Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Caroline Craig.

Nothing is certain in this world except death and taxes — and lots of cloud outages.  The week started badly for Google Drive users as the cloud-based service for storing documents, videos, and Google Docs was down for several hours Monday. Users vented on social networks over their frustration, with one user tweeting, "Google Drive now back up like a limp horse struggling to move." Google moved quickly to acknowledge the issue on its Apps Status Dashboard but did not say what caused the problem or how many were affected.

On Wednesday, it was LinkedIn’s turn to roll over and play dead. Users hoping to reach out and connect via the social media network were greeted with a 503 error "Service Unavailable" message. The website suffered intermittent service disruptions throughout the morning, knocked out for about 45 minutes, got back up for 30 minutes, then experienced a second service disruption. To date, there’s been no word from LinkedIn on why the outage occurred…

Grazed from Motley Fool.  Author: Tim Beyers.

When it comes to storing most of our online entertainment, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG  ) and its Drive file system isn’t top dog. Neither is Microsoft‘s (NASDAQ: MSFT  ) SkyDrive or Amazon.com‘s (NASDAQ: AMZN  ) Cloud Drive. The winner? Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL  ) , says a new report from Strategy Analytics.

The survey asked respondents which digital locker services they use to store music or video. iCloud and iTunes topped the list with 27% using Apple’s services. Surprisingly, Dropbox ranked second, two percentage points ahead of Cloud Drive…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

For three in four IT security professionals, bring your own device (BYOD) is one of the “greatest inhibitors to effective cloud security”. That’s the result from a new report by AccelOps. Talking to 176 IT security personnel, the results put BYOD ahead of data control and data loss – traditional topics for cloud security worriers – as the main security threat.

Other cloud security pain points according to the research included enforcing security policies, compliance reporting and employee training; yet given data breaches and data loss were the top two security threats released by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) last month, this may be something of a surprise…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Google Drive, the cloud storage and applications suite used by millions at home and at work, has suffered three service interruptions this week, making it impossible at times for affected users to access their files and applications. As logged in the official Google Apps Status site, the first incident happened on Monday, and was an outage that lasted about three hours and affected 33 percent of Google Drive user requests.

Affected users got error messages, long load times and timeouts, according to an incident report posted on Wednesday. This problem was triggered by a bug in the Google network’s control software, which caused the system to shift traffic over to unaffected network connections and servers. Unfortunately, this traffic load-balancing increased latency in the servers and caused another glitch, this time in the software that manages Drive user connections and sessions, causing the access problems…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

While database software such as Oracle or MySQL has been available for some time on Amazon Web Services, only a handful of cases exist where a customer may go to a service provider and get a scalable, NoSQL database as a service. A predecessor service meeting that description is Amazon Web Services’ DynamoDB, which is still a beta offering.

Joyent is a San Francisco infrastructure-as-a-service provider that has marched to a different drumbeat from its entry into the cloud market. The firm’s staff includes Sun Solaris expertise and it builds infrastructure based on an open source derivative of Solaris that it calls SmartOS. Gartner has put Joyent in its "challenger’s" quadrant for the cloud marketplace…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cyber Innovation Labs and NEC have partnered to deploy the next generation of Big Data solutions. Using Cyber Innovations Labs’ Cloud in a Vault (CiaV) offering and NEC’s Nblock integrated IT infrastructure, the two companies are aiming to help enterprises deploy Big Data solutions.

IaaS provider Cyber Innovation Labs’ CiaV offering is a dedicated, fully managed and scalable private cloud that takes NEC’s Nblock IT infrastructure and combines it with security, compliance and monitoring in a hosted environment. According to the two companies, this enables organizations to "quickly and easily align business projects with infrastructure costs by allowing them to consume only the infrastructure they need, incurring only monthly operational expenses and zero capital expenses for equipment."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

Following its acquisition of Game Minion last year, mobile development tool maker Corona Labs has rebranded and relaunched the service as Corona Cloud. Company co-founder and CEO Walter Luh calls Corona Cloud "mobile backend-as-a-service."

MBaaS? It’s awkward as an acronym, but increasingly popular as a business model. Selling software runs the risk of competing with a less expensive or free open source option. And then you have to upgrade your software periodically to continue generating revenue. But cloud services bring in regular revenue and benefit from the lock-in of inertia and the pain of rewriting code. What’s more, mobile app developers tend to see value in services that accelerate and simplify the creation and maintenance of apps…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Rachel King.

To encourage and speed up cloud deployments, Rackspace is launching a new service for IT professionals, dubbed the Open Cloud Academy. The San Antonio-based company pointed towards a recent survey it commissioned as part of the motivation behind the new academic venture.

Researchers found that found out of the 1,300 companies surveyed, more than half of them acknowledged that their cloud deployments are being hampered by a shortage of cloud computing skills. Specifically, approximately two thirds (66 percent) of them replied they are looking to increase their IT skill strength to meet cloud demands…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Jeff Vance.

More than 10,500 people cast votes for their favorite cloud startups. But before we get on to our final rankings, a bit of background on the voting process: Unfortunately, a couple of frisky engineers decided to try to hijack the vote with a few automated bot ballot-box stuffers, so some votes had to be purged. When the startups who most likely scripted the bots were contacted, the management teams appeared genuinely shocked.

The CEOs involved tracked down the script writers quickly, reprimanded them and threw their startups at the mercy of the court.
We kept them on the list, because iIn the grand scheme of things, trying to hijack online voting isn’t a capital offense. It’s a misdemeanor, but enough of one to get you dropped down the list significantly…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Michael Endler.

The variety of cheap and attractive cloud options continues to grow. But according to a Strategy Analytics study released Thursday, the U.S. market is being dominated by major companies with developed ecosystems. The report found that Apple, whose fusion between services and hardware has largely set the standard for such ecosystems, is leading the field, followed by Dropbox, Amazon and Google.

Strategy Analytics examined almost 2300 connected devices and concluded that Apple’s iCloud and iTunes Match services accounted for 27% of users. The other players boasting a double-digit usage share were Dropbox with 17%, Amazon Cloud Drive with 15% and Google Drive with 10%. No other competitors claimed more than 4% of the field…