Grazed from Forbes. Author: Bob Evans.

A strong case can be made that Oracle has the widest, deepest, and most-modern set of cloud-computing solutions in the world. More than 10,000 paying customers are using the Oracle Cloud, and that extends out to 25,000,000 million individual users. Can any other IT vendor that claims to be a serious cloud-computing player—IBM, SAP, Salesforce.com, Amazon.com, etc.—match Oracle’s offering across not only cloud applications but also cloud infrastructure and cloud platforms?

Here’s a quick quiz:

• Public cloud, private clouds, and hybrid clouds: how many companies other than Oracle offer that full range of cloud deployment models?
• Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service: how many companies other than Oracle offer that full range of cloud services?…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The eighth annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report from security provider Arbor Networks has revealed how cloud services and data centres are “increasingly victimised” by cyber attackers. The report, which looked at a 12 month period ending September 2012, asked nearly 200 security-based questions to 130 respondents in the enterprise and network operator fields.

The key points of the research were:

• 94% of data centre operators reported security attacks
• 76% had suffered distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks towards their customers, whilst just under half (43%) had partial or total infrastructure outages due to DDoS. Yet only 14% of respondents had seen attacks targeting any form of cloud service
• The result of this was that “complex multi-vector attacks” – combinations of attack vectors intending to hack away at a company’s defences – were on the rise, with big security breaches becoming less common. To exemplify this, advanced persistent threats (APTs) were cited by 55% of those surveyed as their top security concern…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

NetCitadel is launching itself onto the market with a security orchestration virtual appliance the company promises will eliminate the manual configuration of changes in cloud, virtual and physical infrastructures, thereby freeing up IT administrators’ time and reducing the chance of human-created errors.

The OneControl Security Orchestration Platform is a virtual appliance that does the hundreds or thousands of systems changes that happen over a year, but it does it without the need for interference from an IT administrator. According to Mike Horn, co-founder and CEO of NetCitadel, one of the company’s early customers does in excess of 10,000 changes to its different infrastructures every year. With cloud continuing to take off (and some claim this will be the year cloud comes into its own), it’s not unbelievable to believe the number of annual systems changes for that company could approach 50,000. "For us, it’s all about bringing rich intelligence and information into the environment. That was really the nexus and the reason we started the company," Horn told Talkin’ Cloud…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cyber Innovation Labs (CIL), a leading provider of innovative Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions, announces NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a leading provider of innovative IT, biometrics, network, and communications products and solutions, has selected CIL as a core data center platform to help deliver NEC’s Cloud Computing Solutions for the North America market.

NEC will leverage CIL’s facilities located at "The Underground," Iron Mountain’s highly secure, 145-acre facility in Boyers, Pennsylvania, to help fuel its business expansion in North America. NEC offers a broad portfolio of cloud solutions (IaaS, UCaaS, SaaS) and managed services addressing the financial services, healthcare, government, education, and legal markets. Architected with a groundbreaking audit, security and compliance foundation at its core, enterprises are able to deploy their mission-critical systems and applications with confidence in a fully private, physically dedicated environment…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Cloud computing has a growing problem: Many providers haven’t built contract negotiations into their customer on-boarding processes. Instead, they offer "take it or leave it" contracts that protect the provider from everything, transferring all responsibility, liability, and risk to the businesses using the cloud services. Small and medium-sized businesses have accepted such contracts because they can’t afford the lawyers to second-guess them. But large businesses have lawyers, and they aren’t about to enter into such one-sided contracts.

That reality could inhibit cloud adoption, unless cloud providers get realistic about these contract issues. As Computerworld recently reported, large businesses have already started pushing back on cloud providers about these contracts. Today, cloud providers typically offer contracts that look more like they came from iTunes than a provider to IT. They’re designed like all those consumer contracts that users simply click through until they find the Accept button. That won’t fly in large businesses, which have stricter guidelines around managing liability, so enterprises will try to negotiate these contracts…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

It doesn’t matter if you are a technology wizard or a non-tech business professional. Cloud computing is impacting your job, and the ability to be savvy with cloud resources can mean career advancement. For business professionals, it means better understanding information technology. For IT professionals, it means better understanding the business.

There is a rising number of IT jobs that require the ability to either build or interface with cloud computing services and systems. One report estimates that only about five percent of the IT workforce is “cloud ready.” Whether or not this is accurate, it does point to a market that is accelerating faster than the skills available to keep up with it…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Vijay Sethi.

Cloud computing is about delivering massively scalable IT-enabled capabilities, as service to external customers using Internet technologies. Instead of saying that Cloud computing is a hyped tech-trend, I will say it is a buzz word today and still many service providers actually interchangeably use SaaS and Cloud Computing in their discussions.

Not all SaaS solutions leverage cloud-based computing and cloud computing is not another term for SaaS. In fact it is a broad technological concept where some types of SaaS offerings could qualify for to be included under cloud computing. That is, if the IT application being delivered under SaaS concept is one which is highly scalable; it could qualify for being considered as a cloud computing application…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud adoption is on the rise, but according to the results of a survey conducted by OneLogin, there are a lot of naughty end users out there. As 78 percent of organizations surveyed said they planned to increase the number of cloud apps they have in 2013, 71 percent admitted to using unsanctioned apps. Rogue IT is, of course, nothing out of the ordinary, but it does present a great deal of security risk in this information age. Rogue cloud, specifically, has been making the lives of IT administrators difficult ever since the first cloud service was opened up for credit card billing. The survey clearly shows it’s still a major problem for administrators.

According to OneLogin, the survey demonstrated that 2013 will be the tipping point for cloud adoption. The company, in collaboration with security consultancy flyingpenguin, surveyed 200 IT and business professionals within organizations of all sizes and across various industries. The results were interesting, but perhaps not entirely surprising…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Xath Cruz.

Cloud Computing is taking off in various parts of the globe, partly because companies are now realizing the great potential of cloud computing technology when it comes to cost efficiency, productivity, agility, and operational flexibility. However, Canadian companies seem to be lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to the adoption of this newly matured technology.

Canada’s Slow Adoption of the Cloud

The chief reasons why Canadian companies are slow to adopt cloud technology despite its maturity is due to security and privacy concerns. Canada has extremely stringent data privacy laws, and many Canadian companies are still waiting for the provincial and federal governments to standardize and update the policies in order to accommodate the cloud. With the Canadian government’s lack of clear policies on data privacy and their effects on the cloud, companies will not be willing to risk possible legal troubles regarding cloud use…

Grazed from NewsObserver. Author: Deanna Gibbs Lanier.

How can cloud computing help entrepreneurs on the go? Or small businesses with employees who spend most of their time on the road, and need access to company information anywhere, any time? Shop Talk put those questions to Deanna Gibbs Lanier, director in advisory for KPMG LLP, an audit, tax and advisory services firm with 87 offices, including Raleigh. Lanier helps clients see what it means to conduct business “in the cloud” – accessing emails, documents and applications through a combination of the Internet, plus hardware and software as a service.

Some firms find cloud computing to be a less expensive alternative to the traditional software licensing model, where companies are contracted to pay for a set number of users — even if that number shrinks over time. Cloud computing allows companies to add or decrease users as they go, and pay only for what they use, Lanier said. Some cloud models for small offices can start as low as $7 per user, per month, she said…