Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Thomas Claburn.

Being ahead of the curve can be as much of a problem as being behind it. New York-based TransMedia introduced its Glide Effortless service in late 2005. The cloud-based app, storage and collaboration service was one of the early efforts to recreate the desktop experience in a suite of Web applications.

Since then, Apple, Google and Microsoft have all introduced their own cloud storage, sharing and productivity services, leaving TransMedia to reposition its offerings in an effort to survive amid the giants. Glide Effortless became Glide OS and its focus has shifted from providing branded and white-label Web applications for cable operators, to social networking, to content sharing, and online storage…

Grazed from Virtual Strategy Magazine.  Author: Robert Clyde.

2013 will be an exciting year for cloud computing for all the obvious reasons: exponential growth, new technologies, greater understanding, etc. Rather than repeat the obvious, I would like to make three predictions that are perhaps a little more controversial, or at least less obvious:

Bare-metal Clouds Will Continue to Grow

We tend to think that virtualization is a requirement for cloud computing. This is not so. Many clouds, especially private clouds, utilize bare-metal hosts in addition to virtualized hosts. Some applications need the enhanced I/O or processing performance that comes from running on physical hardware. If these applications don’t require the benefits of virtualization (migration, multi-tenancy, etc.), a bare-metal deployment can be best. This trend will continue to grow, as organizations learn to choose the right platform for the right job. Cloud management systems with policy-based optimization can manage heterogeneous hosts inside a single cloud environment, deploying services on physical or virtual hosts as needed…

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…