Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Xath Cruz.

According to a study by the London School of Economics and Political Science, the development of cloud computing will result in economic growth, increased productivity, and promote change in the types of jobs and skills required by businesses.  The study focuses on two industries – smartphone and aerospace service – and dives into the impact of cloud computing on said industries using the UK, Germany, Italy, and USA and the years 2010 and 2014 as subjects. Microsoft helped underwrite the study.

The study claims that investments in cloud computing are contributing to job creation and growth in both the old and slow-growing aerospace sector and the relatively new, yet fast growing smartphone industry. Added to this, the cloud computing industry is also responsible for job creation via construction, staffing, and supply of the data centers that will host the cloud. Cloud computing also has the benefit of optimizing businesses as it frees up managerial staff and skilled employees, allowing them to focus on the areas of work that are more profitable…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Chris Talbot.

Sidera Networks will be providing the high-performance network connectivity needed for customers’ growing needs in cloud, disaster recovery and managed services. Sidera is collaborating with ContintuityX Solutions, a provider of managed networking, data center, applications, cloud and disaster recovery services, to connect ContinuityX’s data centers in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Philadelphia and Toronto to provide stronger disaster recovery and cloud services.

Business continuity has been top-of-mind for a lot of east coast companies the last few months as they’ve had to contend with hurricanes that have at times taken down data centers. Thankfully, during Hurricane Sandy, cloud data centers fared quite well, but some of the business continuity plans included shifting customer data to data centers farther inland…

Grazed from CloudComputing News.  Author: James Bourne.

Research from identity management provider SailPoint has revealed that US and UK based IT leaders see one in three mission critical apps as currently in the cloud, with that figure rising sharply by 2015.  The Market Pulse Survey of 400 IT and business leaders, which defined ‘mission critical’ as apps mainly focused on storage, file-sharing and communications, forecast that the number is expected to grow to one in two in three years.

The figures differed slightly dependent on which side of the Atlantic respondents were based – 32% in the US compared to 30% in the UK for cloudy mission critical apps now – but the consensus was the same.  Another element of the research centred on pain points with moving to the cloud, with the usual suspects present…

Grazed from Crikey.au.  Author: Bernard Keane.

It was a peculiar piece, out of the blue, from Washington’s man in Australia: yesterday, Fairfax ran an op-ed from US Ambassador Jeff Bleich about “cloud protectionism” and why it was important that the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiation currently underway (this week, in Auckland) pave the way for the removal of restrictions on movement of data across borders:

“Like people who once thought keeping their money hidden under the mattress was better than having it in a bank, some voices across the region, and even in Australia, have called for limiting the flow of data across borders, and requiring firms to install local data centres in each market to ensure local ‘control’. This ‘beggar thy neighbour’ protectionism would be just as self-defeating in the digital economy as in every other sector.”…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Companies worried about their bills for cloud services have a new — and free — option: Apptio’s Cloud Express, which can track usage and costs for cloud services from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Rackspace.

IT departments are increasingly being asked to adopt cloud computing, but they often lack the necessary data and analysis required to make informed decisions, according to Apptio, a company that specializes in tools to help CIOs determine the cost and quality of their IT systems.  Gathering cost information on use of public cloud providers is today a labor-intensive process, but Apptio wants to change that with the introduction of the free Cloud Express tool…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

EMC has joined the OpenStack open-source cloud effort. The news hits three months after VMware — 80 percent owned by EMC — signaled its intention to back the initiative. EMC joins as a corporate-level member while VMware is a higher-level gold member…

Grazed from Silicon Republic.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A key barrier to the uptake of cloud computing technologies is reassuring and convincing IS/IT managers that their jobs would not become obsolete if they shifted to the cloud, a major study by Lero involving 170 pages of interview case notes has revealed. It also found that the word ‘cloud’ actually scares some people.

According to Dr Lorraine Morgan and Dr Kieran Conboy, who conducted the Lero research at NUI Galway, the key barriers to cloud assimilation can be grouped across six headings: (i) Perceptions of the term ‘cloud’, (ii) Convincing IS/IT management, (iii) Persuading employees to use cloud systems, (iv) Security and privacy issues, (v) Integration, and (vi) Bandwidth and connectivity…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Today, GlobeRanger announced iMotion Stratus, the cloud-based version of its award winning iMotion Edgeware Platform. It delivers the features of the proven iMotion server-based platform from the cloud, easing deployment and enabling global capability. Stratus provides a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) avenue for companies to begin utilizing RFID technology without the upfront costs of RFID software and the servers to run it. It allows for economical small initial deployments with ability to scale up as needed. Deployments can scale from a single location to thousands of locations globally.

iMotion(TM) Stratus(TM) complements GlobeRanger’s premise-based iMotion Edgeware Platform and Edge Controller platform. Stratusintegrates seamlessly with iMotion server-based and network appliance-based deployments to allow the best-suited technology for the specific application to be used, whether an on-premise server or cloud-based…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Crowdsourcing is a great idea in theory, but it hasn’t really lived up to its potential, says Alegion CEO Nathaniel Gates. He thinks with some fundamental tweaks, Alegion can change all that for the better.  There’s man and there’s machine. And then there’s Alegion. The Mill Creek, Wash.-based startup launched at Amazon Web Services’ Re: Invent conference in late November with a business model that aims to turn crowdsourcing labor into the perfect blend of human-machine interaction.

Crowdsourcing hasn’t really taken off, Alegion Co-founder and CEO Nathaniel Gates told me, because it’s too complex to do correctly. This is especially true on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, atop which Alegion has built its business. Conceptually, he thinks it’s amazing, but the answer to the question of “Why hasn’t it taken off, why hasn’t it revolutionized labor?” is that compared with the rest of the AWS platform, Mechanical Turk is a bear to use…