Grazed from Federal Times.  Author: Aileen Black.

With some kind of major budget cutting around the corner, no matter what happens with sequestration, government organizations need to lower their information technology costs. One option that works: Leverage cloud technology. And don’t stop with “routine” IT processes — the impressive savings come when you leverage cloud to truly support your mission.

The government’s Cloud First strategy requires agencies to evaluate secure cloud computing options before making new investments in IT. The strategy identified $20 billion in potential savings from cloud computing; this represents 25 percent of the total IT budget. For agencies to tap into this cost savings opportunity, they must leverage the cloud for mission efficiency and IT efficiency…

Grazed from CloudComputing Journal.  Author: Elizabeth White.

An exclusive Q&A with Bennett Bauer, Director of Cloud Marketing at DreamHost

"Open source cloud is enabling a vast developer community that is today building applications to solve the points of integration in this growing area," stated Bennett Bauer, Director of Cloud Marketing at DreamHost, in the exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. "Pure, built-in-the-cloud applications that resolve the social, mobile, analytics lifecycle through the cloud," Bauer continued, "and applications that are not hamstrung by trying to integrate traditional corporate data and custom functionality are proliferating."

Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?…

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Brandon Bulter.

Chinese telecom giant Huawei today announced FusionCloud, an OpenStack-powered cloud aimed mostly at carrier providers.  Huawei joined OpenStack in October with subdued fanfare compared to other companies that have joined the open source cloud computing project. OpenStack was started by Rackspace and NASA in 2010 and has since grown to include dozens of major vendors, including IBM, Dell, HP, VMware and others, but Huawei is by far OpenStack’s largest teclo-focused company.

Huawei’s FusionCloud, unveiled at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, has a variety of components including FusionSphere, an operating system for running cloud deployments, as well as FusionCable, a complementary converged infrastructure component that incorporates compute, storage and networking…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Liz McMillan.

Saas, IaaS, PaaS. Cloud computing is growing at a breathtaking speed and is the fastest-growing means by which technology companies offer their products today. Regardless of the industry, cloud computing is revolutionizing the way companies manage their applications and data processing, while simultaneously being one of the least understood. However, before companies go flying in the clouds, they need to be aware of the significant legal risks and implications associated with cloud computing.

In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dan Pepper, managing member of Pepper Law Group, examines how cloud computing can be adopted and the dangers avoided on a practical level…

Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Xath Cruz.

Authors everywhere should be paying homage to Gutenberg, the man who created the printing press late in the mid 15^th century. Without him and his invention, books would be non-existent and there would be no “authors” in the true sense of the word; no Stephen King, Ayn Rand or Isaac Aasimov churning out page upon page of stories.

Maybe this is putting a little bit too much emphasis on the author. While they do take care of the conception of the material, it is the publishers and the publishing companies that are tasked with manufacturing, reproducing and ultimately selling their works…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Lindsey Nelson.

Now quite often you hear me ranting about the benefits of cloud computing, and although I’m still a firm believer it will continue to transform the way business is done, I know something that sounds too good to be true typically is.   I did a little research, and I found a couple common cloud computing concerns and a way to talk you out of your doubt.

Sensitive Data and Security

Much to your dismay, there’s a security benefit to putting your information in the cloud. The traditional security hole fixes take weeks, with costly downtime and more often than not issues just start to pile up. Especially if you’re a global company, you’ve probably got more than one to fix. However, with the cloud you it’s one band-aid for everybody…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

By compressing data and eliminating duplicate copies, an Amazon Web Services customer can decrease by as much as 50% the cost of moving data out of the cloud, say spokesmen for Silver Peak Systems, which on Thursday started offering a virtual appliance to do just that.

It can be critical for some public cloud users to reduce the amount of data exported from the cloud. Several vendors, including Amazon, charge nothing for the bandwidth to upload data. But they charge by the GB when it comes to downloading. AWS, for example, charges $0.12 per GB after the first free GB to move data out of S3 to a destination on the Internet, a charge that can quickly mount up. Ten terabytes would lead to a charge of $1,200, and truly big data would rack up multiples of that figure. That gives many cloud users second thoughts as they contemplate the cost of moving data out of the cloud, a possibly intended consequence of that pricing approach…

Grazed from CloudCow – Contributed.   Author: Dick Csaplar, Senior Research Analyst, Aberdeen Group.

In January 2013, Aberdeen surveyed 123 organizations to learn how they use the Public Cloud as part of their IT infrastructure as well as the use of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This Blog will focus on Software-as-a-Service as a platform for enterprise applications and the growing importance it plays as an application deployment method. Companies now have an alternative to purchasing a software license when they decide to use a commercially available application. Aberdeen research shows wide use of Cloud-based SaaS applications in many different parts of today’s enterprises. The full report can be found here.

Cloud SaaS Offerings

Most software vendors now offer a SaaS deployment of their application. Users are likely familiar with SalesForce.com, Google Apps, and Microsoft Office 365 as the most widely used of these applications, however there are now SaaS offerings for almost every aspect of business management. The technology can be used for departmental apps (such as customer relationship management (CRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), and business intelligence (BI) or by function (email, database, and ecommerce)…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

A new study sponsored by CDW shows what may seem obvious: Home users of cloud-based services are more likely to promote work use of cloud computing. The interesting part is that these self-motivated customers have done a better job of selling cloud computing than the marketing departments with their billions of dollars.

CDW’s "2013 State of the Cloud" report surveyed 1,242 tech professionals and concluded that the personal use of cloud services is a big factor in corporate cloud adoption. In the report, 73 percent of respondents claimed that, in their company, employees’ use of personal cloud services has "significantly influenced" the decision to move aspects of enterprise IT to the public cloud. The survey included employees who worked within as well as outside of IT…