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…

Grazed from Ravello. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud computing company Ravello Systems Inc. has raised $15 million in second financing round. The company has now raised a total of $26 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Norwest Venture Partners since it was founded in 2011.

Ravello, founded by CEO Rami Tamir and chairman and president Benny Schnaider, has developed what it calls the standard KVM hypervisor, which it says will change the game in the hybrid cloud market by delivering the industry’s first cloud application hypervisor. Ravello is headquartered in Palo Alto, California and has offices in Ra’anana. This is the fourth start up founded by Schnaider and Tamir. In September 2008, they sold Qumranet Inc. to Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) for $107 million…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

More than 50 percent of the world’s top 30 global telecommunications companies have bet their cloud services strategies on Parallels’ software. Moreover, 9,000 service providers and more than 50,000 web developers leverage Parallels’ software to serve millions of SMB customers. So what’s next? How about new Parallels Cloud Storage technology that allows service providers to counter Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Simple Storage Service (S3)?

Parallels CEO Birger Steen announced the updates during Parallels Summit in Las Vegas, where the company is hosting ISVs, VARs, telcos and aspiring cloud services providers (CSPs). During a pre-conference interview last week, Steen outlined a range of moves for Talkin’ Cloud. They included: …

Grazed from Wired. Author: Ryan Kean.

Cloud computing offers a value proposition that is different from traditional enterprise IT environments. By providing a way to exploit virtualization and aggregate computing resources, cloud computing can offer economies of scale that would otherwise be unavailable. The elastic nature of cloud computing provides near immediate access to resources. This is in contrast to the traditional approach of investing capital, resources and time in designing and implementing infrastructure (hardware and middleware). This allows organizations to drive to realize business benefits faster by shortening time to market.

Understand the benefits and risks

While the benefits of cloud computing can be very persuasive, consumers must have a clear understanding of potential security benefits and risks of a potential cloud provider. This allows a consumer to set realistic expectations with their internal business partners as well as the cloud provider. Transitioning to public cloud computing involves a transfer of responsibility and control to the cloud provider over information as well as system components that were previously under the organization’s direct control. The transition is usually accompanied by loss of direct control over the management of operations and also a loss of influence over decisions made about the computing environment…

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

IBM says it is buying the software portfolio of Star Analytics Inc, a privately held business analytics firm in California, on undisclosed terms. The acquisition, another in a string of Big Data and analytics acquisitions, is supposed to advance IBM’s business analytics initiatives so clients can get faster access and real-time insight into specialized data sources.

Star Analytics software helps automatically integrate essential information from applications and business intelligence tools across the enterprises, on-premise or from the cloud. It removes custom coding for specialized sources that are hard to maintain and retires manual processes that are cumbersome and time-consuming…