Grazed from CloudTimes.org. Author: Xath Cruz.

The state of cloud computing in Japan makes for an interesting read, due to the various oddities that are present within the country with regard to the technology. For instance, the country currently comes in at first place in the BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard, which is a remarkable achievement considering the fact that Japan has a track record for being a slow adopter of new, non-Japanese technology. And we all know that the Cloud was born in the Western IT landscape.

Slow Adopters of Western Technology
Japan’s slow adoption of foreign technology is made apparent by majority of Japanese businesses’ resistance against social media services such as Facebook, Mixi, Twitter, and others. Whereas other countries’ businesses have already adopted the social medium as new venue for marketing, promotion, and even profit earning, Japanese companies are still cold to the idea of using social media as part of their day to day operations. However, the good news about this is that it’s only a matter of time and they will eventually realize that they’d have to keep up or risk being overtaken by foreign businesses. This means there is a huge possibility that they will start adopting the new technology in the future, in which case a boom will happen in the industry…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Heroku, the Salesforce unit that sits atop the Amazon Web Services cloud, is taking a big step toward becoming a platform for software-as-a-service suppliers. But most of the budding SaaS suppliers that use Heroku will not be competing with Salesforce. On the contrary, they’ll provide custom applications and add-on services to the Salesforce product line, with Salesforce opening the door to authorized developers and their work.

Heroku now offers 85 such services from its hosting environment, a total that’s been built up over three years. But it’s got another 80 in the pipeline that will become available in 2013 as well, giving Salesforce.com customers a wide range of potential add-on applications and services, said Oren Teich, COO of Heroku, in an interview…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Kerio Technologies took a small step into the cloud computing realm with the launch of SaaS capabilities in Connect 7, but now the vendor is taking a much larger step into cloud with the release of Connect 8.

Previously, Kerio enabled its partners and customers to host Kerio Connect on their own hardware using the SaaS model, but Kerio is now offering its messaging and calendaring server on a new cloud service infrastructure. However, it’s not pulling the plug on its on-premise version of Connect; it’s simply adding more cloud capabilities in an effort to compete more directly with the big guys in the space, namely Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

A recent study from Gartner has found that priorities are changing in the realm of application development, and cloud computing is playing a huge role in this paradigm shift. Gartner has stated that it expects 55% of enterprises to adopt some form of cloud based computing practice in less than eight years. There are some very compelling reasons for large corporations to move in the direction of cloud computing.

Current IT environments are expensive and difficult to calculate ROI. As the need for technology grew over the years, so did the complexity of IT departments. Over time, the level of support and maintenance of hardware, networking and software was so intermingled that determining if there was any real value within any particular system or application was next to impossible. With rising energy costs and the massive floor space required to house a data center, the infrastructure itself was also very expensive to maintain…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Dean Takahashi.

Adobe is announcing today a set of cloud-based tools for game developers. The tools take advantage of the new cloud-computing trend, where web-connected data centers host subscription-based software. Hosted in the Adobe Creative Cloud service, the tools enable developers to access a centrally located suite of tools for making their titles. The aim is to streamline the game-development process from creation to final deployment.

Adobe says that developers who use its tools can access an audience of 1.3 billion worldwide on PCs and more than 500 million on smartphones and tablets, 20 times the reach of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Rick Blaisdell.

Speaking of Laws and Regulations Governing the Cloud Computing Environment, we cannot ignore the latest cybersecurity bills proposed this year. There have been many cyber bills proposed, but none was as important as the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, supported by the Obama Administration. Cybersecurity is a top administration priority for Obama’s second term. His approach to IT security will influence the U.S cloud computing environment over the next four years.

When it comes to cloud computing, security is top-of-mind for each institution, public and private. In a recent study, defense contractor Lockheed Martin and its Cyber Security Alliance partners acquired feedback from government agencies in an effort to measure attitudes around cloud computing and cybersecurity. 85% of government technology decision makers cite cybersecurity as a high priority, with at least one or more related initiatives underway…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

The enterprise IT market is undergoing a radical shift thanks to cloud computing. On-demand computing has added agility but also increased complexity, and Okta, a startup that helps track who can access what corporate assets, has raised $25 million to bring identity management into the future.

Okta, an almost-four-year-old startup pushing a new type of identity management aimed at cloud-based enterprise applications, has raised $25 million in third-round funding. This round brings the San Francisco-based company to $52 million in total funding. New investor Sequoia Capital led the round with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate also participating…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

AMD’s Opteron 4300 and 3300 processors will combine performance and power efficiency for such environments as cloud computing and Web hosting. Advanced Micro Devices is aiming for cloud providers and smaller businesses with new power-efficient Opteron server chips.

The nine new Opterons, introduced Dec. 4, are based on AMD’s new Piledriver architecture and are being targeted at the midrange and entry-level segments for use in servers that can process high levels of Web-based transactions in such environments as cloud computing, virtualized infrastructures and Web hosting, according to company officials…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Piston Cloud Computing is one of the leading companies in the Open Source OpenStack effort. Piston is now getting some new leadership of its own, appointing industry veteran Jim Morrisroe as CEO.

Piston Cloud was founded by Joshua McKenty, one of the leaders of the open source Nebula platform at NASA, that became the core Nova compute module in OpenStack. McKenty had previously held the role of CEO and will now be the CTO. Morrisroe had previously been the President and General Manager of Zimbra, an open source email startup that was acquired by Yahoo in 2007 and then sold to VMwarefor in 2010…

Grazed from DataCenterJournal. Author: Jeff Clark.

Cloud computing has become a fixture in the IT landscape over recent years. Some debate has even arisen over whether the development of cloud computing counts as evolution or a revolution. Leaving such questions to others (evolution and revolution both signify change, perhaps simply at a different rate or by more or less gradual steps), a brief (and broad) look at the history of the cloud may provide some indicators as to where it’s headed next.

Origins—Maybe

The origins of the cloud are often seen in mainframe computing in the last century. This is a matter also up for some debate, as some cloud proponents like to treat cloud computing as an entirely new phenomenon. Skeptics (or, perhaps, just less excitable types) sometimes see the cloud as nothing new at all, but rather just a rebranding of a computing model that has been around for decades. As with most such arguments, reality is probably somewhere in between. The fundamental model of centralized resources certainly can be traced to mainframe…