Grazed from Fox Business. Author: Donna Fuscaldo.

Small businesses are adopting cloud computing to save money, but it could end up costing them. According to a recent survey by Symantec, enterprises and small businesses are embracing cloud computing at a fast clip, but at the same time are experiencing escalated costs due to things like rogue cloud use, complex backup and recovery and inefficient cloud storage.

“Because it’s so easy to setup … there’s rouge deployments of cloud services,” says Tom Powledge, Symantec’s vice president of product delivery for SMB and Symantec .cloud. "Employees inside companies are using various cloud services on their own without checking in with IT administrators.”…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Patrick Burke.

Ask not what your cloud can do for you, but what it can do for your country. The Defense Department’s IT infrastructure is on a mission of consolidation, standardization, security and access, the Defense Department’s principal deputy CIO told attendees at a recent cloud computing panel discussion, according to an article on Defense.gov.

The department is reducing the number of data centers from about 1,500 to "a number far below that," Robert J. Carey said, and is implementing a coherent and consistent architecture across thousands of computing environments. This process is taking place in part because of costs, but also because it makes sense when it comes to securing data within the network, Carey said…

Grazed from HostReview. Author: Lucy Goodell.

Our cloud technology works on three specific cloud computing service models that are popular, effective, and flexible and most importantly user friendly. Therefore, the basic models of the cloud architecture are: 1. Infrastructure as a service: The infrastructure part includes the computer, network, storage, load balancing devices, virtual machines. All the hardware or the physical resources required for the clients are provided and also can be scaled up and down with the help of these services.

2. Software as a service: as the name suggests it includes the software section such as the virtual desktop, various utility applications, content resources management, email, games and much more. In this cloud computing model the service provider install, manage and operate various software’s and the client access them from the cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

The setting was Dogpatch WineWorks in San Francisco, a site where customers produce their own barrels of wine. But a different kind of ferment gripped the venue Jan. 24 as 120 developers, bloggers and analysts gathered there to see which mobile application producers Amazon Web Services selected as winners of this year’s Global Startup Challenge.

Before the winners crossed the stage in WineWorks’ large meeting hall, attendees sat through a presentation by Simone Brunozzi, senior AWS technology evangelist for the Bay area, on the many technical assists and services that Amazon provides developers building mobile apps in the EC2 cloud. They ranged from its AWS Mobile Software Development Kit to its DynamoDB database service…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Jeremy Geelan.

"Cloud computing’s not a panacea and it’s not the ideal solution for every business situation," wrote Oracle SVP Bob Evans recently in Forbes, "but at the same time, it’s no longer some nebulous (pardon me) theory whose risk is high and whose potential benefits are impossible to quantify."

Evans was commenting on the state of the infrastructure industry in response to a report by McKinsey consultants James Kaplan, Chris Rezek, and Kara Sprague in which they suggested that the recent IDC saying spending on third-party-managed and public-cloud environments will surpass $70 billion in 2015 might significantly under-estimate the true size of the market…

Grazed from RTTNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing poses a larger threat to your privacy than you might think, according to an European Parliament study. The study published by its Directorate-General for Internal Policies identified potential risks: "The challenge of privacy in cloud computing is underestimated, if not ignored. The main concern arising from the growing reliance on cloud computing is less the possible increase in cyber fraud or crime than the loss of control over individual identity and data."

On Monday, Europe is marking annual data protection day, an initiative to raise awareness of how people’s personal information is collected and processed and how to best protect your private lives. The EP is currently looking at plans to update current European rules on data protection to bring them in line with the latest technological developments and prevent misuse of private data. The report, published at the year-end, also points out that U.S. law authorizes surveillance of cloud data of non-American citizens. U.S. authorities would not be bound by the proposed reform of EU rules, but it is something that could be dealt with by opening EU-U.S. negotiations, the report says…

Grazed from Lexology.  Author: John P. Beardwood.

In the closing months of last year we conducted a survey of our clients as to their views on the benefits and risks of cloud computing.  Admittedly, conducting surveys of IT professionals and business executives regarding their views on cloud computing has been somewhat of a growth industry over the past two years.

However, our survey was notably different in that most of the respondents were either in-house counsel or in risk management positions wherein they are responsible for retaining counsel, rather than business executives or IT professionals.  As a result, the survey has provided a valuable cross-section of those critical personnel’s views as to the risks and benefits of cloud computing…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Leading cloud computing vendors are diversifying into new product and service areas, as well as expanding into new geographic territories in an effort to stave off up-and-comers, according to new research.  The moves reflect a maturation of the cloud computing industry, which Technology Business Research (TBR) analysts say is a transitioning from vendors differentiating by their technology offerings to separating themselves via business strategies, such as which new markets to enter.

Stalwarts of this developing industry have begun spreading into new service areas in an effort to extend their reach into the enterprise. Salesforce.com, for example, has broadened beyond just sales management tools and into application development; Amazon Web Services (AWS) has moved from being a virtual machine rental service to hosting entire databases in its cloud. Meanwhile, hosting providers are looking to South America and Latin America, as well as Asia and Pacific nations, to expand their reach…

Grazed from Datamation.  Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Hybrid cloud deployments are attractive to many enterprises in that they offer the best of both public and private cloud approaches.  The move to hybrid is part of the evolution of cloud, according to IDC Research VP Mary Johnston Turner. It’s an evolution that will require a new generation of IT management technologies.

"We see increasing interest in open standards based heterogeneous and hybrid cloud architectures," Turner said during a Red Hat sponsored webcast this week. "A couple of years ago, we mostly saw tactical cloud initiatives, focused on enabling fast self-service deployments for relatively specific needs."…