Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

Meaningful cloud computing standards are crucial to improve the maturity of cloud-based services and bring increased flexibility, security and interoperability, but too many competing standards could wreak damage, warned the Cloud Industry Forum’s independent certification partner, the APM Group. As cloud uptake gathers pace among users, industry bodies and consumers have expressed anguish over the lack of relevant cloud standards and interoperability hindering cloud adoption.

Cloud standards and interoperability would allow IT to move applications and workloads between private and public clouds and from one public cloud to another. It would enable enterprises to select a combination of cloud technologies and avoid vendor lock-in…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Security may not quite be the hot topic it was a couple of years ago, but it’s still top of mind for CIOs and other IT decisionmakers. On Amazon EC2, nCircle is hoping to alleviate some of those concerns with a new free security service designed for its nCircle PureCloud customers.

The new service provides customers with automated cloud security scanning for Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) networks within nCircle PureCloud. The vendor’s PureCloud service is a vulnerability management solution that enables customers to evaluate the security of their cloud deployments on Amazon without the need to do manual identification of each machine instance…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Chris Poelker.

The acceptance of server and storage virtualization has enabled a paradigm shift in how data center infrastructure is purchased and deployed. End user companies are migrating from purchasing separate physical servers connected to storage area networks (SANs) to more modular “reference architectures” which include every component required to run their applications.

Servers and storage were typically sold as separate IT infrastructure elements in the past, usually to different groups within the IT department, and usually under different parts of the IT budget. The move to the cloud has changed all of that. For example, one recent move by a major server and storage vendor enables its storage to directly connect to its blade servers, which may make a storage network unnecessary. You simply purchase the servers, storage and network together as a data center “building block” which converges everything together to make rolling infrastructure a one stop shopping experience…

Grazed from Backup-Technology. Author: Editorial Staff.

A recent Backup Technology blog briefly touched upon the legal concerns that many businesses have when considering a move to the cloud. This post looks to explore those concerns further. Many of the concerns relate to the lack of regulation in cloud computing, which often makes some larger corporations fearful in case something goes wrong with the service. Although cloud computing is picking up momentum, it is yet to be taken up on a large scale by big corporations, who still prefer to use hardware. Two of the reasons that many big corporations give for not moving more of their IT to the cloud is the concerns over responsibility for the service provided and data security. Understandably, lawyers of big corporations are concerned that when things do go belly up, they will not be able to hold the cloud provider responsible, and even more worryingly they may in fact be liable themselves. This is a major stumbling block for many large corporations who would otherwise be quite keen to make a push to the cloud.

There are many calling for tighter regulation of the cloud computing industry, as well as a change to legislation that is better suited to the cloud. As things stand, US law does not empower prosecutors to hold cloud providers accountable for criminal activity facilitated by the cloud. This is not to say that the cloud provider itself did anything illegal, but simply allowed crime to occur by hosting a service for the criminal organisation…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Luchi Gabriel Manescu.

The best thing about open source software systems has always been the fact that it is freely available and any programmer or company can use it to develop its own version of that software. For the longest time they have been the best solution for people willing to go outside the box in order to get the best results in their respective IT departments. Of course these systems have never been without profit and it came from two sources that are now getting to be absolute because of the emergence of cloud computing and the level of affordability most of its components come from.

The way open source software systems have worked so far has been through selling license agreements. Any company could take a software system like MySQL incorporate it in their own product and then they would either have the choice of getting an open source license or buy a commercial license from MySQL, in this case. However because of the cloud is not actually selling software systems but only time on those systems companies like Amazon, who has developed their Amazon RDS based on MySQL do not have to pay them any licensee fee. The end users get exactly what they needed and are willing to pay for it and cloud service providers like Amazon do not need to pay any fee in licensing…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Always delivering the future of hosting solutions, Arsalon Technologies cloud computing clients are realizing increased capacity on-demand. The Kansas City-based business class hosting provider announced today expansion of their existing Cisco Unified Computing SystemTM (UCS). Arsalon was among the first in the nation to implement this best-in-class cloud solution in their newest data center in 2010. Now, this expansion in hosting technology serves to meet the demands of clients due to the rapid growth in companies outsourcing data center services.

Arsalon’s new and current clients are migrating from traditional hosting environments to cloud-based solutions to benefit from high scalability, consolidated platform management, and reduction in service costs. Unforeseeable demands on hosting environments, outdated technology or rapid growth can result in costly hardware, software or infrastructure upgrades. Because of this, companies are turning to cloud hosting providers like Arsalon to outsource responsibility of their IT infrastructure…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

These days, I get email after email from anyone and everyone who has predictions for cloud computing in 2013. I’ve started to delete them without reading any. Why? They all say very obvious and simplistic things around an industry that is very nonobvious and very complex, if you peel back the layers. Worst of all, because most of the predictions come from technology vendors, their forecasts are annoyingly positive.

This is not to say that cloud computing won’t have high growth and high energy in 2013 — it will. However, not everything will be so rosy, and understanding the negative predictions is important for anyone adopting cloud computing. In the spirit of constructive realism, here are my two tragic cloud computing predictions for 2013…

Grazed from ARN. Author: Patrick Budmar.

If NetSuite APAC managing director, Mark Troselj, were to sum up 2012, it was a year centred on the Cloud. And this is expected to continue well into next year. Or more accurately, the accelerated adoption of Cloud computing by multi-billion dollar enterprise companies, locally and globally. “We’re already seeing this,” Troselj said, “and expect it to happen more in 2013.”

For Troselj, seeing major enterprises like the Commonwealth Bank of Australia openly declaring this year that Cloud computing saves it millions of dollars was proof of this. “Not to mention the bank denouncing traditional excuses for not adopting the cloud as ‘rubbish,’” he said…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

VirtualSharp Software, the leading provider of next generation automated Disaster Recovery solutions for private and public clouds, today announced that its CEO and Co-Founder Carlos Escapa will speak at UP’s third annual Cloud Computing Conference on December 12, 2012 at 11 a.m. PT at the South San Francisco Conference Center.

During his talk on Cloud-Aware Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, Escapa will talk about the transformational effect of the cloud in Disaster Recovery planning and service resilience. Legacy tools and existing recovery methodologies developed when data centers were not virtualized lack service awareness and do not provide metrics that IT can use to comply with Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery policies at all times…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

The Department of Energy and its national laboratories released a wide-ranging cloud computing strategy and overview that for the first time pulls together the disparate cloud computing efforts of the agency’s 22 national laboratories. The strategy largely leaves in place the agency’s hands-off approach to information technology at the national labs in what it calls a "cloud of clouds approach": A small set of centralized Department of Energy initiatives will guide the numerous cloud computing efforts at the independently-operated national labs.

Thus far, that hands-off approach has led to significant innovation at the labs. The strategy highlights a number of cloud computing initiatives and efforts at the national labs that range widely from the basic to the innovative, from infrastructure-as-a-service to Google Apps to virtual desktop infrastructures. Among them:…