lead tech engineer with Faith Comes by Hearing, an audio Bible organisation that utilises cloud block storage for its recordings. “Storing files and assets in the cloud is important because it means you have a large amount of flexibility in how you deliver them to your customers and employees,” Carl added. “Not only are the files constantly available, you have the ability to control – at a very granular level – who has access to those files and when they have access.”…

Grazed from WorkSpot. Author: PR Announcement.

Workspot launched a new bring-your-own-device solution for the mobile workplace. Workspot has created both a SaaS service for IT administrators, Workspot Control, and a mobile application for IPads called Workspot. Workspot also announced that it has raised $1.9 million in seed funding from Kleiner Perkins, Norwest, Redpoint, and angel investors including Peter Wagner and Gaurav Garg.

Workspot is a single app and secure mobile workplace that helps end-users and IT departments conveniently separate work-related content and personal information stored on the device. End-users can flip between applications inside Workspot with ease, in a single, contained workspace including Intranet, SharePoint, Email, and Microsoft Office documents. Collaboration with co-workers is possible through applications that reside behind their organization’s firewall making full use of SaaS applications…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

IaaS player SoftLayer and distributed software company Basho have come together in order to offer the latter’s NoSQL Riak database as a service operating on SoftLayer’s cloud. The companies claim the collaboration will make the open source database more accessible and flexible, as it is available on a pay-as-you-go basis. Marc Jones, vice president of product innovation at SoftLayer told Cloud Pro: “The overall goal is to launch a product on the SoftLayer platform that is very easy for customers to get started with their Riak and Riak enterprise deployments.

“We want to make it simple, starting from the up-front ordering process. We have designed what we call a solution designer and it allows customers to dynamically build Riak clusters and specify which SoftLayer data centre they want to build it in. So it’s not quite wizard style, but it is very easy to walk through.”…