Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

The folks at Spiceworks recently analyzed the key questions cloud computing buyers need to ask before signing a contract. Here are the four main categories — ranging from basic technical questions to governance, risk and compliance inquiries.

“Nuts and Bolts” questions:

1. Can the solution support our OS platforms and run our applications?
2. What web services integrations are available to us?
3. Does the solution meet our I/O requirements?
4. What will the latency, response times and throughput be for our applications?
5. What’s the pricing model and cost?
6. What’s my monthly expenditure going to be?
7. What are the storage options and costs?…

Grazed from FastCompany. Author: Addy Dugdale.

Meet Amazon Redshift. It’s the online retail giant’s data storage cloud and it’s gunning for the established data management services, such as Oracle, Describing itself as a fast and powerful, fully managed petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, claims that the firm’s data warehouse team, piloting the system, found it ran between 10 and 150 times faster than their existing system.

Should the existing data management services be worried? Andy Jassy, the boss of Amazon Web Services thinks so, saying that cloud computing packages offered by current providers such as HP, IBM and Oracle, which only last month announced its arrival on the Cloud, are over-priced and under-performing. "Customers are tired of it," he told the AWS conference yesterday.

Learn more about Amazon RedShift here: http://aws.amazon.com/fr/redshift

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Data centers are the manufacturing floor of the web and cloud computing, so it makes sense that the amount of data center capacity added in the last two years as been measured in millions of square feet. But where it’s added is changing.

The demand for data centers just isn’t subsiding. And to serve the companies that can’t build their own data centers, there’s there has been a boom in retail co-location space around the world, according to Telegeography. The places in which this boom is happening may surprise you…

Grazed from BetaBeat. Author: Steve Huff.

Researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Oregon have discovered a way to turn cloud computing into hacker heaven. Disguising data transfers with URL-truncating services like TinyURL or Bit.ly, researchers found that cloud-based processing power intended to shift computing tasks from laptops, tablets and mobile devices could be converted to crack encoded passwords or used for a large scale denial-of-service attack.

WhiteHat Security’s Jeremiah Grossman told Dark Reading that cloud browser providers need to “ensure adequate security controls are in place to prevent their end users from abusing the system.”…

Grazed from Investors.com. Author: Reinhardt Krause.

Amazon Web Services, the top provider of cloud computing infrastructure services, and No. 2 Rackspace Hosting are campaigning overseas to keep their heady growth on track. Like presidential candidates dueling in swing states, the two cloud rivals are showing up in the same markets. Amazon Web Services, part of online retail king Amazon.com (AMZN), announced on Nov. 12 that it would open a new data center in Sydney. Rackspace (RAX) in August unveiled a new data center in Australia, which it expects will start operating by year’s end.

In Latin America, Rackspace is eying a move into Brazil, a market AWS entered last December. "I think wherever we will be, they will be — and vice versa," Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier told IBD. Oppenheimer analyst Tim Horan, in a report, says the move by AWS into Australia "is a slight negative for Rackspace."…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.

When the trappings of public cloud computing — security concerns, lack of control, long-term costs — hinder adoption, many IT teams turn their attention, dollars and deployment efforts to private cloud. Still, not everyone is convinced that private cloud computing is the answer.

Indeed, some people at IT organizations who have embarked on a traditional private cloud project are concerned that private cloud didn’t fix the problems it was supposed to solve, said Pat O’Day, CTO at BlueLock, a cloud provider based on VMware’s vCloud offering…

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board is a non-partisan, non-political agency created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It has two goals:

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Adam Riglian.

The task of selling the concept of cloud computing isn’t just for the marketers and executives at major tech companies. A little selling can also help rank-and-file IT employees and business users get the cloud tools they need without running afoul of company brass.

Shadow IT, which refers to the use of hardware or software — often cloud software — without the official permission of the IT department, is potentially harmful, according to Adobe Senior Cloud Engineer Tim Prendergast. Speaking at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent show, Prendergast outlined the best ways to garner support for cloud applications within a company without getting into trouble…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Alex Sherman.

Cox Communications Inc. is considering acquisitions of business-services companies with annual revenue of about $200 million and could announce a deal in the next six months. The third-largest U.S. cable company is targeting telecommunications-services and cloud-computing companies as it seeks to increase its potential revenue base by 10 percent in 2013, Phil Meeks, senior vice president of Cox Business, said in an interview.

Atlanta-based Cox is also looking at partnerships and acquisitions of smaller companies, he said. U.S. cable companies are counting on faster-growing business services to buoy growth as residential video customers decrease…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud computing may represent the beginning of a shift of control of business technology away from information technology departments and into the hands of managers and professionals from other parts of the business. While a third of executives responding to a recent survey (32%) agree that the IT department is currently the main driver of cloud adoption, another 45% report that individual business units are ultimately responsible for cloud adoption strategies.

These are some of the findings from a new survey of 460 IT leaders and senior business managers conducted by Capgemini. However, just because cloud computing is in more of the hands of the business doesn’t mean it’s run as effectively as possible. For example, the board of directors is seen as both a driver (29%) and a blocker (28%) of cloud initiatives. This suggests that in many cases, “benefiting from the cloud is still being hindered by a lack of appropriate senior level understanding and commitment,” the report states. “It is safe to conclude that by now the benefits of the cloud are clear and widely understood.”…