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:…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Narendra S Sahoo.

Cloud security is a hotly debated topic in India today, with delegation of duties and responsibilities being the key areas of concern. Sales personnel will assure you of “all-inclusive services”, or, “Don’t worry, we are your partners, and everything will be to your satisfaction.” Yet, the client ends up disappointed. They needed apples, but the provider sold them oranges. The oranges are in good shape, but the client needed apples!

In my experience as the Director at a consultancy which has helped many organizations transition safely to the cloud, both sides are equally responsible for the mess. While providers fail to adequately understand client needs, clients think, “Once I sign up, it is their problem, not mine. I will hold up their payments”. Hence cloud audits and compliance are vital. “Audits and compliance” refer to all the internal and external processes that an organization implements in order to:…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Savvis is moving more convincingly into standard cloud services. The managed hosting provider launched Savvis Direct as a beta compute service Monday, following on its Dec. 3 launch of Symphony Cloud Storage, its long-term storage equivalent to Amazon’s S3.

Savvis comes to the party with some of its own particular bells and whistles. To provide cloud services, it’s marrying its experience in managing large data centers with CenturyLink’s networking savvy. CenturyLink is the third-largest carrier in the United States, and that means if you’re already a CenturyLink business customer, you can move your data between CenturyLink cloud centers at no additional charge on the private network…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Cade Metz.

“I’m a cloud architect,” says Carl Perry, and there’s not even a hint of irony. His business card says the same thing. Perry works for a Los Angeles outfit called DreamHost. The company began life in 1997 as a four-person operation that would set up and host websites for anybody who needed one, but like many web hosts, it has evolved into something a bit different. Following in the footsteps of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, it’s now offering what are commonly known as cloud services — internet services that give you instant access to computing power.

With these services — named after Amazon’s seminal Elastic Compute Cloud — you can set up and host a website all on your own. Or fire up any other software application. Or store virtually unlimited amounts of data…