Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Vaultive has announced the 3.0 version of its persistent encryption gateway. The big news in this major release is that Vaultive has extended its encryption and data residencey support to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office 365 and Exchange 2013.

According to the company, Vaultive 3.0 provides "seamless support" for Exchange 2013, no matter whether it has been deployed in the next version of Office 365 (Wave 15), is hosted elsewhere or has been implemented on-premise. The vendor incorporated several new scalability, resiliency and availability features into the 3.0 version to help enterprise customers protect data while implementing deployments of cloud-based services…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

In business, you go where your customers are. If the kids want to listen to that rock and roll music, well, you put it on the jukebox. If the enterprise caretakers want to buy something from a cloud, then you bundle up your server boxes and call them a cloud. That’s what Dell is doing. If time is too short to buy your Dell machines with a purchase order and take delivery, you can call up the company and it will start them up in its data center.

Dell’s new cloud has a distinctly Dell flavor that’s apparent from the beginning. The company has always been very close to Microsoft, and now it’s even closer after the leveraged buyout. While other clouds charge a bit more for a Microsoft license, you get one to Windows Server 2008 R2 as part of the whole bundle. The Dell Cloud portal where you control your machines insists that you log in via Internet Explorer or Firefox. Chrome isn’t even on the list…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Walter Bailey.

Many research and studies verify the fact that the volume of the cloud computing business is swelling exponentially across the globe – the growth rates are unprecedented and unexpectedly high. Among such reliable studies, Gartner research and Market Research Media group a few to name – from the results of these studies, it has been found that the growth rate of the volume of business based on cloud computing is much more than the expected.

Forrester Research reveals that the volume of cloud computing business would reach $241 billion in the year 2020 – which is many times the existing market of $41 billion in the year 2011. The investment in this field of the business is much more than expected during the past few years – meanwhile, it is also being predicted that the investment in future would be much more than previous estimations…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Patrick Budmar.

Stand by, Cloud busting is here. And that’s just on reason there is so much focus on the hybrid Cloud, according to VMware Cloud infrastructure and management product marketing manager, Aaron Steppat. "What Cloud busting means is the ability for a company using the hybrid Cloud to use infrastructure that isn’t on their premises, such as from a public Cloud, but in a secured, measured and controlled state to get extra capacity for their infrastructure requirements," Steppat said.

He added a "key enabler of that ability" is workload portability or mobility. Thomas Duryea Cloud services general manager, Adam Beavis, refers to the hybrid Cloud as a "good stepping stone" for people who want to move forward and make use of the technology. "People are looking for the agility that Cloud offers, but also want to maintain that control of the on-premise solution, whether it is for security reasons or compliance," he said…

Grazed from AssociationsNow. Author: Anita Ferrer.

A new survey shows that business executives are questioning whether the advantages of cloud computing outweigh the uncertainties it brings. You’ve heard about the vaunted benefits of cloud computing, including improved efficiency, reduced costs, and better results. But a recent survey shows growing uncertainty among executives about security, integration, and return on investment.

The survey of IT professionals, conducted by The Open Group, determined that measuring return on investment (ROI) is seen as increasingly difficult. Organizations that reported having measurement mechanisms in place decreased from 30 percent in 2011 to a little more than 19 percent last year. Cost, quality, and speed were the most popular ROI metrics…

Grazed from GreenerIdeal. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing, or the practice of using remote servers to store data and software, is changing the way the world does business. The cloud can be accessed from anywhere where there’s an internet connection, and therefore allows business data to be stored and continuously updated in one, central location. This guide to cloud computing explains the technology in further detail.

But what has this got to do with green business practices? Well, Microsoft has invested in a study that found “small and medium-sized businesses can reduce the impact of their activities on the environment by taking advantage of cloud technologies.” However, others disagree, and the National Data Center Energy Efficiency Information Program’s factsheet states that in 2006, Data Centers used 61 billion kWh of electricity (equivalent to 1.5% of all U.S. energy consumption) and that the amount of energy consumed by data centers is set to continue to grow by 12% per year…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Amazon Web Services has introduced OpsWorks, a cloud-based platform powered by the Chef framework, which will give enterprises more integrated tools for managing the complete application life cycle. Enterprises have started asking for more sophisticated tools to manage their AWS resources and automate application deployments because their cloud-based infrastructures are becoming bigger and more complex, Amazon said on Monday.

AWS OpsWorks is available now as a beta and is targeted at DevOps users who want better management and automation tools to help them customize and control their environments. It can be used for resource provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, software updates, monitoring, and access control at no extra cost through the AWS Management Console, SDKs, and Command Line Interface, according to Amazon…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Many business and IT leaders get consumed in many questions: Should we go with private cloud? Public cloud? Hybrid model? What about our legacy systems? Where do we find the skills to make cloud happen? But there is another, even more important question that needs to be pondered before asking these questions, however. What are we actually trying to accomplish? In the headlong rush to cloud, not enough people are asking this question.

That’s the view of Dan Kusnetzky, founder of Kusnetzky Group and former IDC analyst, in a recent webcast at VIRTu Alley (sponsored by Dell). Too many organizations are jumping into cloud for cloud’s sake, and not thoroughly evaluating where the business value may be, he cautions…

Grazed from The Huffington Post. Author: Marcel Hildalgo.

The fundamental question that pushed Alan Turing, the pioneer of computer science, was can machines do what we can do? Turing was said to have come up with everything that computers do today. His concerns were not whether machines could think but if they had the intellectual capacities equal to a human mind. If he were here now how would he assess the advances in the development of computer technology, especially cloud computing? Would Turing think that machine intelligence has come pretty close to human intelligence? The idea is certainly entertaining. And people like Amy Poehler, in a recent Best Buy commercial, had us all laughing when she spiritedly asked the questions: "Where is the cloud?" and "Are we in the cloud now?" The average person cannot ignore that computers have become smarter in ways that continue to amaze us.

A different question is: are computers becoming independent of the user? In other words, will the virtual machine at some point in time completely control the user or even exempt the user? Perhaps a consoling thought articulated by Turing came when he said that an equation, which cannot be solved by a machine, proves the value for human thinking. But the need for smarter computing has opened a gateway to technology that can sometimes feel like the line between human thinking and machine thinking is remarkably thin…