Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Updated: Oh to be a fly on the wall for the conversations that must be going on between Netflix and Amazon engineers this holiday season.

If you’re not a Netflix subscriber, you may not yet know that issues at Amazon’s US-East data center facility took down Netflix’ streaming service on Christmas Eve — arguably the worst possible time. Starting at 1:50 p.m. PST, as GigaOM’s Janko Roettgers reported, Amazon’s US east facility reported issues with its Elastic Load Balancing service that carried over into Christmas morning.  Interestingly, Amazon Prime Instant Video streaming service, which competes head-on with Netflix and which also runs on AWS, appeared to be unaffected by the US East snafus…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Question: Just how much mission-critical work do financial services firms and companies in other heavily regulated industries put on the public cloud?  Answer: It depends on whom you ask.   IT execs in financial services — including Chris Perretta, CIO and executive vice president of State Street – say they absolutely do not allow the use of Amazon Web Services at all.  Period. (For my purposes, public cloud for now pretty much means AWS). They deal not only with their own top-secret data but with that of clients, which makes a move into a cloud they don’t control a career-limiting decision…

Grazed from Sci-Tech-Today. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

Demand for "cloud -ready" IT workers will grow by 26 percent each year through 2015. So says a new Microsoft -sponsored IDC white paper. If that estimate bears out, that means there could be as many as 7 million cloud-related jobs in the world. That said, IT hiring managers report that the biggest reason they failed to fill an existing 1.7 million open cloud-related positions in 2012 is because job seekers lack the training and certification needed to work in a cloud-enabled world.

The IT sector is seeing only modest growth of IT jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average growth in IT employment sits between 1.1 percent and 2.7 percent per year through 2020. But within the larger IT sector, cloud jobs are gaining major momentum — and the IDC study suggests an urgent need to retrain existing IT professionals and encourage students to pursue cloud-related IT trainings and certifications…

Grazed from ChannelNomics. Author: Chris Gonsalves.

If there’s one thing that could slow the inexorable rush to cloud computing, it’s the dearth of talent trained and certified in the ways of the cloud. A new Microsoft Corp.-sponsored report from analyst firm IDC says 1.7 million cloud-related IT jobs went unfilled in 2012 and the number of available cloud positions will swell 26 percent per year to about seven million by 2015.

This puts the United States’ pace of cloud jobs growth well ahead of general IT employment, which is expected to continue its tepid climb of less than 3 percent through 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The gap — coupled with the state of the IT workforce, which remains unprepared to handle advanced cloud jobs — is putting a renewed focus on retraining tech workers and pushing students to focus on cloud skills and certifications…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

When we started talking about cloud computing five years ago, it meant one thing: Services such as Amazon or Salesforce that customers could self-provision over the Internet and pay as they go.

That’s what we call the "public cloud" today, as opposed to the "private cloud," which refers to the application of public cloud technologies and practices to one’s own data center. And guess what? The public cloud was where the action was in 2012 — and it’s where much of the action is going to be in 2013. According to IDC, businesses will spend $40 billion on the public cloud this year, rising to nearly $100 billion in 2016…

Grazed from WorksManagement.co.uk.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Businesses remain sceptical over cloud services, especially public cloud computing, and while they see the benefits of adoption, perceived risks are causing concern.  That’s chief among findings just release by global IT professionals organisation ISACA, which conducted research among 4,500 senior IT people across 83 countries.

Commenting its 2012 IT Risk/Reward Barometer report, Marc Vael, international vice president of ISACA, says: "What is apparent from this study is the perception of control. Private cloud scores better than both public and hybrid cloud, when asked if the benefit outweighs the risk, yet take up is still relatively low."…

Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Alexei Oreskovic and Alistair Barr.

When Amazon.com Inc CEO Jeff Bezos got word of a project at Google Inc to scan and digitize product catalogs a decade ago, the seeds of a burgeoning rivalry were planted.   The news was a "wake-up" call to Bezos, an early investor in Google. He saw it as a warning that the Web search engine could encroach upon his online retail empire, according to a former Amazon executive.

"He realized that scanning catalogs was interesting for Google, but the real win for Google would be to get all the books scanned and digitized" and then sell electronic editions, the former executive said.  Thus began a rivalry that will escalate in 2013 as the two companies’ areas of rivalry grow, spanning online advertising and retail to mobile gadgets and cloud computing…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: Wieland Alge.

You may already be familiar with the term ‘Real Time Protection’, which could just as easily be labeled ‘Cloud Protection’. Simply put, when a vendor’s research team identifies a new email threat, the characteristics of the message are sent to all affected hardware appliances straightaway, so that the malicious content is immediately blocked. This all happens far ahead of the regular update by on-premise virus signatures.

Because they are outsourced, Cloud technologies can be implemented far more flexibly; it could also be referred to as an "elastic protection". Conventional security technologies demand computing power from both onsite hardware and software. But when new threats emerge it means that much more computing power is necessary to take successful action against the threats from one moment to the next. This performance can be provided in the Cloud without having to replace or upgrade the customer’s equipment…

Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Sue Poremba.

Use of cloud services at home, in the workplace and in large enterprises has steadily and significantly increased. Now we are seeing a similar trend with mobile devices and cloud technology. Mobile devices are already accessing a number of cloud services, such as Dropbox, and more third-party applications utilize cloud computing technology. It is only a matter of time until the technology becomes the central force to mobile applications. Where will the future of the mobile cloud lie?

“Mobile platforms are already accessing the cloud for a lot of consumer-based services such as email, social media, online file storage and corporate communications tools. But so far, there are essentially only two players here ñ the individual or consumer, and the consumer cloud service,” said Dan Matthews, chief technology officer with IFS North America. “One of the biggest changes I think we will see in the next year or two is the entry of a third player ñ the corporate back-end system (e.g., corporate ERP, Financials, SCM and other mission-critical systems).”