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.”…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

AWS CTO Werner Vogels and I sat down at the AWS re:Invent conference yesterday to talk about whether large companies are actually using the cloud to innovate through new styles of applications. Vogels says they are, and has plenty of examples to prove his point. Maybe big businesses really do understand cloud computing after all.

When I sat down with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference on Wednesday, we began the discussion by talking about applications designed to take advantage of everything the cloud has to offer in terms of control, resiliency and programmability — what Vogels calls 21st-century architectures. It’s great in theory but, I asked, “Who’s actually building these apps?”…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: Caron Carlson.

Enterprises have been loud and clear about ongoing security concerns regarding cloud computing, but by and large, vendors haven’t responded with robust service level agreements or any other reassuring controls, experts say. Customers should be on the lookout for nine controls that could relieve their concerns, reports Brandon Butler at Network World. One of the most effective security provisions customers should ask for in a cloud contract is a certificate that shows data is deleted when the contract expires. This is not at all common, Butler notes, but it is legally defensible.

Other highly effective provisions would include a disaster recovery clause and a clause that establishes that the provider is responsible for the customer’s losses if a security breach occurs. Unfortunately, these provisions are also non-existent today…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

Cloud computing is rearranging the datacentre infrastructure market: large server makers are seeing their dominance wane as competition grows from low-cost Asian manufacturers that sell directly to the clouds of Google, Amazon and others. HP, Dell and IBM are all struggling to ship servers due to competition from low-cost and specialist vendors, figures from Gartner shows.

The latest report by the analyst company on the worldwide server market was released on Wednesday. It paints a grim picture of the global datacentre market, with the market’s overall revenues during the third quarter decreasing 2.8 percent year-on-year and overall shipments growing a measly 3.6 percent…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudStack Collaboration Conference — Cloudian today announced that it has extended its industry-leading Cloudian Cloud Storage Platform for easy integration with Apache CloudStack. The Cloudian solution enables cloud service providers and enterprises to seamlessly deploy S3-compatible cloud storage quickly and cost-effectively along with a state-of-the-art cloud computing platform under a common user interface and single provisioning and sign on.

"Storage is a critical element of cloud computing, and Cloudian’s object store is very complementary to Apache CloudStack," said Kevin Kluge, VP of Product Development for Citrix and Apache CloudStack Committer. "We are pleased to have the Cloudian Cloud Storage Platform support the Apache CloudStack cloud computing platform, giving users powerful storage via a simple, elegant deployment."…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

Retailing giant Amazon runs AWS as a subsidiary at arm’s length and in a somewhat stealthy manner at that. Having AWS be a little removed from Amazon is necessary because Amazon often competes with some of the companies that want to host applications on its cloud, and the stealth is just a way for AWS to preserve some mystique in terms of just how large the cloud computing unit is and how pervasive its use is.

As the first mover and undisputed leader in cloud computing, what we want to know is exactly the kind of data that Rackspace Hosting provides in its quarterly reports: server count, customer count, employee count, revenue per customer, and revenue by category for the collection of infrastructure and platform services that are known as the AWS cloud…

Grazed from GMANetwork. Author: Editorial Staff.

A vulnerability in cloud-based mobile browsers may allow hackers to steal cloud computing time from users of such apps in mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, a tech site reported Thursday. Security researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Oregon said the cloud resources that do the heavy lifting can be tricked into doing "other things," according to an article posted on PC World.

"(It) depends on how well-provisioned the cloud browser platform is, as well as how large of a job the attacker is executing. Cloud browsers operators who are monitoring resource use will definitely notice a spike in service use. However, reacting to BMR (Browser MapReduce technique) jobs requires the operator to build additional defenses into their framework," it quoted NCSU assistant professor William Enck, a co-author of the paper, as saying…

Grazed from Yahoo. Author: Alistair Barr.

Amazon.com Inc’s cloud computing division is going after big corporate customers, a new focus that will put the fast-growing unit into direct competition with some of the world’s largest technology companies.

Andy Jassy, head of Amazon Web Services or AWS, criticized the hefty profit margins of what he called "old guard" tech companies on Wednesday and unveiled a new data warehousing service that he said will cost about a tenth of existing solutions…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Shaun Nichols.

Administrators with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are looking to cloud computing platforms to power the administration’s next generation of projects. Speaking at the 2012 re:Invent conference, Nasa IT CTO Tom Soderstrom and software engineer Khawaja Shams said that the JPL staff are using cloud platforms to power, among other things, the Mars Curiosity rover mission.

The rover, which has already made a number of historical discoveries on the red planet, uses a number of computing and storage platforms from Amazon in order to communicate with the rover and process data gathered in the mission…