Grazed from CloudPro.co.uk. Author: Davey Winder.

A new research paper has described how hackers can benefit from Google for cheap cloud computing – will this open the floodgates? Because I spend the most of my working day writing about the IT security space, you might think I get to read an awful lot of research papers concerning proof of concept threats and potential exploits.

And you would be right. On the whole, while these are interesting enough to someone such as myself, when it comes to the actual real-world risk posed to your average enterprise by such research that is best summed up in the title of a recent blog of mine: Cryptography attack: side-channel cloud threat is all nerd and no knickers. I concluded that particular piece by saying that "If you are a business with real data out there in the real cloud, and assuming you’ve followed basic security best-practice strategies, including the rather obvious non-use of public clouds for highly sensitive data storage, you can move on: nothing to see here…"…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

The season of predictions is upon us, with market intelligence firm IDC last week releasing its report "IDC Predictions 2013: Competing on the 3rd Platform." What exactly is the "3rd platform"? It’s an IDC amalgam of mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies — which tend to be procured outside the usual enterprise IT channels. According to the report, these technologies will together drive approximately 90 percent of the growth in IT spending from 2013 through 2020.

A fascinating aspect of this prediction crystalized for me during a conversation with IDC Senior Vice President Frank Gens, who described how cloud services are starting to dig deep into vertical industry areas — an accelerating trend that portends dramatic fragmentation of IT…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Howard Baldwin.

The first time a client brought intellectual property lawyer Janine Anthony Bowen a cloud computing contract to look over, her reaction was, essentially, "These people must be nuts." "I read the clause saying the service provider would bear no liability for anything that went wrong with its service, and even if something did go wrong, my client would still be responsible," recounts Bowen, lead partner at Jack Attorneys & Advisors in Atlanta.

To recover any losses, her client would have had to bring suit, and the maximum recovery amount equaled no more than the fees paid for 12 months of service. That amount wouldn’t even begin to come close to the value of a data loss. Bowen’s assessment of the contract was blunt: "The terms were offensive," she says…

Grazed from MacWorld. Author: Rohan Pearce.

CEO of US video streaming company Netflix, Reed Hastings, says that the current state of cloud computing is akin to the era before compilers took some of the heavy lifting away from coding. Netflix started its move to Amazon’s cloud in late 2009, and according to Hastings, who addressed the recent AWS re:Invent customer conference in Las Vegas, 95 percent of the company’s computation and storage is provided by Amazon Web Services.

“We’ve got some remaining low value systems that we haven’t yet converted but we hope by the end of next year to be the largest business in the world that’s 100 percent on AWS outside Amazon retail,” Hastings said…

Thrown into this mix, of course, is the latest attempt by the European Commission (EC) to protect privacy rights and provide a uniform approach to data protection with the General Data Protection Regulation.

Although the EC is not looking to implement the Draft Regulation until 2014, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has released Guidance on the use of cloud computing, in an attempt to address some of these concerns and hopefully shed light on the best approach for cloud customers to take….

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

 Proformative, the largest and fastest-growing online community and resource for senior level corporate finance, accounting, treasury and related professionals today seeks feedback from its constituency with its second annual Cloud Computing Survey tied with a ‘cloud’ giveaway.

Cloud computing and cloud services have become so prevalent and integral to organizations of all sizes that Proformative is hosting another Cloud Computing Survey to gain even more insight into the topic.

Cloud Computing is very easily applied to the accounting and finance departments. Traditional on-premise software used to record, process and report on company business can all be taken to the cloud where it can go beyond the debits and credits to managing people, payroll, commerce, treasury, BI and a whole host of formerly difficult-to-acquire and integrate technologies…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Alexander Haislip.

 Cloud computing has become a lot like the Hotel California: Once you pick a provider you can check out anytime you want – but you can never leave.

You’ve no doubt heard of “cloud lock-in,” the concept that once you architect and optimize your systems on a single infrastructure seller you’re effectively stuck with the choice. It’s an unattractive idea, especially in an industry moving as quickly as cloud computing is.

And the companies paying real money for cloud computing – signing eight- and nine-figure annual contracts – they’re the ones looking for alternatives. They know they’re going to get discounts now that HP, Microsoft, Google and Dell are all in the cloud game…

Grazed from TheNextWeb. Author: Josh Ong.

We’ve already talked at length about the division between the Chinese Internet and the rest of the world. It’s a schism that has broad-reaching effects on censorship and culture, and it also has a heavy impact on the development of the Chinese cloud industry.

That industry, like its nebulous namesake, is itself vague and undefined. These days it has become such a buzzword that almost anything related to the Internet will have the label slapped onto it. As such, in our survey of the Chinese cloud industry, we’re going to look at several different cross-sections, from back-end computing infrastructure to personal storage…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Bob Prince Alo.

Amazon has dropped prices on its popular cloud database servers and added a range of rentable hardware that customers can use to host cloud technology and related platforms. The cloud computing juggernaut lost some popularity in the wake of power outages that received its fair share of media coverage earlier this year. Amazon hopes to regain its market share by reducing prices and expanding product lines.

Amazon’s price cuts comes amid a backdrop of increasingly steep competition from other cloud vendors like Microsoft and Oracle. Lower prices and diversified cloud products attract many small and midsize firms to cloud solutions…