Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

The Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has launched a second Special Interest Group (SIG), this time focusing on cloud operations and management. The move comes a little over a week since the industry body, which aims to promote trust, security and transparency in the cloud computing sector, launched an SIG to focus on cloud security issues.

CIF claims the new SIG – which will be chaired by Lee Fisher, Abiquo’s vice president of products – has been set up in order to help both cloud providers and end users develop better cloud strategies. These should, the organisation says, properly define service goals and success criteria, plot migration paths for legacy technologies and processes and identify agnostic and ‘future proof’ technologies…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

The OpenStack Foundation issued its Grizzly release Thursday with 230 new features for running production-level cloud computing, but the most important additions dealt with the new area of software-defined networking. The OpenStack compute component can now support multiple hypervisors, including VMware ESX Server, open source KVM and Xen and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. "With Grizzly, there’s no advantage of one hypervisor over another," said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, the cloud services supplier that first got the OpenStack project going in collaboration with NASA. OpenStack has been known up until the Grizzly release for primarily supporting KVM, the open source hypervisor that’s found inside the Linux kernel and often favored by open source developers.

The compute orchestration capability has been given the ability to provision bare metal servers as well as virtual servers. But the key area of development is adding virtual networking to the OpenStack arsenal of capabilities. Networking has lagged servers when it comes to being managed as a virtual resource and in most enterprises, is still tied to a set of hardware resources that are hard to modify…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Cade Metz.

Anyone can now use the Google Compute Engine — the web giant’s answer to Amazon’s seminal EC2 cloud computing service. Well, anyone who’s willing to pay Google $400 a month for customer support. On Thursday, the company announced that you too can now use Google Compute Engine if you sign up for “Gold Support” program, which provides twenty-four-hour-seven-day-a-week access to Google support engineers for prices beginning at $400 a month. Previously, the service was only available to certain beta testers. “You no longer need an invitation or a conversation with sales to get access,” the company said in a blog post.

Uncloaked last summer, Google Compute Engine is an online service that provides instant access to virtual machines where you can run just about an software you like, including, say, your entire website. It’s a lot like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, service, which first brought the cloud computing idea to the mainstream and is now widely used by startups and developers and so many others. According to one study, Amazon’s cloud services now run as much as one percent of the internet…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

Though online content management and sharing does not necessarily equals to cloud computing, it can be implemented without cloud computing, yet it is an integral feature of IaaS. A lot of users and companies are now using some sort of content management system in-house and are probably looking for a way to bring move that to the cloud. Cloud content management however is not new to people used to dealing with distributed team members, an ECM becomes a necessity at that situation and cloud ECM would be the most logical way to go.

Services like Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive are all exceptionally well suited to small teams that share and work with smaller files. The biggest benefit of all is that these are free for those users with small space requirements; otherwise the pay per use policy comes into play for some of them. But for enterprise-sized organizations, these solutions would not be enough as they need to transfer and keep track of hundreds of files totaling to hundreds of gigabytes per day. This makes ECM managers struggle to keep corporate information assets safe and compliant while also making users quite happy with the workflow…

Grazed from Securosis. Author: Editorial Staff.

Securing the Storage Infrastructure and Management Plane: Your first step is to lock down the management plane and the infrastructure of your cloud storage. Encryption can compensate for many configuration errors and defend against many management plane attacks, but that doesn’t mean you can afford to skip the basics.

Also, depending on which encryption architecture you select, a poorly-secured cloud deployment could obviate all those nice crypto benefits by giving away too much access to portions of your encryption implementation. We are focused on data protection so we don’t have space to cover all the ins and outs of management plane security, but here are some data-specific pieces to be aware of:…

Grazed from IDG. Author: Brandon Butler.

Who is Amazon’s biggest competitor in the cloud? The go-to answer for many may be companies like Rackspace with its OpenStack platform, perhaps Google with its Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, VMware or one of the up-and-coming cloud computing companies like Joyent.

But Mikhail Malamud, founder of cloud consultancy startup CloudAware, says another cloud company could pose the biggest challenge to Amazon’s cloud plans: Salesforce.com. These two companies, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com, are two of the leading cloud providers in their respective markets of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for AWS and software as a service (SaaS) for Salesforce.com. But Malamud believes there is one reason why Salesforce.com could be a formidable foe for Amazon in the cloud moving forward: data…

Back in mid-February, the people who help control security of credit card data, the PCI Standards Console, did us all a favor. They clarified something that technically, should make handling credit cards in, around and through “the cloud” more secure. They released the document called, “PCI Cloud Computing Guidelines.” Certainly, clarification was required. Before this document, if you used a Cloud Service Provider (CSP), you couldn’t be sure whether you had to have a separate audit for them, or if your audits covered everything. It was nebulous, to say the least. 

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

A new development in the application programming interface (API) market, Backend as a Service (BaaS), offers devel­opers a whole new dimension of opportunity: cloud services to build the mobile applications of the future. Mobility, mobile broadband and mobile apps are transforming the Internet and the way people communicate and use information. For developers, the mobile app represents an enormous, lucrative new market. From a business perspective, each of the mobile platforms has its own benefits and limita­tions. Each also has its technical framework — its own APIs. Mobile develop­ment platform APIs generally fall into two categories: platform APIs related to the mobile device’s own operating system and middleware, and service APIs related to the access of Web-hosted material.

The new opportunity in APIs is Backend as a Service, an extension of the service API model. The goal of BaaS is to convert common and useful elements of mobile application logic — storage, identity management, social network integration, photo enhancing — into representational state transfer (REST) Web services that the application invokes as needed, making these services "back ends" to mobile apps…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Nick Heath.

Since Amazon launched its public cloud service in 2006 it has lowered the cost of using the platform 30 times. The gradual reduction in the price of renting virtualised servers and storage through its EC2 and S3 offerings has driven down the wider infrastructure as a service (IaaS) prices. Amazon announced the latest drop in the price of its S3 storage service yesterday, lowering the cost of making GET requests by 60 per cent and halving the prices for PUT, LIST, COPY and POST requests.

Today AWS dominates the IaaS market, with its cloud services netting Amazon an estimated $700m in revenue in 2011 – about 20 per cent of the $4.23bn that Gartner said the "systems infrastructure" market was worth that year. But do these price drops really make a difference to which IaaS a company chooses? Maybe not, according to Kyle Hilgendorf, research director in Gartner’s service for technology professionals, who said the cost of IaaS has dropped to a point where they have less of an impact…

Grazed from TechZone360. Author: Erin Harrison.

Sony is latest company to get into the cloud business, launching a new subsidiary, Sony Media Cloud Services, which is aimed to provide an online platform for creative professionals to store and share their large and complex media files. Sony’s cloud storage platform – dubbed Ci (pronounced “see”) –is currently in beta production and is designed to provide broadcasters, filmmakers, independent producers and marketing teams with a “one-cloud” solution to collect, produce and archive high-definition content, according to Naomi Climer, president of Sony Media Cloud Services.

“Every day, creative professionals around the world spend numerous hours and resources on non-creative tasks like moving and sharing content, figuring out how and where to store it, and getting the right assets to the right places and in the right hands,” Climer said in a statement…