Grazed from TriplePundit. Author: Harry Stevens.

Salesforce has announced an ambitious goal to fully power its data centers with renewable energy. The software-as-a-service company that Bloomberg Businessweek recently called “a cloud computing king” announced last week that it is “committing to work to steadily increase the amount of renewable energy we use in our data center operations, to reach our goal to be fully powered by renewable energy.”

The company will take a number of steps this year to begin making its data centers more sustainably powered. The company will research energy efficient data center technology and encourage its energy providers to increase the supply of renewable energy. The company will also convene peers, sustainability specialists and energy experts around data center energy issues…

Grazed from BBC. Author: Mark Ward.

The word cloud evokes images of all things soft and gentle; the kiss of a kitten or the soft touch of a lambswool mitten. While that might be true of clouds in the real world, those in cyberspace are turning out to be very different entities indeed, especially when it comes to security. Some of them are downright dangerous.

The captivating idea behind using a "cloud" of computers is that it does away with having a dedicated data centre. Instead, companies get their number crunching done by a benevolent source of computational power that sits out there, somewhere, anywhere, on the net. It’s the word cloud itself that is responsible for making this sound much more ephemeral than it actually is, said Martin Borrett, IBM’s cloud security adviser…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Krishan Lal Khatri.

Experts have started to believe that 2013 is going to be the year when enterprises are likely to cease worrying about cloud related security issues, and the market will see increasing popularity of cloud services. These speculations are based on industry surveys conducted by many reputable market analysts and technology reviews. It is predicted that year 2013 will witness growing popularity of hosted services and solutions, and more companies to migrate their prime IT assets to the cloud as they see more returns from cloud technologies.

The leading cloud computing trends for the current year are summarized below:

Cloud will remain popular platform for collaboration
Surveys suggest that enterprises will continue to use cloud for collaborative tasks such as application development, online communication, and software testing. Google and Amazon to remain leading collaboration service providers among public clouds…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

Ah, Amazon — did Jeff Bezos choose that name to symbolize the largest bookstore in the world or did he realize that he would one day create an enterprise cloud service that was as large and complex as the river basin? After spending some time with his enterprise infrastructure service, I think he saw this coming.

Selling servers by the hour was a bold idea when the Amazon cloud business launched a few years ago, but it seems quaint compared to all the options for sale today. There are currently 21 products available on Amazon Web Services, and only one of them is the classic EC2 machine, an abbreviation of the full name, the Elastic Compute Cloud. The original S3 (Simple Storage Service) now has cousins like the Simple Workflow Service and SimpleDB, a nonrelational data store. Then there are odder innovations like Amazon Glacier, a very cheap storage solution that takes hours to retrieve the data. Yes, hours. Not milliseconds, not seconds, not minutes — but hours…

Grazed from Abiquo. Author: PR Announcement.

Service provider Abiquo has launched a new interface that will do for cloud computing what the World Wide Web did for the Internet, it has claimed. Abiquo’s EverythinQ will integrate its software with third-party infrastructure components used for cloud operation and management. This, it claimed, will let businesses manage everything from a unified platform and make IT managers ‘get’ the cloud.

EverythinQ EveryWare

The launch is a response to massive customer demand for an easy interface, according to Abiquo, which surveyed a sample of IT managers in order to quantify its feedback. The main finding was that 84percent of IT managers are yet to make the most of cloud computing, because 78 percent of them find the cloud set up too ‘convoluted’ and in need of a single point of control. The upshot was that 66 percent of them find resources cannot be automatically allocated…

Grazed from PhysBizTech. Author: Doug Pollack.

Cloud computing manages data, secures it and makes it available when and wherever needed. No wonder the cloud is attractive to organizations burdened with time and budget constraints. But the cloud is not without its risks. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) recently released its “Notorious nine,” a list of the top threats associated with cloud computing. At the top of the charts for 2013: data breaches. With this threat at the forefront, healthcare organizations should determine when, if ever, is an optimal time for placing protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII) in the cloud.

Caught in the crosshairs?
The cloud offers a “target-rich environment” for those looking to mount cyber attacks, with the intent of either disrupting commerce or more typically monetizing the data through criminal means. It’s logical to assume that cloud providers are better qualified to secure data, given that their job is to provide computing services in a safe and secure manner…

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Claire Miller and Quentin Hardy.

In a battle for dominance in cloud computing, Google is taking on Microsoft and Amazon in their own back yard. Google said Tuesday that it was doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, and stepping up the hiring of engineers and others who work on cloud technology.

It is part of Google’s dive into a business known as cloud services — renting to other businesses access to its enormous data storage and computing power, accessible by the Internet. In cloud computing, dozens or even thousands of computer servers are joined to create a giant machine capable of handling many tasks at once, from storing data to running Web sites and mobile apps to tackling complicated analytical problems…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Rick Whiting.

Just what is the role of distributors — and the solution providers they serve — in an IT industry that’s increasingly focused on cloud computing? That was the question posed to representatives of the leading distributors during a Q&A session at UBM Tech Channel’s XChange Solution Provider conference this week. The answers: Distributors see themselves as fulfilling a number of solution providers needs in a cloud-focused world, from managing cloud service logistics to helping the channel evaluate the true value of vendor offerings.

As cloud computing becomes more prevalent, there’s been increased talk of "disintermediation" between vendors, distributors and solution providers, raising the question of the role distributors will play in this new world. A prime example is Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)’s Office 365 cloud application set. While Microsoft initially sold the service direct to customers, with channel partners serving in a consultative and supporting role under the "Advisor" program, the vendor recently launched the Office 365 Open program under which partners can buy the service through distributors and sell it to their customers…

Grazed from The Globe and Mail. Author: Editorial Staff.

Most Canadians know something about cloud computing – our Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail accounts are all sitting on a virtual server somewhere – but businesses have been slow to adopt this technology. A 2012 Bank of Montreal report found that half of all business owners weren’t familiar with cloud computing, while only 10 per cent of companies planned to use it.

Wayne Ingram, managing director of technology for Accenture Canada, says it’s only a matter of time until those numbers tick upward. Storing information on a virtual server, rather than on servers stored in the office basement, is cheaper and more efficient. And with people working on multiple devices and from disparate locations, logging on to a network with a VPN key, or encryption key, isn’t practical any more. Mr. Ingram told us how companies can adopt cloud-based software, what’s holding people back and where this technology will go in the future…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

Seeing skeptical CIOs agree to cloud-based pilots of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other applications is evidence of how cloud computing is slowly winning the trust war. Further evidence can be seen from how skeptical many of these CIOs initially were, and how successful pilots led to their gradual trust.

This trust hasn’t come cheap however. Every one of these CIOs spoken with, across a range of manufacturing companies, learned that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) aren’t sufficient to manage the areas of security, privacy and confidentiality on their own. Cloud computing vendors have used SLAs as a means to imply security standards are met; one CIO told me he had an audit done to see if the SLA targets promised were realistic. They weren’t and he moved on to another vendor…