Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Pretty much anyone watching the cloud computing market will tell you that Amazon Web Services is its 800-pound gorilla. Which means that this is a big week for the company: On Wednesday in Las Vegas, Amazon kicks off its first user conference, called AWS re: Invent.

Given the breadth of services it offers, Amazon is expected to be a major force in the cloud for the foreseeable future. But with its market-leading position comes questions about how the company runs its cloud, who is using it and what the future holds. From outages that have brought down Amazon services, to questions around the extent to which the company is seen as a trusted enterprise partner, AWS users and cloud watchers are keeping a close eye on the company…

Grazed from BackupTechnology. Author: Editorial Staff.

The use of cloud services is becoming more and more common in businesses of all types and sizes. However, there are still many businesses who are reluctant to commit to cloud computing because of concerns, primarily over reliability and security. For many businesses, trusting a cloud provider with something essential to everyday business processes, such as a hosted exchange server or backup of essential data, is often the most difficult step to take. From this point of view, having a set of industry standards that can help to guide buyers is potentially very positive for customers and providers alike.

As the cloud computing industry picks up more momentum, some, like the Open Data Center Alliance, are promoting the idea that it should become a regulated industry. This would standardise services offered by cloud providers and would ensure customers could trust they were buying from a reputable company in what is a new and extremely fast growing sector of the IT industry…

Grazed from The Age. Author: Trevor Clarke.

It’s the latest buzzword in the crowded IT dictionary: "software defined network", or SDN for short. But is it something Australian technology and business leaders need to worry about for 2013? Or can they comfortably ignore the industry hype and get back to their plans for mobile, social, cloud computing and big data?

The answer is one that consultants and analysts love to give: "it depends". It depends on whether you are a large telco, cloud computing provider, IT service provider or research institute operating a large or complex network: these are the likely candidates for early adoption of SDN…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Boundary has added analytics features to its cloud monitoring service to give enterprises a better idea of how applications running on public clouds are performing and warn them when something starts to go wrong. Boundary is delivered as software-as-a-service and the new analytics features are being added this week, according to CEO Gary Read.

"The features will allow enterprises to start understanding what is normal for their cloud-based applications, including performance characteristics such as latency, response times and traffic patterns," Read said. When that has been established, Boundary can start to warn users when things start to go wrong…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Ken Presti.

International Computer Security Association Labs is working on a new initiative aimed at helping cyber liability insurance companies more accurately assess risk associated with cloud computing. An independent division of Verizon (NYSE:VZ), ICSA Labs has built a reputation around testing and certification criteria to measure product compliance and performance.

"We are teaming with the insurance industry to provide insurability certifications around cloud," explained Vinny Sakore, the organization’s program manager for cloud security. "This is a focus for 2013, and we expect to go public with an announcement sometime during the first quarter."…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Frank J. Ohlhorst.

Back in July 2010, Rackspace Hosting and NASA jointly launched a new open-source cloud initiative known as OpenStack. The ultimate goal was to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services that run on standard hardware. Since that date, approximately six revisions of OpenStack have been released, and more than 150 companies have signed up to support the platform.

Simply put, OpenStack is a "cloud operating system" designed for the data center. What’s more, OpenStack is also viewed as the kernel for cloud operations, on which vendors can build all sorts of software to run on in the cloud…

Grazed from HealthLeaders. Author: Scott Mace.

I’m here to say that healthcare should be thankful it has come late to part of the technology party. Why? Because healthcare doesn’t have to play by the so-called rules that existed a few years ago. Healthcare can challenge the assumptions that drove decisions a short while ago and take advantage of cloud computing technology that overturns the conventional wisdom—and price structure—of IT services.

Want an example? Recently, I spoke to Qualsight, a healthcare provider you probably haven’t heard of, even though it serves more than 75 million health plan members. Chicago-based Qualsight launched eight years ago to connect independent ophthalmologists to healthcare plan sponsors to provide their members laser vision correction services. Today, the ophthalmologists operating out of 800 locations let Qualsight boast of being the nation’s largest Lasik services manager…

Grazed from TheNextWeb. Author: Alex Wilhelm.

Today Microsoft’s Azure team released a number of statistics concerning its platform, touting its scale and speed. Since its birth in 2010, Microsoft claims that Azure has processed a total of 200 billion authentications for a total of 50 million active user accounts. The cloud computing and storage service now averages some 4.7 billion authentications weekly.

Azure, a product that has struggled somewhat in the shade of Amazon’s broad and popular AWS cloud computing and storage services, is fighting for mind and market share. It appears to be making progress. Chest-thumping its 9,000 requests per second, Azure claims that in the United States, the average authentication takes less than a second…

Grazed from ADTMag. Author: John K. Waters.

Red Hat today launched a new version of its OpenShift cloud computing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) packaged for enterprise consumption. Dubbed OpenShift Enterprise, this is a fully supported version of the product designed to be installed on-premise within customer datacenters as private clouds, or as public or hybrid clouds.

This new release targets organizations with what the company is calling "the industry’s first comprehensive, open, on-premise PaaS for enterprises," which fulfills a promise the company made back in May to provide such a product. OpenShift Enterprise is built on top of Red Hat’s core open source technologies, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Apprenda, a true believer in private Platform as a Service, is embracing the hybrid cloud with its latest release. CEO Sinclair Schuller said many companies are ready to test out at least some workloads in a public cloud.

Apprenda, a startup that’s bet big on a .NET-focused private Platform as a Service, is branching out. With its new Apprenda 4.0 release, the company says it can connect on-premises environments running Windows Server 2012 with Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services resources as needed…