Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Spanning Cloud Apps has tripled its funding after an undisclosed investor led the company’s latest round of financing. The developer of Spanning Backup for Google Apps has added another $6 million to its coffers to build out its direct sales team and its reseller channel. Existing investor Foundry Group of Boulder, Colo., participated in the Series B funding, which has brought the total raised funds for Spanning Cloud up to $9 million.

"We’ve spent the last two years building the best backup system on the planet for the millions of businesses that use Google Apps," said Charlie Wood, CEO and founder of Spanning, in a prepared statement. "This infusion of capital will allow us to accelerate the buildout of our direct sales team and reseller channel, while extending the product lead we’ve established over our competitors. It also provides us with an important strategic partner."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Joe Masters Emison.

On March 13, Netflix announced $100,000 in prize money for the developers who do the most to improve its open source tools for controlling and managing application deployments on cloud computing. Before spearheading this contest, Netflix’s cloud architect, Adrian Cockcroft, released many internal Netflix tools as open source. Currently, 8 cloud-architecture-specific tools are available from Netflix, and Cockcroft has been very open in sharing his and Netflix’s knowledge in public forms.

In theory, all of this should be wonderful. In reality, however, it’s likely to leave cloud computing with an enormous hangover of subpar practices and architectures for years to come. Netflix is the poster child for "Cloud Computing v1.0" and demonstrates both the enormous benefits and troubling problems. Cloud Computing v1.0 is a strictly an Amazon Web Services affair — it was first, and no other provider had the core features necessary to build comparable applications (think multiple availability zones and EBS with snapshots and quick restores). So it makes sense that Netflix embraced AWS; it saw huge benefits in being able to deploy and scale its service using the interfaces and architectures that were possible when AWS launched…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Jaroslav Cerny.

One of the many areas where services are beginning to move towards the cloud is in the database, as cloud providers, either public or private, can remove many of the time-consuming tasks around installing, configuring and provisioning the database. These roles are typically assigned to the database administrator (DBA), and one of the questions this raises is around the future of DBAs and their role in a cloud environment.

While cloud providers may take on a large proportion of the mundane tasks associated with the database, this by no means negates the position of the DBA. Instead, it allows the DBA to move from a tactical position to more of a strategic role, focusing on tasks that will add value to the business rather than being exclusively assigned to the day-to-day maintenance and running of infrastructure. For many reasons, the role of the DBA will continue to be an important one in the cloud environment, but DBAs need to be prepared for a shift from a highly technical role, to one that adds greater business value down the line, says Jaroslav Cerny, CEO at RDB Consulting…

Grazed from Delimeter. Author: Editorial Staff.

When many people come up against the term “risk” in the context of IT projects, they immediately reach for the telephone to call for their IT security experts. Risk, to many people, means the risk of data loss; in this sense, focusing on security has often been a logical proxy for more comprehensive IT risk management strategies. However, the moves which many organisations are currently undertaking as they embrace cloud computing technologies for substantial cost reductions, performance improvements and greater scalability in their IT operations have made many IT professionals aware that such definitions of risk are not always comprehensive enough to meet their needs.

The fundamental promise of cloud computing technology is that it allows organisations to externalise many of the resources previously managed within their own operations. However, unlike traditional outsourcing, which has typically been provided by one or multiple suppliers, cloud computing involves a broad range of suppliers whose varying approaches to security, governance, resilience, availability and privacy create a level of uncertainty for organisations. This creates perceived risk…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Saad Shahzad.

In addition to the legions of cloud provider startups carving out their places in market, major technology companies such as VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Google and Apple have also made a big push into cloud services. But after so many high-profile blunders last year, providers have to overcome customers’ concerns to gain mainstream traction in 2013.

Apple’s iCloud has had its share of problems, for example, and even cloud provider giants such as Amazon have struggled to ensure uptime for their cloud services, causing big customers such as Netflix, Instagram, Heroku and Pinterest to suffer outages. Amazon had a particularly tough year in 2012 with a number of cloud failures, some even causing permanent data loss to its customers. To find out whether the cloud market can still succeed in light of such major missteps, we have to take a deeper look into some cloud computing issues getting in the way of adoption…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Patrick Burke.

Symantec recently took a stroll down memory lane to revisit the first seeds of cloud computing that took hold more than a half-century ago. Symantec created an interactive timeline that illustrates the history of cloud computing, highlighting just how far the technology has progressed.

The interactive map, however, does more than just recall the roots of cloud computing; it provides an opportunity to look ahead as well. Symantec has plans to help usher in an era of safe, agile and efficient cloud computing. It recently outlined a strategy to get there, which includes providing companies with a variety of cloud solutions to address their specific needs and current IT environments, according to an article on CMSWire.com…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

According to the latest report published by Strategy Analytics, Apple is moving ahead of competitors Dropbox, Google and Amazon in the battle for cloud storage supremacy. Over a quarter (27%) of Americans polled said they had used iCloud, compared with 17% for Dropbox, with Amazon Cloud Drive (15%) and Google Drive (10%) trailing behind. Interestingly, over half of respondents (55%) had never used a cloud storage service, but 33% had first used one within the past week.

The report noted the key battleground in the cloud storage wars was music, with nine in 10 users storing music, although movie content has the potential to become a huge player in the space. “The growth of video streaming and the desire to access content via a growing range of devices will see services such as the Hollywood-backed digital movie initiative Ultraviolet – currently used by 4% of Americans – increase market share,” noted Strategy Analytics’ Ed Barton in a prepared statement…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey Nelson.

Cloud computing’s adoption in the enterprise has been primarily driven by personal use. People are now accustomed to being able to access their personal email and documents from all devices and at all times. So it only makes sense we should be able to do this with our work content!

As I’m sure if you’re reading this article, you’re already with me. It’s not you I have to convince, but it’s you who has to convince your CEO. But I’m guessing if you aren’t there already, he’s a huge skeptic. So how do you persuade him/her otherwise? Here are 5 steps to convince your CEO 0n cloud computing:…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

WBUR is reporting a new proposal to tax cloud computing services as part of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s fiscal 2014 plan to boost state spending by $1.9 billion. Included in the budget is a $265 million line item that if accepted will see sales taxes expanded to include broadly worded “canned software.”

The tax would cover custom-designed software and services hosted on the Internet (aka The Cloud). “Custom” software includes the design and custom development of Web sites, so the cost to local businesses of a new Web site could increase by 4.5%…

Grazed from ProfitBricks. Author: PR Announcement.

ProfitBricks, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company that completely reengineered the delivery of cloud computing, today announced that Pete Johnson, senior director of platform evangelism at ProfitBricks, will present at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) on March 27 at 5 p.m. Johnson will discuss how ProfitBricks’ Cloud Computing 2.0 solution empowers gaming companies to implement lower-cost, higher performing back-end infrastructures.

During "Matching Your Costs to Your DAU: Thin Client Back-End Infrastructure Made Easy," Johnson will reveal how gaming companies no longer have to take on horizontal scaling, which is often more programmatically intense or a waste of resources. ProfitBricks offers per minute billing and live, vertical scaling without requiring a reboot, allowing users to add more CPU and RAM to existing virtual machines as DAU rises and remove them when no longer needed…