Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

Salesforce.com is planning to add a series of mobile applications to its Service Cloud line of customer service software, in a response to the rampant rise of mobile devices both in the consumer and business worlds.

Dubbed Service Cloud Mobile, the new offerings include a "co-browsing" capability, which allows end users to share a screen with a call center agent from their mobile device. For example, a customer interested in purchasing custom-fitted clothing could walk through an online catalog and find the correct sizing together with the agent, with both parties able to click on buttons and links, said Alex Bard, Service Cloud senior vice president and general manager, in an interview and demonstration prior to Tuesday’s announcement…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

According to a study recently released by CDW Government, a provider of government technology products and services, 40 percent of K-12 schools are turning to cloud computing for storage. However, the cloud is finding other applications at schools, with conferencing and collaboration the second-most-used cloud services (36 percent), and Office and productivity tools running close behind (33 percent).

Considering that most school systems are underfunded, how they can afford cloud-based services? The truth is that they can’t afford not to use these services, because cloud computing lets them get much more IT for the money…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Carnegie Mellon University’s innovative Parallel Data Lab (PDL) has received $487,500 for cloud computing research from Intel, the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductor products. "This financial support affords us an excellent platform for open collaboration research into the underlying technologies so essential to allowing cloud computing to reach the promise of dramatically improving efficiency, ubiquity and productivity for all scales of user–facing applications across many areas of information technology," said PDL Director Gregory Ganger, the Stephen F. Jatras Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU.

Ganger also is a co-principal investigator of the Intel Science and Research Center (ISTC) for cloud computing at CMU along with Phil Gibbons, an Intel research scientist and an adjunct professor in computer science. "This support helps drive development and implementation of strategies to explore emerging technologies within a university research environment," said Scott Buck, university program officer for Intel…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Louis Columbus.

Cutting through the hype of cloud vendors starts by evaluating how ready their cloud services, enabling technologies and professional services are to serve customers today. That’s one of the key take-aways from a recent webinar I attended titled How Cloud Computing Changes the Vendor Landscape by David Mitchell Smith, VP and Gartner Fellow last week. The slides are available for download here (Free for download after Gartner registration if you are not a Gartner client).

What made this webinar unique and worth mentioning is the framework that was presented for evaluating vendors. Beginning with the well-known Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) structure, Gartner added in a Business and Information Systems layer that includes brokerages, management and security…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Ted Samson.

Cloud computing has grabbed the spotlight at this year’s RSA Conference 2013 in San Francisco, with vendors aplenty hawking products and services that equip IT with controls to bring order to cloud chaos. But the first step is for organization to identify precisely where the greatest cloud-related threats lie. To that end, the CSA (Cloud Security Alliance) has identified "The Notorious Nine," the top nine cloud computing threats for 2013. The report reflects the current consensus among industry experts surveyed by CSA, focusing on threats specifically related to the shared, on-demand nature of cloud computing.

First on the list is data breaches. To illustrate the potential magnitude of this threat, CSA pointed to a research paper from last November describing how a virtual machine could use side-channel timing information to extract private cryptographic keys in use by other VMs on the same server. A malicious hacker wouldn’t necessarily need to go to such lengths to pull off that sort of feat, though. If a multitenant cloud service database isn’t designed properly, a single flaw in one client’s application could allow an attacker to get at not just that client’s data, but every other clients’ data as well…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Archie Hendryx.

When you think Cloud, whether Private or Public, one of the key advantages that comes to mind is speed of deployment. All businesses crave the ability to simply go to a service portal, define their infrastructure requirements and immediately have a platform ready for their new application. Coupled with that you instantly have service level agreements that generally center on uptime and availability.

So for example, instead of being a law firm that spends most of its budget on an in house IT department and datacenter, the Cloud provides an unavoidable opportunity for businesses to instead procure infrastructure as a service and consequently focus on delivering their key applications. But while the understanding of Cloud Computing and its benefits have matured within the industry, so too has the understanding that maybe what’s currently being offered still isn’t good enough for their mission critical applications…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Red Hat is outlining its five big data "must haves" with a new strategy that pushes ahead with its cloud big data analytics workload plans for the next year or so. With a new Apache Hadoop plugin that connects Red Hat storage products into Hadoop open platforms, the company is looking to help partners provide customers with a comprehensive big data solutions portfolio.

"Red Hat is uniquely positioned to excel in enterprise big data solutions, a market that IDC expects to grow from $6 billion in 2011 to $23.8 billion in 2016.2 Red Hat is one of the very few infrastructure providers that can deliver a comprehensive big data solution because of the breadth of its infrastructure solutions and application platforms for on-premises or cloud delivery models. As a leading contributor to open source communities developing essential technologies for the big data IT stack – from Linux to OpenStack Origin and Gluster – Red Hat will continue to play a pivotal role in in Big Data," said Ashish Nadkarni, research director of storage systems and co-lead of Big Data Global Overview at IDC, in a prepared statement…

Grazed from CPA Practical Advistor. Author: Editorial Staff.

The American Institute of CPA’s framework for evaluating technology-related controls and other safeguards used by cloud service providers has been endorsed by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization that promotes the use of best practices on security assurance within cloud computing.

The AICPA’s reporting framework, known as Service Organization Control Reports, was developed in 2011 and consists of three major document types. The first – the SOC 1 report – deals with controls over financial reporting, and replaces the widely used SAS 70 report…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Rackspace lowered cloud storage prices for volume customers Friday, and it will lower prices on its network bandwidth and content delivery services in a bid to compete more strongly with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Windows Azure services. Rackspace reduced pricing 33%, from $0.18 to $0.12 per GB, for moving data and content over its Rackspace Cloud network and the Rackspace content delivery network (CDN).

Enterprises and online information services use CDNs to pre-distribute key content to Internet servers around the world, owned by CDNs such as Akamai or Edgecast, so that response times to users seeking that content will come from a server close to them. When content is downloaded from a server in the same region as the user, response times can be cut by a third or half. Among cloud service providers, Rackspace CDN competes with Amazon’s CloudFront and Microsoft’s Windows Azure CDN…

Grazed from CliQr Technologies. Author: PR Announcement.

CliQr Technologies, the leader in enabling businesses to move, manage and secure applications on any private, public or hybrid cloud, today announced its advisory board. The six advisory board members will shape the company’s direction and strategy in an innovative cloud computing industry.

"We’re pleased to announce these highly qualified appointed members to our advisory board because of the unique background and knowledge they each bring to the table," said Gaurav Manglik, CEO and co-founder of CliQr Technologies. "With years of expertise in their respected fields, each member will make a positive and insightful impact to CliQr. We are equally honored that despite the numerous opportunities associated with cloud management solution providers, these individuals saw the value and innovative nature of the CliQr platform and its ability to take the cloud to the next level."…