Grazed from Forbes. Author: Erika Anderson.

Ten years ago today, on April 1, 2003, these things did not exist: facebook, youtube, twitter, linkedin. Google had not yet gone public, and Wikipedia was in its infancy. The smartphone was just coming into the market with limited capability. The phrase “cloud computing” didn’t come into common usage till around 2006.

It’s really astonishing that all this has happened in such a short period of time. After tens of thousands of years of interacting with each other in pretty much the same way – face-to-face, or through a physical device (pictures, words, smoke signals) – we’ve suddenly become able to communicate over long distances instantaneously. This communication evolved quickly: from telegraph, to telephone, and then to computers. But it’s only over the past 10 or 15 years that our capabilities have allowed us to communicate so seamlessly that we can actually build pretty robust and 3-dimensional relationships – including work relationships – with people we never meet in person…

Grazed from StartupSmart. Author: John Russell.

In my most recent article for Bluewire Media, I argued Steve Jobs was possibly the greatest pull marketer of our time and his influence on cloud computing. It’s funny to me how a lot of the things we use today were conceptualised from the mind of one man. From touch-screen smart phones with beautiful interfaces, to desktop computers with numerous fonts – Jobs’ influence on the idea of the cloud is no different.

The only difference is that I believe if Steve Jobs was still around today to advocate the cloud we would be further along with cloud infrastructure than where we are currently. Why? Jobs commercialised these “crazy” ideas. He validated them by making them not just ideas, but reality. He made them cool…

Grazed from Quartsoft. Author: Editorial Staff.

Many of us are now not only familiar with the concept of cloud computing, but are using it in our daily personal or work lives. For those not familiar with it, cloud computing is the transfer and use of data to a location that exists virtually, versus storing and using that data on a computer’s hard drive or other physical source.

Along with its many benefits, cloud computing is also available in more than one form. Which form is chosen will depend on how you intend to use it. There are three cloud computing models, which are SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. All three types are delivered in four ways, which are publicly, privately, via a community or in a hybrid cloud…

Grazed from Aveksa. Author: PR Announcement.

Aveksa, Inc., the provider of the industry’s most comprehensive Business-Driven Identity and Access Management platform, today announced that it has expanded the deployment of its cloud-based Identity and Access Management solutions by partnering with GuidePoint Security, a leading provider of customized information security services specializing in cloud, mobile and application security.

“Aveksa’s cloud-based IAM solutions provide these enterprises with the ability to not only manage applications in the cloud, but also manage the IAM process using its SaaS offering. By doing so, these companies will have more secure and efficient cloud initiatives.” Aveksa recently announced a number of cloud-related IAM offerings, including MyAccessLive, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Identity and Access Management solution. MyAccessLive provides integrated visibility and control of both cloud and on-premise applications in a single cloud-based solution. With built-in Single Sign-On capabilities, MyAccessLive helps companies ensure that user access to all applications is easy, appropriate and properly managed…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: CJ Arlotta and Joe Panettieri.

Airlock is pitching a new Secure Cloud Platform to start-up businesses and web and app developers that are seeking an easy, secure platform for building and running WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, LAMP, Magento and Ruby on Rails applications. The big question: How can Airlock stand out in a big crowd of cloud services providers?

According to a company press release, the Secure Cloud Platform provides customers and developers with a turn-key environment that features firewalls, malware scanning, vulnerability monitoring, log monitoring, and more. CTO Austin Saucier built the system; COO Peter Lanier oversees marketing and business operations; Communications Director Amanda Lanier oversees community relations…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Chris Talbot.

CliQr Technologies has added a new set of features around performance and manageability to support mission-critical cloud computing in the latest version of its CloudCenter solution. CloudCenter 2.0 is also being targeted at cloud services providers—and cloud providers in general—to make it easier for them to migrate customers’ applications to private and public clouds.

CloudCenter 2.0 was designed to make it easy for cloud services providers to manage private and public cloud deployments for a variety of applications and to support different use cases such as cloud-based disaster recovery and public development and test environments. With the Vendor Edition of the product, cloud services providers can "progressively retain and repurpose intellectual property from one client engagement to another by publishing applications and application templates to an established repository." Basically, do it once and then reuse templates—a process a lot of vendors and partners have turned to make things as simple as possible in an increasingly complex IT environment…

Grazed from Wired.  Author: Robert McMillin.

New York startup DigitalOcean says that its cloud server platform may be leaking data between its customers.  The company aims to fix this problem, but the snafu preys on many of the fears that so often prevent people from moving to cloud services — shared online services that provide instant access to computing resources, including processing power and storage space.

A low-cost competitor to giants such as RackSpace and Amazon, DigitalOcean sells cheap computing power to web developers who want to get their sites up and running for as little as $5 per month. But it turns out that some of those customers — those who were buying the $40 per month or $80 per month plans, for example — aren’t necessarily getting their data wiped when they cancel their service. And some of that data is viewable to other customers…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview.  Author: Gladys Rama.

Version 2.0 CloudPortal Business Manager, Citrix’s cloud services delivery platform, was released last week.  Citrix acquired CloudPortal Business Manager, along with the CloudPlatform cloud orchestration layer, two years ago when the company purchased CloudStack software provider Cloud.com. CloudPortal Business Manager 2.0 is the first time the product has been updated since Citrix acquired it, according to Tom McCafferty, senior director of product marketing within Citrix’s Coud Platforms Group.

"CloudPortal Business Manager is kind of a self-service or management overlay that sits on top of our CloudPlatform orchestration system. That’s what it was originally designed to do," McCafferty explained in a briefing. "It was for cloud service providers, building an Infrastructure as a Service [IaaS] cloud, who needed a way to deliver that service to their end users. And they needed a way to connect that service on the back end of their business to meter and bill it."…

Grazed from I.T. News Online.  Author: PR Announcement.

CloudSigma, an international, customer-centric, pure-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, today announced at SNW Spring 2013 that it’s upgrading its public cloud storage offering to an all solid-state drive (SSD) solution, powered by SolidFire. Abandoning magnetic-based, hard-disk drive (HDD) storage altogether due to its inability to keep pace with the randomized, multi-tenant access of a public cloud, CloudSigma’s new, all-SSD offering enables companies to realize the scalability, flexibility and cost-savings advantages of a public cloud while ensuring the reliability and performance of their storage.

"With SolidFire’s SSD technology, we have radically improved the performance of our entire cloud," said Robert Jenkins, CloudSigma CEO and co-founder. "After pioneering public cloud SSD technology two years ago, we have seen the value of SSD’s ability to successfully remove storage bottlenecks and inconsistent performance in the cloud for critical systems and applications, especially when backed by an SLA. And now with SolidFire, we expect to see even greater performance improvements and growth for our customers."…

Grazed from SaaSAddict. Author: Omri Erel.

SaaS integration is becoming increasingly prevalent in the business world. The 21st century has finally taken true hold on the world, and the digital environment is now in the forefront of daily life. As a result, digital services have become an integral part of the business atmosphere as well. Everything is handled by computers, from accounting, to ordering, maintenance and finances. Increasingly, communication and customer transactions are entirely digital.

For business, this started early, before SaaS integration was even an issue. Businesses used computers first, after the government. Finances became some of the first uses of modems, and are still the main users of this arcane medieval form of connectivity as well…