Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

According to a new report from KPMG, companies need to assume cost reduction in the cloud is ‘a given’ and consequently need to look at more transformational ideas. KPMG’s report, ‘The Cloud Takes Shape’, polled nearly 700 IT professionals and looks at cloud computing as a maturing technology, noting that seven out of 10 IT professionals agree that cloud computing is currently “delivering efficiencies and cost savings”.

Yet the report advocates that organisations need to go further; merely stating that the cloud drives value isn’t telling the full story. “Gaining real cost savings from the cloud is about more than simply moving from fixed costs to operating costs,” says Rick Wright, KPMG US global cloud enablement program leader in the report. “The greatest cost savings – and, more importantly, the transformational business benefits – will come from the longer-term outcomes, such as more efficient processes, more flexible operating models and faster entry into new markets and geographies,” he adds…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Amazon.com had an outage for 49 minutes on Jan. 31, and it cost big — more than $4 million in lost sales. I’m sure many in the cloud computing community where thinking, "Now you know how it feels." According to Network World’s Brandon Butler, "Amazon officials have said that the biggest customer of the company’s cloud division — AWS (Amazon Web Services) — is Amazon.com. AWS has experienced a variety of outages during the past three years, but usually the Amazon.com retail site is not impacted."

For example, an EBS (Amazon Elastic Block Storage) outage in October 2012 affected such customers as Reddit. Moreover, an outage on Christmas Eve 2012 brought down Netflix, but not the video steaming service that Amazon.com provides. In the Jan. 31 case, Amazon.com appears to the affected party…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Vaibhav Tewari, Mehul Nayak and Ritika Srivastava.

Historically, development and testing environments have been built and managed at the project level, and often remain underfunded, under-resourced and underutilized for significant periods of time. The development and testing demand and the IT infrastructure management processes differ in their DNA. Development and testing is unpredictable and has variable demand cycles while the IT managers look at smoother predictable operations, gradual capacity building and higher utilization. Despite being a crucial IT function, the inability to quickly provide the capacity needed by development and testing teams delays the application development life cycle and hampers the delivery of an application quickly and efficiently.

As the pace of change and the level of competition is growing, businesses today need agile IT environment to match the highly dynamic and resource intensive needs of the application development and testing – a business critical function. According to Gartner, cloud and mobility will drive the worldwide application development market to exceed USD 10 billion in 2013. By leveraging cloud, developers, test engineers, and QA teams can develop and perform extensive scenario testing in shorter cycles. Here’s how:…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Eric Holmquist.

Companies looking to expand their infrastructure capabilities are increasingly turning to cloud service providers (CSPs), which have proven to be a very cost-effective, highly efficient resource for businesses of all sizes. Cloud-based solutions are used for remote hosting, colocation data centers or full infrastructure outsourcing. As these companies move operations to the cloud, confidence is growing that the technology can be an effective way to not only host data and applications, but also reduce key infrastructure costs.

But as CSPs continue to evolve so, too, does the related cloud computing security infrastructure required to ensure that client data remains safely segregated and accessible only to authorized users. The key to managing cloud computing information security is to understand that it cannot be managed using an 80/20 rule — that is, mitigating the obvious risks and then dealing with the rest as they occur…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Butler.

High performance cloud computing company Cycle Computing is no stranger to spinning up massive clusters of servers in Amazon’s public cloud, but this week the company says it recently ran one of its largest jobs ever, one that used 10,598 multi-core instances.

Cycle Computing provisioned Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers for a pharmaceutical client to simulate a drug test. It took two hours to configure and ran for nine hours, for a total cost of $4,362. If the infrastructure had been built by the company, Cycle estimates it would have taken a 12,000-square-foot data center and cost $44 million. Cycle says it’s the biggest job the company has performed in terms of the number of virtual machine instances that have been used for a single run…

Grazed from Secure Business Magazine. Author: Editorial Staff.

Guidelines on cloud computing have been released by the PCI security standards council. With an aim to offer a resource for businesses in choosing solutions and third-party cloud providers, the guidelines were developed by PCI special interest groups to answer common questions. The main objectives are to provide an explanation of common deployment and service models for cloud environments, including how implementations may vary within the different types, compliance challenges in a cloud environment and determining and documenting responsibilities to the different cloud models and guidance.

The document also includes a number of appendices to address specific PCI DSS requirements and implementation scenarios, including: additional considerations to help determine PCI DSS responsibilities across different cloud service models; sample system inventory for cloud computing environments; sample matrix for documenting how PCI DSS responsibilities are assigned between cloud provider and client; and a starting set of questions that can help in determining how PCI DSS requirements can be met in a particular cloud environment…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

I observed an interesting debate on Twitter a couple weeks ago between an advocate of "enterprise" computing and an Amazon Web Services champion. After it went back and forth I bit, I offered my contribution: Somebody is using a ton of AWS, and it’s growing like crazy. Listening to this debate reminds me of the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus discussion about how two people can discuss something and still fail to understand the other person’s basic perspective. In the case of this Twitter debate, the discussion failed to address a key question: What are the requirements of the applications running in those environments?

The crucial fact is that those who defend enterprise computing fail to grasp the fact that legacy IT infrastructure and operations don’t address the requirements of new application types that I label the "three M’s"-mobile, media and marketing. These apps are flocking to public cloud computing because they’re not well served by traditional infrastructure and are much more aligned with what cloud computing brings to the table…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

ElasticHosts has launched a new style of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to challenge Amazon, Rackspace and other major cloud service providers with its own brand of cloud services.
ElasticHosts announced Feb. 5 that it has nine data centers around the world, and it’s possible all nine would fit into one of Google’s or Microsoft’s.

But size is not the point. ElasticHosts CEO Richard Davies says it’s competing with Amazon on price while giving customers a simpler user interface to configure exactly the servers they want, instead of having to select from the coffee shop list of small, medium or large. There is a growing number of small cloud service providers, many of them operating strictly on a regional basis, such as PeakColo in Denver and Phoenix; Bluelock in Indianapolis and Salt Lake City; or CoreVault in Oklahoma City and Cheyenne, Okla…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Samsung is looking to step up its mobile cloud game. Not gaming apps in this case, but technologies related to global distribution and mobile applications data management. The company that has been giving Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) a run for its money in the smartphone world (not to mention duking it out in court) has made a strategic investment through Samsung Venture Investment Corp. in database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider Cloudant.

Details are a little fuzzy as to how much of an investment Samsung Ventures has made in Cloudant, which has made news recently here on Talkin’ Cloud related to its launch of a NoSQL DBaaS offering on Rackspace and the more recent news of SoftLayer announcing it was using Cloudant NoSQL to power its SoftLayer Message Queue Service…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Pete Knight.

When I began looking at thin client applications, I was pretty darned sure that the weight loss industry had come up with yet another way to separate overweight people from their money.

Introducing Thin Technology

Thin clients have been around for as long as there have been computers tied together in networks. The concept is pretty simple; individual users do not need full access to a computer to do their work, so rather than placing a fully functional computer on each desk, a thin client machine provides just the functionality needed to accomplish the necessary tasks. Thin client systems are useful in some business and institutional settings. They have the advantage of keeping the major computing functions, processing and storage, in a safe, central location. There is also potential savings in software licensing, the software is licensed to the central computer but can be accessed from any of the thin client remote terminals…