Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offerings with the general availability of Windows Azure Media Services, which lets enterprises skip building their own infrastructure for streaming on-demand video. The service, released Tuesday, can be used to deliver training videos to employees; stream video content from a website; or build video-on-demand service similar to Hulu or Netflix, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie said in a blog post.

Like many cloud-based platform-as-a-service offerings, Windows Azure Media Services aims to make it easier, in this case, to roll out video streaming services. Building a media distribution platform that encodes and streams video to various devices and clients is a complex task, which requires hardware and software that has to be connected, configured, and maintained, according to Guthrie. Windows Azure Media Services makes it easier by eliminating the need to provision and manage a custom infrastructure, he said…

Grazed from Serena Software. Author: PR Announcement.

Serena Software, the leader in Orchestrated IT solutions, today announced the results of an annual survey on application development and delivery priorities and initiatives for 2013. The survey, conducted at Gartner’s recent Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) Summit, showed delivering applications faster and aligning IT to business goals as the highest priorities for 2013. These findings underscore the trend that online enterprises have elevated themselves past departmental IT concerns. Instead, the survey results show they are now focusing on the competitive goals of the business itself.

The third survey of its kind, the research uncovered changing IT priorities, as both reducing application costs and moving applications to the cloud were reported much less of a priority in 2013 compared to last year. Both fell multiple spots on the one to ten number scale of priority, the same measurement tool used in last year’s survey as well. A graphic summarizing the survey findings can be found here: http://ser.so/app-dev-infographic…

Grazed from CloudComputing News. Author: James Bourne.

The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has published an opinion piece detailing opposition to the well documented European Union (EU) computing initiative. The EU’s cloud strategy, ‘Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe’, announced in September featured two main takeaways; a yearly 160bn Euro (£127.6bn) boost to the European GDP by 2010, and a net gain of 2.5m jobs.

Sounds good on first glance, but the EESC’s opinion – carried by 158 votes to two in a plenary held on January 16 and 17 – disagrees. It’s not that the EESC is opposed to cloud computing in general – the committee agrees that it is “an opportunity for European growth and competitiveness” – more it suggests an alternative complementary vision to the European Commission’s original plan…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Joe Masters Emison.

There’s a growing demand for standards to bring some sanity to the cloud computing market. Both buyers and sellers have their reasons to want common ways to do things such as transfer data from one cloud-based app or infrastructure to another. But the competition to be in control is fierce. "The Internet had the IETF, which wrangled people and protocols," says Mathew Lodge, VP of cloud services at VMware. "But in the cloud, the standardization landscape is so fragmented. There isn’t a central body or forum or place, although lots of people and organizations are trying to be that."

Two main factors drive demand for standards. Cloud vendors want to show they can meet companies’ security requirements, since that’s the biggest roadblock to adoption. IT pros also see value in formalized standards for cloud services, according to the 400 respondents to our InformationWeek Standardization Survey: 89% rate standards for cloud infrastructure vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure or Rackspace as extremely (53%) or somewhat (36%) helpful to their organizations; 85% say the same about software-as-a-service. Why? Would-be cloud customers want to avoid getting locked in to one vendor, so investments in cloud services now don’t end up limiting future flexibility…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Cisco is not a cloud service provider, but it has an expanding suite of products under the label "Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 3.1." With it, Cisco is building out a private cloud across seven major data centers in hopes that its experience will serve as a model for customers to build out their own private clouds. Intelligent Automation for Cloud 3.1 derives both from Cisco’s own data center experience and from acquisitions such as Tidal Software in 2009 with its IT automation products, and newScale in 2011 with its service catalogue, self-service portal and process orchestrator.

When it started its data center conversions in 2009, Cisco moved decisively into virtualization and found that server consolidation leads to many other changes. IT operations managers wrote scripts that automated steps in the virtual server creation process. Some integrated Cisco software with open source code. Others generated scripts for provisioning a simple database server…

Grazed from DesignNews. Author: Cabe Atwell.

Cloud computing is simply computers somewhere else, dolling out software or hardware recourses over the Internet or local network. The inherent risks all still exist, but not on site. Despite this, the cloud has become quite popular with businesses and institutions as a way of storing and accessing data and information on demand.

Some of these institutions, including large US law firms, are slowly and reluctantly implementing the use of these services, but have fears that sensitive information could potentially be compromised (hacked) by exploiting their relatively weak security measures. Using these services, such as IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), StaaS (storage-as-a-service), and PaaS (platform-as-a-service), can be both beneficial and potentially risky for those involved in the US justice system…

Grazed from Backup-Technology. Author: Editorial Staff.

Does the UK lag behind in usage and adoption of cloud computing? Are UK businesses more sceptical of cloud computing than other nations? A recent survey released by Redwood Software would suggest just that. The survey into the use of cloud computing by large US and UK firms (1,000 employees and above), conducted by Vanson Bourne, looked at usage levels of cloud computing and general opinion of cloud computing, e.g. data storage and automation of business processes. In general, the study found that significantly more US businesses are using cloud computing, for example, 58% of US businesses who took part in the survey use the cloud for private data storage compared to 35% in the UK. As well as data storage, 47% of US businesses use cloud computing for capacity management of IT resources compared to just 24% of UK businesses.

Not only is there a significant difference in current usage of cloud computing between the two countries, there is also a disparity in opinion of its benefits. Of the 200 US companies who made up the survey 71% believed cloud computing would “improve agility in supporting business needs”, compared to just 47% of the 100 UK businesses. When asked if they thought that the cloud gave them a “faster return on investment” 57% of US businesses said yes compared to just 36% of UK businesses, while 45% of US businesses believed that cloud computing “reduced labour costs”, compared to 29% of UK businesses…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Editorial Staff.

Data security has been the primary inhibitor preventing enterprises from adopting cloud solutions. Aiming to address this issue, Vaultize recently unveiled a Data Privacy Option (DPO) for enterprises, helping them comply with various data privacy, data residency and data protection regulations –hence further strengthening cloud adoption.

DPO is an innovative concept through which Vaultize lets its enterprise customers retain the full control over encryption keys. With DPO, the encryption keys are never stored on any infrastructure that is not under enterprise control, ensuring that the customer is in complete control of data…

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Editorial Staff.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an advisory group to Congress, is putting more scrutiny on national security threats posed to American businesses by Chinese cloud computing companies. The group, tasked by Congress to monitor the risks of trade with China, is commissioning a report on the ties of state enterprises to the Chinese cloud computing industry and potential espionage risks from cloud infrastructure situated in the country, according to government officials.

Cloud computing generally refers to the delivery of a variety of computing resources – from Web-based services to storage space — over the Internet. The commission is interested in “how information stored by Chinese cloud computing services might be susceptible to theft or exploitation, or how cloud computing infrastructure might be used to launch or enable cyberattacks,” according to a solicitation for proposals that closed earlier this month. The group is looking into how many people in the U.S. are using cloud infrastructure owned or operated by Chinese entities, as well as “Chinese-developed, owned, or operated cloud infrastructure outside of China.” The report is likely to be available to Congress by the middle of the year, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Florence de Borja.

Cloud computing has truly evolved from providing computing or storage resources to a more industry-specific community. Today, there are cloud instances to cater to each compliance and security requirements of a particular industry. Verizon has its cloud service which complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for the healthcare industry. Metal Lynx targets traders of precious metals. There are private clouds which are housed offsite and managed by a 3rd party provider.

With the myriads of cloud applications now available in the market, it makes sense to question if these cloud computing services do offer great cost savings. Although it may seem difficult to evaluate the financial viability of each cloud service, there are cloud providers today who offer cloud costing and modeling tools in order to help the cloud customers ascertain the true cost of such services…