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…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Ken Presti.

The fundamental challenges associated with moving to a new cloud business model dominated the morning keynotes at the UBM Tech Cloud Connect conference, which is under way this week in Santa Clara, Calif. "Nature abhors a vacuum, and organizations abhor change," said Alistair Croll, vice president of Cloud Ops Research. "Cloud computing is about converting an organization into an organism, in which the component parts are acting in the service of a greater whole."

A variety of speakers described their vision for where cloud computing will lead the industry, and also business-as-a-whole. "The Internet will soon begin to transform industrial functions as machines become intelligent and connected," predicted Bill Ruh, Global Technology Director at General Electric. "This will continue to evolve as long as we can demonstrate a resulting increase in productivity…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Admire Moyo.

Cloud computing has disrupted traditional on-premise e-mail archiving, paving the way for interactive archiving. This is the view of Grant Hodgkinson, product director for unified e-mail management at Mimecast, who says e-mail is still the dominant form of communication in businesses today. “The interactive archive is a technology platform that fulfils two important business objectives,” says Hodgkinson. “Firstly, it archives content and data relevant to the organisation so that it can be discovered for compliance purposes later. Secondly, it is accessible to knowledge workers, generally making them more productive.”

According to Mimecast, interactive archiving, driven by the cloud, is a more useful and valuable platform for business users as it allows them to leverage the archive and data therein for business intelligence, end-user productivity, ubiquitous access, and the corporate governance and compliance requirements that underpin the archive itself…

Grazed from InvestorPlace. Author: Brad Moon.

Many of those who know me think I’m a bit paranoid when it comes to computer security. I appreciate the benefits of the cloud and take full advantage of what cloud computing offers, but I’m wary. All of my data — everything from documents to digital photos, music, e-books and movies — is backed up on physical media, multiple times and in multiple locations. I shop online (taking whatever precautions I can) and, as someone who’s invested heavily in the Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) ecosystem, I buy much of my digital content through Apple’s iTunes.

But I’m a little uneasy about the growing importance of the cloud compared to its vulnerabilities. Apple has become a leading online retailer of digital media and has focused considerable energy and resources on the cloud — not just its iCloud service, but also cloud-based functions like Siri and iMessage. A whole lot of integrated Mac and mobile functions are now tied up in the cloud, not to mention loads of personal information and financial data…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Jim Clark.

Platform-as-a-service Heroku spent two years misleading customers because it was so focused on building a new product that it didn’t bother to update old documentation – this is unacceptable. The Salesforce-owned company admitted on Wednesday that customers using its ‘Bamboo" application automation technology could have spent two years paying for a service that used different tech to that found in Heroku’s docs, and that this tech entailed poor app performance that was nearly impossible for both Heroku and Heroku analytics partner New Relic to detect.

An equivalent situation would be a logistics company announcing it had not informed customers that it had shifted from using a central dispatcher to direct its trucks, to a system where each driver had a list of all packages and had to work out the delivery order with other drivers with no central command. Moreover, that this change meant packages were not getting delivered on time and that it had no way of informing customers of the tardiness of their packages…

Grazed from RealWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud-based technology services company Green Cloud Technologies has closed on $5.6 million in new equity financing. The Greenville, S.C. company said that Millry Corporation, an existing investor and Green Cloud’s largest backer, led the series C round. The round also included other existing investors and an unnamed new strategic investor. In a February securities filing, the company reported raising $1.3 million in a round targeting up to $6 million. Since its 2011 founding, Green Cloud says it has raised $9.6 million.

Green Cloud offers “Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS. The company’s data centers house data and applications for businesses in a virtual environment that can be accessed over the Internet via any Internet-enabled device. Green Cloud said that new financing will be used for market expansion, sales and marketing and data center investments. The company this spring added North Carolina’s Research Triangle to the list markets it serves. Green Cloud also recently expanded into South Florida, Atlanta, and the Gulf Coast.

The industry shift to cloud computing has meant more than just a shift in services for users. IT professionals are asking themselves why they should deal with services that could be outsourced to larger cloud providers, and then reposition themselves to take care of the mission-critical technologies that their businesses really want.

This is the main drive behind IT managers pushing their firms to adopt cloud-based solutions. They’re looking to free up their in-house resources for more strategic applications and specialized infrastructure.

HotLink Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for heterogeneous virtualization management, today announced the latest release of HotLink Hybrid Express™, the industry’s simplest solution for deploying, administering and managing hybrid clouds. The new release provides Amazon EC2 plug-in support for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) so IT can deploy, administer and manage hybrid on- and off-premise resources using existing virtualization management infrastructure. Additionally, HotLink Hybrid Express is now available in a free edition for both Microsoft SCVMM and VMware vCenter environments.

HotLink Hybrid Express, which also supports VMware vCenter, is the only solution to natively extend on-premise virtualization management infrastructure to public cloud resources like Amazon EC2. HotLink’s patent-pending transformation technology abstracts public cloud platforms and workloads so on-premise management consoles treat them just like on-premise hosts and virtual machines — fully integrated and managed as a unified pool of resources without the need for a separate management console. Since HotLink natively integrates cloud-based resources, Microsoft SCVMM or VMware vCenter-compatible orchestration tools, service catalogs and self-service portals work seamlessly out of the box. Customers can implement hybrid clouds in just a few hours as opposed to weeks or months.

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Joe Onisick.

The Apache Software Foundation announced in late March that CloudStack is now a top-level project. This is a promotion from CloudStack’s incubator status, where it had lived after being released as open source by Citrix. This promotion provides additional encouragement to companies and developers looking to contribute to the project, because it validates the CloudStack community and demonstrates ongoing support under the Apache Software Foundation.

CloudStack provides a complete IaaS software suite for private, public and hybrid cloud environments. It’s based on a product called Cloud.com, which Citrix acquired in 2011. CloudStack comes from a proprietary code base that was used in production before being acquired…