Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Newvem, the Israeli and San Francisco cloud-monitoring startup, has brought a graphic way of viewing workloads in the Amazon cloud into quick focus. Its recently released Utilization Heat Map service can show utilization levels of an individual server, a group of servers or aggregated workloads in a color-coded map.

Amazon Web Services’ CloudWatch service also shows utilization levels, particularly if a customer plugs certain data from Amazon’s own monitoring system into the CloudWatch dashboard or chooses to chart parts of it. But Newvem has organized the flow of data on a server’s operation into a Cloud Capacity Utilization Heat Map that analyzes it and comes up with a projection of what servers, or group of servers, are being heavily, moderately or lightly utilized…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Walter Bailey.

With an increasing number of people getting involved in the world of technology, there are significant security issues that need to be considered as well. The involvement of different departments in this is thought to change the overall trend of the entire marketplace. The way these virtual techniques are replacing the traditional hardware is something that might grow of concern to the governments of countries as they strive to maintain high levels of security.

What Are Some Of The Issues To consider In 2013 Regarding Cloud Computing?

There are a number of predictions that have been made about cloud computing for the year 2013, which include:

Cloud computing structures would become something of national importance in the years to come. This would mean that the governments would have to include considerations for these structures in their level of operations because of the negative impacts that cloud computing might have. There can be numerous disruptions within the cloud computing initiatives such as attacks on the service providers of the cloud computing managers…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Rachel Dines.

What do cloud gateways, emergency communications tools, and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) all have in common? All are changing the way businesses run their continuity programs. The products that make up the business technology resiliency market landscape historically have been fragmented and ill-defined, despite the fact that the products share a common mission: improving uptime. Although no organization is bullet proof, understanding the business value of these technologies and where they fit into your environment is key to enabling the always-on, always-available extended enterprise.

To help you develop your strategy for business technology resiliency for the next few years, Forrester has identified eight disruptive technologies that infrastructure & operations (I&O) professionals must keep on their watch list for 2013 and beyond. They are file sync and mobile access, cloud-to-cloud backup, cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) services, cloud gateways and connectors, continuity automation, hypervisor replication, virtualized continuity tools, and automated communication and notification tools. Consider how each of these might factor into your plans:…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

TribeHR, the social HR pioneer, today announced the new TribeHR SuiteApp, built using NetSuite’s SuiteCloud Computing Platform. The new SuiteApp is the first social human resources management software for use with NetSuite, enabling customers to manage the entire employee lifecycle through a powerful core human resource information system (HRIS). This system tracks time off and work history, and offers advanced talent management with 360-degree feedback and public recognition, and a social applicant tracking system (ATS) with integrations to LinkedIn and Facebook. With NetSuite and the TribeHR SuiteApp, businesses can now manage their entire business from one integrated cloud solution: finance, sales, service, fulfillment, and now for the first time, human resources.

"We’re excited to be a NetSuite SuiteCloud Developer Network partner and to develop the first end-to-end HR solution designed specifically for NetSuite customers," said Joseph Fung, CEO of TribeHR. "The TribeHR SuiteApp brings a whole new set of capabilities to NetSuite customers, allowing them to not only gain greater insight into their organization, but giving them the critical tools needed to motivate, retain and engage one of their most valuable assets – their employees."…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

The decision over whether to move your organization’s IT to the cloud can be a daunting one. After all, it means a wholesale change in the sourcing and delivery of IT products and services. However, many companies are making the leap, at least for select capabilities—a recent by CDW of 1,242 IT professionals found that more than half of organizations are moving a variety of capabilities to the cloud. And a majority of them are recognizing cost savings and increased profits, according to another study by Rackspace Hosting.

"The findings were pretty telling in terms of the adoption of cloud computing and the benefits of cloud computing," says John Engates, CTO of Rackspace Hosting. "The bottom line is cloud saves companies money and increases their profits." Rackspace, in conjunction with the Manchester Business School and Vanson Bourne, recently conducted a survey of 1,300 companies in the U.K. and U.S., supplemented by qualitative telephone interviews by the Manchester Business School with companies that used the cloud during December 2012 and January 2013…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

As cloud computing technology reaches a saturation point in North America many in the space are beginning to look at other markets to supplement growth prospects. According to IDC, the Middle East could be the next major market to adopt cloud computing. A recent report by IDC expects total spending on cloud delivery in Saudi Arabia to increase 34.86 percent year on year in 2012 with long term spending to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 49.7 percent between 2012 and 2016.

In a story published in the Saudi Gazette, Hamza Naqshbandi, senior research analyst for IT services with IDC Saudi Arabia said, “Organizations across the kingdom have traditionally preferred to manage their IT operations internally, however, there has been growing interest in outsourcing models, with organizations increasingly using hosting and managed services. This growing adoption of outsourcing services is seen as a first step toward moving to a cloud-based model, as companies become more comfortable with the concept of remote services delivery.”…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

In my days as CTO of a technology company, I often received outside advice as to how I could improve my technology. A new set of eyes is a good thing, and often the recommendations were solid ideas I implemented to improve the product.

It appears that some cloud providers, such as Google, are also open to suggestions, as Phys.org reports: "Computer scientists at the University of California at San Diego, and Google have developed a novel approach that allows the massive infrastructure powering cloud computing to run more efficiently. The new approach can make these warehouse-scale computers run as much as 15 to 20 percent more efficiently." The scholars analyzed a bunch of Google Web services, including Gmail and search, and performed two basic steps:

• Gathered live data from the Google cloud in real time
• Analyzed that data on an isolated server…

Grazed from MITNews. Author: Larry Hardesty.

For many companies, moving their web-application servers to the cloud is an attractive option, since cloud-computing services can offer economies of scale, extensive technical support and easy accommodation of demand fluctuations. But for applications that depend heavily on database queries, cloud hosting can pose as many problems as it solves. Cloud services often partition their servers into “virtual machines,” each of which gets so many operations per second on a server’s central processing unit, so much space in memory, and the like.

That makes cloud servers easier to manage, but for database-intensive applications, it can result in the allocation of about 20 times as much hardware as should be necessary. And the cost of that overprovisioning gets passed on to customers. MIT researchers are developing a new system called DBSeer that should help solve this problem and others, such as the pricing of cloud services and the diagnosis of application slowdowns…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., a unit of Oppenheimer Holdings OPY -0.94% , held its sixth annual Cloud Computing/Services One-on-One Conference on March 6, 2013. Eleven public companies and one private venture discussed cutting-edge information on advanced telecommunications with approximately 75 institutional clients in a One-on-One and small group meeting format.

This year’s conference was hosted by Oppenheimer’s leading Research Analysts covering this sector: Timothy K. Horan, CFA, Managing Director and Senior Analyst heading up the Communications and Cloud Services research team; Shaul Eyal, Managing Director and Senior Analyst covering the Communications, Security and Infrastructure Software sectors; and Brian Schwartz, Managing Director and Senior Analyst covering the SaaS/Applications Software space…

Grazed from FierceGovernmentIT. Author: David Perera.

Cloud computing adoption within the Defense Department will require establishment of clear security mandates, says a report from a Defense Science Board task force. The report (.pdf), dated January 2013, says among the mandates the DoD chief information officer and the Defense Information Systems Agency could establish include aspects of trusted computing such as hypervisor attestation to assure that it hasn’t been corrupted, cryptographic sealing and "strong virtual machine isolation."

Data at rest should be stored in encrypted form with keys protected using a hardware attestation "such as a trusted platform module" and data in transit should likewise be encrypted with hardware-attested keys, the report says…