Grazed from EUObserver. Author: Benjamin Fox.

Industry lobbyists have downgraded EU countries in their world ranking of top performers on cloud computing, as the Union prepares to overhaul its data protection rules. Japan, Australia and the US are top of the cloud computing class, according to the Cloud Scoreboard, published on Thursday (7 March) by the Business Software Alliance, an international lobby group.

Four EU countries – Germany, France, the UK and Italy – are in the top 10. But all six EU nations featured in the study have lost ground. Italy and Spain were the biggest fallers, slipping back by four and two places in the rankings, respectively…

Grazed from NewsWire.ca.  Author: PR Announcement.

In a first-ever analysis of the shifting international policy landscape for cloud computing, a new study ranks Canada nine out of 24 leading IT economies, a sign of improvement from its starting position of 12 a year earlier.

BSA | The Software Alliance evaluated national laws and regulations in seven policy areas critical to the development of a globally integrated cloud marketplace. The findings released today in the 2013 BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard build on a first edition of the study, published in early 2012…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Patrick Thibodeau.

IBM’s announcement this week that it would base its cloud services on OpenStack may help establish the open-source platform as the standard in enterprises. IBM along with Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco, Red Hat and Rackspace, which helped developed the platform, are supporting OpenStack.

This means that just about every Fortune 1000 company will be using vendors that are building products and services based on the OpenStack-based cloud platform. Considering that OpenStack is less than three years old, this may be remarkable. The rapid rise of OpenStack may not have happened without NASA. That may be worth noting, especially in a time of government sequesters, budget cutting and retreats on R&D spending…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

An important industry forum, the Canada Cloud Network, is launching an exciting R&D program: Always On Cloud Computing. The initiative will enable Canada to become a world leader in the global Cloud computing sector.

Recent downtime incidents from giant Cloud providers and lack of effective SLAs, highlight that despite the advances in underlying technologies, operating critical IT infrastructure in a single data centre still presents a major risk of a catastrophic failure that can endanger customer relationships and ultimately lead to business failure…

Grazed from DataCenter Dynamics. Author: Editorial Staff.

Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine, is pushing the boundary of data center design with its cloud computing data centers. By integrating new hardware technologies including ARM-based servers, custom-designed all-in-one racks, 10Gb top-of-rack (TOR) switches and self-designed Solid State Disks (SSD), Baidu is boosting the performance of its cloud computing data centers. And it says it expects such efforts will lay the foundations for the technology benchmark for China’s internet data centers (IDC) of the future.

Self-designed 10Gb TOR switch

Baidu deployed a self-designed 10Gb TOR switch on over 5,000 servers in one of its cloud computing data centers. It is a server cluster which is believed to be the largest 10Gb TOR based cluster in the local market. By using self-designed hardware and software, an original design manufactured module, as well as DAC (direct attached cable), the cost of Baidu’s 10Gb TOR is almost the same as the commercial 1Gb TOR switches, Baidu said. Baidu started its research and development on the design of TOR switches in 2011 and launched first generation 10Gb TOR switch in 2012…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

SaaS adoption came from the bottom up. Salespeople within enterprises needed a useful CRM system, and instead of begging IT, they used their own credit cards to purchase a Salesforce.com subscription. Eventually, IT figured out Salesforce.com was pervasive in the enterprise and took over the implementation, settling on the strategy by default.

These days it’s the same story around cloud-based file sharing, email, office automation applications, and even larger-scale options such as mass storage and compute services from IaaS and PaaS providers. We seem to be OK with users and developers figuring out the cloud, then IT coming in and making sense of the arrangements…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Krishan Lal Khatri.

Cloud computing is gaining popularity since last few years. It is a computing model that uses shared infrastructure to provide computing resources to companies dynamically over a cloud, such as internet. It enables companies to use data storage, software applications, and computer processing power owned and maintained by cloud service providers through the internet or proprietary network of the service provider. The cloud computing services are broadly divided into three categories:

1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

2. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

3. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Alternatively, some providers use some different nomenclature, e.g. Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) for IaaS and only SaaS for later two categories…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: N. Nataraj.

Wipro Technologies today announced the launch of the Wipro AssureHealth platform in partnership with Microsoft. This is primarily targeted at healthcare providers to deliver innovative solutions for Remote Fetal Monitoring and Cardiac Care that will ensure high quality treatment at reduced costs, especially for chronic diseases.

The Wipro AssureHealth platform leverages Microsoft’s Cloud, Mobility and Analytics offerings to allow care providers to monitor patients regularly and precisely. This is done through hosted services and mobile apps that integrate medical devices, IT Infrastructure and 24/7 customer support, to deliver highly scalable solutions. This is a value based service aimed at revolutionizing user experience like never before…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

OpenStack Summit 2013 is set to start April 15 in Portland, Ore. The open source platform seems to be gaining momentum with cloud services providers (CSPs). IBM (NYSE: IBM) has just placed a huge bet on OpenStack. Plus, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) have each built their public clouds on the emerging software platform.

Some folks think today’s OpenStack is a lot like Linux from a decade ago — destined to emerge as a de facto standard for the next generation of computing. But in reality, OpenStack faces plenty of challenges. As Talkin’ Cloud looks ahead to the conference, I hope the OpenStack community addresses these five issues head-on:…

Grazed from NewsWise.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

In their new book, Cloud Computing Service and Deployment Models: Layers and Management, two professors from the University of Baltimore’s Merrick School of Business present a cohesive, highly effective way for businesses large and small to find the answers. Co-authors Alberto M. Bento and Anil K. Aggarwal, both professors of information systems in the school’s Department of Information Systems and Decision Science, have gathered experts from several disciplines to consider how business can best manage and take advantage of the opportunities stemming from this unprecedented growth in information resources. The relatively straightforward solution to the problem, they say, is cloud computing.

Cloud computing is a term that has had its time in the spotlight, as so many ideas and concepts in the world of technology do. But it remains an approach beyond the grasp of many ordinary users of computers and the Internet. The earlier applications allowed data—whether they’re for music, documents, spreadsheets, photos, even the dreaded cat video—to be stored elsewhere, in a secured, dedicated environment. While somebody else maintains this information, the user is free to move from laptop to mobile device to tablet to virtually anything else that can "see" the Internet, and pull down the needed data from the cloud at will. The user is only a login and password away from accessing what he or she needs, and his or her computer hardware and network can work fast and efficiently without all of that "baggage" stored locally…