Grazed from Investors Business Daily. Author: Donna Howell.

Cloud computing is a ticket to losing data for two in five companies, a new study finds. "It’s really kind of astounding," said Dave Elliott, a cloud marketing manager at storage and security company Symantec (SYMC). The company polled more than 3,200 organizations to gauge hidden costs of the cloud and ways to mitigate problems.

"Forty-three percent of respondents have lost data in the cloud and have had to recover from backups," Elliott said. And the recovery process has failed at least once for most. Internet cloud and cloud computing these days means most any services obtained over the Internet or obtained from potentially remote data centers, instead of the old-fashioned kind of on-premises computing where you knew exactly what machine your data were on…

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

Online learning company Lynda.com has gotten $103 million in funding from Accel Partners and equity investor Spectrum Equity. Meritech Capital Partners also participated. It’s the first money Lynda has taken from the outside and is meant to push the 17-year-old company into the international arena, which will mean localization, and add to its curriculum. It expects to scale its web and video platform.

Its video learning platform, available in monthly and annual subscriptions, teaches computer skills such as 3D and animation, audio, business, design, development, home computing, photography, video and web and interactive design to individuals as well as corporate, government, school and university accounts…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: James Carlini.

With more smartphones being utilized everywhere, should we be redefining cloud computing? If not redefining it, at least recalibrating it to encompass and fit new edge technology that is becoming the device of choice.

Many organizations that are looking at implementing cloud computing should also be looking at BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) concepts that focus on smartphones and tablets.
Why? More people are using smartphones and tablets than PCs today. They don’t want to be burdened with "computing," that sounds too technical. All they want to do is make a call and get things done…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Skytap, a provider of self-service cloud automation products, has unveiled pre-configured Cloudera Hadoop (CDH4) Enterprise templates that are now available as part of the Skytap Cloud public template library.

According to Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development at Skytap, the launch of Cloudera Hadoop for Enterprise Hybrid Clouds will make it easier for Skytap Cloud customers to quickly and easily configure and launch Hadoop instances for development and testing purposes. Goodwin told Talkin’ Cloud that a customer can use the service to get virtual Hadoop clusters up and running in less than 10 minutes…

Grazed from ERP News. Author: Editorial Staff.

Productivity is valued in every workplace, but there are differing schools of thought as to how best to achieve it. Some businesses prefer a lot of structure and accountability, while others advocate a more flexible and permissive environment, giving employees more freedom and latitude. One of the ways productivity has been increased of late is via the development of cloud computing. It cannot be denied that cloud computing is having a tremendous positive effect upon integrating technology and making life easier overall. This is also true in the workplace, and more and more businesses are reaping its benefits.

In the past, traditional IT has managed inter-office communications, information logging, file sharing, data storage, and team and collaborative efforts. All of this used to require a more hands-on and managed approach. However, many of these functions are now being handled remotely by the cloud, which in itself is a boost to efficiency in the workplace…

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Adi Gaskell.

The following is an interview with Joseph Corrigan, Partner at Posternak Blankstein & Lund in Boston on the benefits and risks of using cloud computing in your business.

How do you use cloud computing in your business, and what are the advantages of using it?

We are currently use a cloud service provider to back-up our data periodically throughout the day as well for our disaster recovery needs. The advantage of cloud computing for this service is that backing up data used to be a time consuming and expensive process, where tapes were utilized to back up data on a daily basis, and it was expensive to maintain the equipment necessary restore the data contained on the back-up tapes…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Charlie Osbourne.

Although organizations are moving to cloud-based computing systems in their droves, it may result in unforeseen costs unless rogue cloud use is regulated. Symantec’s "The Hidden Costs of Cloud 2013 Survey" (.pdf) suggests that over 90 percent of organizations are now discussing cloud, which is up from 75 percent a year ago, in order to try and remain competitive and improve the flexibility of their business practices. However, picking the wrong system can result in high expenditure in the long run.

Based on data from several thousand responses from 3,236 organizations — both SMBs and enterprises — from 29 countries, the report found that rogue cloud computing use is causing an escalation in cost, increasing complexity in backing up and storing data, and inefficient storage services. "Rogue" cloud use, defined as business groups that offer public cloud applications which are not managed by or integrated into a company’s IT infrastructure, are at the heart of the problem…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

The cloud has a way of hiding much of what we used to fret about. Servers are boxes, and boxes are meant to be interchangeable. You push the button and you log in. It’s just a box, and there’s no need to spend much time thinking about it because it’s a commodity. SoftLayer is one of the companies fighting the commodification of the servers, at least a bit. SoftLayer is still selling servers by the hour and offering a cloud of machines that starts up on demand, but it’s also making the server purchase more like it used to be. You have plenty of options, some of which include getting a raw machine that’s yours, all yours.

Amazon and Google, for instance, started selling a few basic models. Although they’ve expanded the selection over the years by adding higher-powered CPUs or more RAM, the menu of choices is still pretty simple. If you get a small machine, you get a small CPU with a smaller amount of RAM and a smaller bundle of everything else. If you want more, you buy more of everything. SoftLayer lets you shop for servers the old way. You choose how many cores you want, then choose the RAM independently. You can build a machine with 16 2GHz cores and 1GB of RAM, one core and 16GB of RAM, or any integer in between — say, 13 cores and 7GB of RAM. The prices slide up and down, and the two parts are priced independently. Sixteen cores will cost 75 cents per hour, while only one core will cost 7 cents per hour. There are price breaks along the list and it’s not exactly linear…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Oracle is continuing its faux cloud strategy, adding to its private-cloud infrastructure offering the ability to rent for a monthly fee preconfigured application servers to be deployed in customer data centers. The available application servers — what Oracle calls "engineered systems" — include Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Sparc SuperCluster, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, and Oracle Sun ZFS Storage.

The notion is they provide specialized capacity beyond what you deployed using Oracle’s private cloud systems, which Oracle labels "infrastructure as a service" but is not actually a cloud IaaS offering — it’s the usual Oracle data center gear. Just as Oracle IaaS is not a true cloud offering, neither is Oracle’s new "Iaas On Demand" selection of rental application servers. Unlike with a true cloud on-demand service, your monthly fee — which requires a three-year contract — covers just the hardware, its maintenance, and some degree of usage. You pay extra for the Oracle software licenses and for "peak" usage (no definition or price given). It’s not the standard cloud model, in which the entire service is included with the fee…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The National Association of Realtors®’ venture capital fund Second Century Ventures has become a strategic investor in Symform, a revolutionary, distributed cloud backup service. "Second Century Ventures was created to help develop and deliver real estate industry technologies to Realtors® so they can best serve their clients and customers," said Dale Stinton, SCV president and NAR chief executive officer. "This investment in Symform will give Realtors® access to electronic data management resources they can use to organize and protect the information of home buyers, sellers and investors in the real estate transaction."

Unlike traditional data center storage, the Symform Cloud Storage Network encrypts, shreds and globally distributes data. This technology provides a secure and high-performing cloud backup system. Customers join the Symform network by contributing excess local drive space and, in exchange, receive free cloud backup…