Grazed from Technorati. Author: Geoff Simon.

Finding the right cloud storage provider is now easier with small business and consumer review site NextAdvisor.com, who announced a cloud storage category offering consumers its top picks. It also allows visitors to compare cloud storage services like SugarSync, mozy, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox side-by-side, looking at price, features & benefits as well as actual user reviews in one place to help people make more informed decisions.

According to a study by IHS, a global economic and market information company, personal cloud-storage subscriptions are set to jump to 625 million this year, a 25% increase over 2012. The same study also anticipates uninterrupted double-digit growth through the year 2017, where it forecasts about 1.3 billion subscriptions to cloud storage services. "With all of the cloud storage services out there, it can be hard for consumers to choose which one works best for them," says NextAdvisor.com’s President Erik Larson. "We want to make it easier for them by providing a hands-on and informed opinion so people can find the option that provides them the best value."…

Grazed from Defense.gov. Author: Claudette Roulo.

The Defense Department’s information technology infrastructure is on a journey of consolidation, standardization, security and access, the Defense Department’s principal deputy chief information officer told attendees at a cloud computing panel discussion today. 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 the current era of fiscal austerity, but also because it makes sense when it comes to securing data within the network, Carey said. In addition, DOD, along with much of industry, is shifting toward a cloud computing posture: the collection of data and use of related computing services via remote servers accessed through the Internet. Cloud computing isn’t without its risks, Carey said, but the department is moving the paradigm of security from the infrastructure to the data layer. This includes continuous monitoring and cryptography, he added…

Grazed from Business Insider. Author: Michael Kelley.

The U.S. has been very aggressive in deploying cyber attacks in recent years, and it appears that subsequent concerns that America invited attacks on vulnerable U.S. networks were well-founded. In fact, U.S. companies are just beginning to realize the increasingly novel dangers of all-out cyberwarfare.

Last week Nicole Perlroth of The New York Times reported that a recent cyber attack on major U.S. banks were so powerful because they were directed through hijacked data centers (i.e. the cloud) around the would instead of individual computers…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

Security is always an issue whenever sensitive data is involved no matter what era it is; this was true during the time of the Greeks and it is true now. The problem, however, is compounded by an ever increasing complexity of technology and the sheer number of hands that have access or may gain access to that data in one way or another. There is a big piece of mind that a large metal box with equally large locks affords when it comes to security; the internet is the opposite. With millions of people having access to the internet and by extension potential have access to all your data, a few of them will bound to have some interest in that data and may possibly have the skills and means to acquire them.

This is the fundamental fear that CISO’s (Chief Information and Security Officer) and system administrators possess towards cloud computing, the public kind. A private cloud can be very secure because outside access can be limited or entirely removed, but that would really not be considered cloud computing in essence even if the same technology is used, it would simply be a private network where benefits like scalability and affordability remain untapped…

Grazed from HomeToys. Author: Editorial Staff.

THINKstrategies, Inc., the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the on-demand services market, announced today that dinCloud has been named the latest winner of THINKstrategies’ Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s cloud computing solutions.

The CCBV Awards program was launched in 2010 to recognize Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers delivering tangible business benefits to specific user organizations. These benefits include lower costs, faster deployment times, greater profitability, etc. The CCBV Award program builds on the success of THINKstrategies’ Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program which was initiated in 2009…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

ProfitBricks, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company that completely reengineered the delivery of cloud computing, today announced its Referral Program, designed to positively impact the benefits for referral partnerships. The program is currently unmatched, offering as much as 25 percent of a customer’s net revenue as compensation. ProfitBricks is also opening up its early-stage reseller program by inviting select Value Added Resellers (VARs) to work with the cloud computing provider.

The ProfitBricks Referral Program is aimed at developers, IT consultants, system integrators, independent software vendors and even well-connected technology influencers looking for recurring revenue streams from a next-generation cloud provider…

Grazed from DataCenterDynamics. Author: Laura Luo.

The Wuyuan Cloud Computing Data Center Project has been launched, marking China’s first county-level cloud computing data center landing in Wuyuan, Jiangxi Province. With a total investment of 500m CNY, the data center will be constructed by Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT), a branch of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) in South China.

It is planned to break ground this January and be completed in June next year. The data center will have a computing speed of 300 trillion times/second, with its storage capacity reaching PB level upon completion. It is said that it will become the largest headquarter data center and supercomputer data center of the Chinese Academy of Science in East China, providing supercomputing and storage services for many industries including banking and education and provincial governments of Jiangxi, Hubei and Anhui…

Grazed from PingZine. Author: Editorial Staff.

As Cloud computing continues to take the business world by storm, new research has found that the public’s understanding of ‘the Cloud’ is still poor, some five years after the term became widely used in the IT industry. A new survey from Webfusion – one of the UK’s biggest hosting groups, polled more than 1,000 of the general public to gauge their understanding of what the Cloud meant in the context of computing. The research found that almost two in five (38 per cent) said that they had little or no understanding of the term, while only a third (34 per cent) said they were confident that they knew what it meant.

Although the poll found that ‘cloudy’ applications such as file hosting services similar to Dropbox, email services like Hotmail or Gmail, or online music hosting such as iTunes were each seen as cloud services by around 30 per cent of the population, a similar proportion did not recognize these to be Cloud. A much smaller proportion (15.7 per cent) said that scalable hosting across multiple servers counted as a cloud service…