Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

iSoftStone Holdings Limited ("iSoftStone" or "the company," NYSE: ISS), a leading China-based IT services provider, today announced that it has signed an agreement with IBM and the Xiangyang city government to co-build an IBM Central China Cloud Computing Center of Excellence (CCoE) in the city of Xiangyang in China’s Hubei province.

As a sub-center city in Hubei, Xiangyang has become one of China’s largest automotive industry bases in which many manufacturers of vehicles, engines, and other vehicle parts are located. The IBM CCoE, located in Xiangyang and taking all of Central China as its service area, aims to build the first cloud platform to integrate the information needs of the automotive industry supply chain in China…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Robert Shaw.

In 1992, the CME Group launched the first electronic trading platform, which heralded a completely new age for anyone with capital to spare. Electronic trading and money transfers meant a whole new world of opportunity for potential investors.

In essence, the Internet freed wealthy (and even not-so-wealthy) investors to move their money wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, at a negligible cost. The result has been hedge funds, day traders, a huge uptick in emerging market investments, and a veritable explosion of highly complex “financial instruments.” (Plus, grandpa gets to trade stocks at home.)…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: John Omwamba.

Three areas of cloud computing are the crisis points of security breaches. Were it not for Software as a Service (SaaS) programs, there would be no malware. Similarly, but for the openings in the server connections in a network or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), cases of mistrust between proxies would never be an issue. Lastly, were it not for the break in the wall of Platform as a Service (PaaS) as the development platform where hackers can find a field day, there wouldn’t be any security concerns for the cloud community.

Still, the evolving nature of traditional antivirus giants may one day become the saving grace against hardware and cyber crimes that center on mistrust. Though antivirus is like a physical injection, it still qualifies as an all-embracing technology that has legal implications. For example, McAfee, one of the biggest antivirus providers has migrated into the cloud with the aim to certify server networks and a collection of IP sites in a certain domain with particular security details. If the cloud computing providers breach these enforcements, they stand to lose their support by the antivirus companies while their clients may learn that their data stays unguarded…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

InfoWorld’s IT advice columnist Bob Lewis reached out to me last week after my blog post "How AWS can conquer enterprise IT’s resistance to public clouds" with a few ideas. He suggested we should take a page out of the early PC and Web playbooks to help readers understand how to match up the new technology with the old problems. For example, we could use Amazon Web Services — or any cloud computing technology — to address business problems that would be impractical to deploy on traditional IT platforms.

Indeed, cloud computing providers tend to push their technology as the solution to any and all business problems. Unfortunately, there is not a universal fit for cloud computing technology, so you have to be careful to match the business problem you’re looking to solve with the technology that best addresses it. To paraphrase James Carville, the political strategist for former President Bill Clinton, it’s the fit, stupid…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Avnet Technology Solutions, a global IT solutions distribution leader and an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), today unveiled four off-premise cloud computing solutions powered by Amazon Web Services® (AWS). These initial offerings provide managed service provider (MSP), value-added reseller (VAR), and independent software vendor (ISV) partners with integrated, packaged solutions that span the AWS portfolio.

“Avnet’s new solutions built on AWS complement our partners’ portfolios. We specifically designed these solutions to align with how end customers want to purchase cloud computing offerings, which will ensure that our partners can quickly, easily and cost effectively take these solutions to market.”…

Grazed from Business Wire. Author: PR Announcement.

The forecast for cloud computing in 2013? A veritable downpour of innovation: the first touch-based operating system. Greater emphasis on the “open cloud.” Apple’s new virtual server. VMWare’s new “self-service” virtualization product. And that’s just for starters. “With openness comes questions of security and data and application interoperability, among other issues.”

For an IT environment defined by seemingly non-stop evolution, cloud computing will welcome a host of groundbreaking technologies in 2013, according to Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern. “In looking at innovations shaping the cloud hosting and computing environment for next year, I believe this will be the most exciting time in the history of the cloud model,” Stern says. “Whether you’re a medium-size business or an early stage startup, in 2013 you will be able to take advantage of new technology that gives you both greater control over your virtual environment, and also more flexibility.”…

Grazed from The Houson Business Journal. Author: Lisa Chason.

Businesses all over the world are making the leap to the cloud as a cost-effective way to store and protect vast amounts of transactional data and information. Financial institutions are no different. However, given the sensitive nature of the data that banks handle with every transaction, it is crucial to understand how to design and deploy the right cloud solution to ensure security of customers’ information.

In recent years, security breaches impacting financial institutions and their customers have been widely reported, so banks are continuously updating their security platforms — and may be hesitant to transition to the cloud, which is sometimes perceived as less secure…

Grazed from Security Info Watch. Author: Deborah O’Mara.

Prism Skylabs, based in San Francisco, recently unveiled a new partner program for systems integrators. The Silicon Valley company, a cloud-based service that is changing the way video is accessed, stored and analyzed, recently launched the program designed specifically for installation companies who understand the importance of bringing a differentiated product to market.

With little or no barrier to entry and the ability to offer the service to current customers with smaller IP/IT footprints consisting of off-the-shelf hardware, the program gives participants an easy way to leverage the existing video infrastructure, add value and increase their recurring monthly revenue…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware announced Monday that it has integrated its virtualized environment software with its cloud management products, putting into one box the software that generates virtual machines, applies cloud management, and introduces performance and capacity management to the resulting environment.

Dubbed VMware vCloud Suite 5.1, it combines the latest version of three previously separate products: vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 for virtual systems management; vFabric Application Director 5.0 for deploying applications in a virtual environment; and vCloud Suite 5.1 for managing pooled resources as a cloud operation…

Grazed from SMH. Author: Brad Howarth.

While many businesses are still weighing up the benefits and risks of cloud computing, the cloud saved the skin of Australian games developer Halfbrick when dealing with the explosive popularity of its Fruit Ninja games.

Halfbrick’s executive producer Dale Freya said the launch of Fruit Ninja Frenzy on Facebook resulted in user numbers rocketing from hundreds of thousands to millions.
“At one point Facebook did a promotion on the game, and we weren’t even aware of it,” Freya said. “The game went from one million active monthly users to about 9 million in the course of a couple of months.”…