Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

The rumors of Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) being acquired are true. Michael Dell has teamed up with Silver Lake and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to fund a $24.4 billion takeover of the company he founded in 1984 in an effort to take the company out of the public trading space and back into private hands.

Our sister site, The VAR Guy, provides analysis on what this deal will mean for Dell and the community of channel partners it has built up over the last few years, but what about the cloud? Should the deal go through and the company return to being a private company under control of Michael Dell and Silver Lake, with a minority share being held by Microsoft (which is lending $2 billion to the deal), what might happen to the company’s ever-growing cloud strategy?…

Grazed from InformationWeek. AuthorL Gary Flood.

When it comes to Joe Q. Public, it seems Main Street U.S.A. is a lot weaker on its cloud understanding than its British High Street peers. The issue that’s embarrassing many U.K. cloud mavens is that despite that disparity, it’s in the Land of the Free, not Her Majesty’s domain, that actual cloud projects seem to be getting done. A new poll from European cloud supplier Webfusion of 1,000 U.S. citizens found 31.8% claimed to have no understanding of the term "cloud" at all, and only 25% said they had a clear grasp of the topic.

In terms of age groups, 25 to 34-year-old people performed best on this question, with 33.8% claiming to know what cloud computing is. The same exercise found 63% of these U.S. respondents weren’t able to recognize Dropbox, iTunes, Gmail or Microsoft’s Hotmail as cloud services, and 91% did not see the term "scalable hosting" as equivalent to cloud…

Grazed from FutureGov. Author: Sri Narayanan.

With all the buzz around cloud computing, it’s easy to ignore the more mundane aspects of auditing and cost allocation when investing in the cloud. In a recent conversation with Philippine CIOs during a breakfast meeting in Manila, the question of government auditing and budgeting guidelines for cloud services spurred a spirited exchange. They readily admitted to grappling with how to set accounting guidelines for cloud services even as the Philippines sets aggressive targets to move public services to the cloud. The issue is one of governance and control; if you can’t see what you’re buying, how would you know what you’re actually spending on?

The problem, it seems, is that the public sector is not quite sure what to make of the ‘utility or pay-as-you-go model’ of cloud computing. While there are provisions for subscription-based resourcing for commodities such as energy supplies, there is precious little literature preparing the government sector for subscription-based cloud computing. The same applies to annual contracts for Infrastructure- or Platform-as-a-Service solutions…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

SaaS-based application performance monitoring start-up New Relic, which has already raised $34.5 million in venture capital, has gotten a whopping $80 million in mezzanine financing to move into native mobile applications, open an office in Europe, add staff and prepare to IPO. The handsome sum, which gives it a total of $115 million and a reported valuation of $750 million, comes largely from Insight Venture Partners and T Rowe Price, marking the first time since Twitter that the pair has funded a start-up together.

Other participants include Dragoneer Investment Group, Passport Ventures and the company’s existing investors Allen & Company, Benchmark Capital, Trinity Ventures and Tenaya Capital. New Relic says it saw 200% year-over-year revenue growth including 18 quarters of consecutive growth from playing in the data center and cloud markets monitoring deployed web applications implemented in Ruby, Java, .NET or PHP…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Sharon Florentine.

Welcome to Generation Now. Today’s users want information in an instant. Make them wait more than a second or two for your webpage to load and they’ll surf over to the first competitor who feeds their demand for instant gratification. Using a Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network (CDN) to quickly load static elements of your site to hasten access can deliver quicker gratification for customers. And stickier eyeballs — and greater profits — for you.

Basically, a CDN is a number of highly optimised web servers located around the globe, explains Joost de Valk in an article posted to Yoast.com. Though de Valk’s article deals specifically with using a CDN to speed performance of Wordpress sites, a CDN is beneficial for almost any organisation with a Web presence, in any industry. Users expect that all elements of a site will load in an instant: web objects including text, graphics, URLs and scripts, downloadable objects like media files, software, documents, e-commerce applications, portals, streaming media and the ubiquitous social networks…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: James Dohnert.

Small and medium business spending on cloud services in 2012 topped $45bn, and is predicted to rise to $95bn by 2015, according to a new study. Cloud hosting firm Parallels reported that 22 percent of SMBs are currently managing websites through cloud services, with another 30 percent of SMBs planning to adopt cloud-based website management tools by 2015. "Cloud computing has given SMBs access to computing power, applications, and services that were formerly available only to large enterprises," Parallels wrote in its study.

"Looking at the global IT landscape in 2012, we see SMBs’ participation in the cloud market spanning the full gamut – from having a mature cloud services market to needing education about what cloud services are." According to Parallels, the SMB market for cloud services will be worth $68bn by 2014, double its total estimated worth in 2011…

Grazed from HealthcareGlobal. Author: Abigail Phillips.

When it comes to global tech trends, you don’t get much bigger than cloud computing. Virtually every single industry across the globe has adopted cloud computing in one way or another and the healthcare community is fast cottoning on to this ever-developing trend. Gone are the days of filing cabinets full of paperwork and massive on-site servers, business is moving to the cloud because it is cheaper, more efficient and more secure.

At Healthcare Global we have addressed some of the main concerns when it comes to moving healthcare infrastructure to the cloud. Executed properly, cloud computing could see the healthcare industry move at a much quicker rate than it does currently in terms of patient communication, prescriptions, research and development, manufacturing and more…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dana Gardner.

Emerging markets don’t generally follow smooth, predictable paths. Rather, they struggle and jerk unexpectedly, much like an eaglet escaping from its shell. Vendors, analysts, and pundits may seek to define such markets, but typically fall short. After all, vendors don’t establish markets. Customers do.

Today, cloud computing is still in its birth throes. Yes, many organizations are now achieving value in the cloud, but many more still struggle to understand its true value proposition as cloud service providers (CSPs) and vendors mature their offerings in the space. One problem: cloud computing is not a single market. It is in fact many interrelated markets, as its core service models, infrastructure-, platform-, and software as a service (SaaS), fragment as though they were so many pieces of eggshell…

Grazed from The Journal. Author: Margo Pierce.

Businesses use cloud computing differently than educators do, but access, security, cost, and scalability are shared concerns. The report "A Snapshot into Cloud Storage Adoption produced" by TwinStrata, a data storage company, offers the perspective of those using or exploring cloud storage options. The company conducted a survey of more than 200 people that “focuses on the attitudes and experiences of a cloud-friendly sample group as determined by their attendance at one of two cloud-focused conferences.” Here are some highlights of the results.

Eighty percent of current cloud storage users claim that they can recover their data in less than 24 hours, with nearly a quarter believing that they have instantaneous recovery. In comparison, nearly one in six respondents who do not use cloud storage estimated that it would take more than a week to recover their data in the event of a disaster…

Grazed from InforWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Users of Amazon Web Services’ Relational Database Service (RDS) can now keep track of their databases with new notifications via email and SMS. Amazon’s Simple Notification Service (SNS) will give administrators a heads-up when their databases are running low on storage, have shut down, or a backup has started or finished. More than 40 types of notifications are available, Amazon said in a blog post on Monday.

Users can choose to receive different categories of notifications. For example, if administrators subscribe to the backup category for a given database instance, they will be notified whenever a backup-related event occurs, according to a support document published by Amazon. There are also notifications for availability and configuration changes. The notifications can be used with all three databases — MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server — that run on Amazon’s cloud using RDS, which is still being beta tested…