Grazed from TechTarget.  Author:  Lynn Haber.

Targeting VARs, systems integrators, managed service providers and cloud services providers, CSPcommunity, launched this week, is an online information and education site, and network of industry professionals devoted to helping partners with any level of cloud savvy learn how to build a robust cloud services practice and transition to a reoccurring revenue business model.

Started by high-tech sales and marketing veterans Todd Hussey and Dave Zwicker, co-founders and partners of Andover, Mass.-based MSPexcellence, a business building consultancy for managed services providers (MSPs) and cloud computing service providers, CSPcommunity offers three levels of membership, or business building models for becoming a cloud computing service provider (CSP): Silver, Gold and Platinum. The membership levels correspond to a variety of resources, from the fundamentals of learning what cloud means to a partner’s business, to transforming and operating a successful cloud service provider business…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Nathan Eddy.

While businesses have improved their practices around cloud computing security, there are continued concerns about organizations’ use of security best practices and their awareness of the cloud services used within their organizations, according to the "Security of Cloud Computing Users 2013" study commissioned by CA Technologies and research firm Ponemon Institute.

When compared to a previous study from 2010, the latest study, based on survey of 748 IT and IT security practitioners in the United States, indicated progress. However, the report pointed to conflicting views on who is most responsible for cloud security, with a bias toward end users and IT security “getting a pass.”  The study also cited conflicting views in the case of best practices, such as vetting services for security risk, engaging the security team in determining cloud service use and assessing how a cloud service could affect data security…

Grazed from ScienceDaily.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and Google have developed a novel approach that allows the massive infrastructure powering cloud computing as much as 15 to 20 percent more efficiently. This novel model has already been applied at Google. Researchers presented their findings at the IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture conference Feb. 23 to 27 in China.

Computer scientists looked at a range of Google web services, including Gmail and search. They used a unique approach to develop their model. Their first step was to gather live data from Google’s warehouse-scale computers as they were running in real time. Their second step was to conduct experiments with data in a controlled environment on an isolated server. The two-step approach was key, said Lingjia Tang and Jason Mars, faculty members in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud outages are never going to go away. The minute the IT downtime problem is solved, we’ll all have to find something else to complain about, after all. But still, unexpected cloud downtime remains one of the larger pain points skeptics point to when they get their hackles up regarding cloud computing. These same people seem to forget about the amount of downtime they experience within the four walls of their organizations—but there are IT people to blame at that point. The faceless cloud is something else. Still, cloud services fared well last year, according to research from RightScale, which recently released an infographic with all kinds of data points regarding cloud outages in 2012.

RightScale found that there were 27 notable publicly-reported cloud outages around the world. We reported on many of these outages on Talkin’ Cloud. Six of them were actually caused by Hurricane Sandy. However, when we’re talking about these outages, we’re included hosting providers, as well. Based on the RightScale information, 26 percent of outages in 2012 were private data centers, another 26 percent were public clouds, 7 percent were SaaS offerings, and 41 percent were hosting providers…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: James Morris.

The Internet, and indeed every business, runs on data – usually lots of it. Thanks to the proliferation of cloud-based services we discussed in the first feature in this series, that data could be all over the place, too. Keeping track of all this data, and ensuring that it is secure, is a major logistical nightmare. As we explained in an earlier feature focusing on Big Data, interlinked information and its analysis is also the next big revolution currently brewing in Web culture. In this feature we examine the issues of data growth, and look at some of the solutions available.

Reaching for the cloud store
In reality, cloud storage shouldn’t be about having some documents on a service like Google Drive and others stored locally, which is clearly a recipe for confusion. It should be about having your documents appear to be in the same place all the time – on whatever machine you are currently using – but also having them seamlessly and securely stored in a remote location as well. You could, of course, standardise on just one cloud service and specify that everyone in your organisation use this for all primary document storage…

Grazed from ElectronicDesign. Author: Al Wegener.

Let’s examine an impending problem looming at the intersection of big data and cloud computing. Big data is the vague, all-encompassing name given to immense datasets stored on enterprise servers like those at Google (which organizes 100 trillion Web pages), Facebook (1 million gigabytes of disk storage), and YouTube (20 petabytes of new video content per year).

Big data also is found in scientific applications such as weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, seismic processing, molecular modeling, and genetic sequencing. Many of these applications require servers with tens of petabytes of storage, such as the Sequoia (Lawrence Livermore) and Blue Waters (NCSA) supercomputers…

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…