November 16, 2012 Off

When is a cloud not (quite) a cloud?

By David

Grazed from Computing.co.uk. Author: Editorial Staff.

At a recent Dell roundtable event on the future of cloud computing, the discussion centred around how cloud was not being adopted wholesale by many organisations yet. Various reasons were put forward, such as fear of change, fear of losing control, security issues and so on. A little while later on, several people were pushing the case for cloud around its capability to enable innovation.

Sure, cloud computing can provide a different way of doing things and can encourage a completely different way of facilitating business process – but if this is pushed as the main way that cloud works, then surely all that is happening is that users will be put off more? If fear of change is a factor to scare organisations off from using cloud, then moving critical business workloads to a relatively unproven emerging platform AND changing the way the application runs has to be enough not only to put the techies off the change, but also the business?…

November 16, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Salesforce.com’s complexity brings CIOs, partners together

By David

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: John Moore.

When Republic Services sought to retool the systems supporting its national account team, the environmental services company selected Salesforce.com as part of the overhaul-and soon after making that decision, Republic Services hired Bluewolf, a New York-based consulting firm and Salesforce.com partner, for some deployment help.

Bill Halnon, CIO of Republic Services, says his company wanted to work with an experienced hand in the Salesforce.com space. "After selecting the tool, we looked at how we [were] going to implement this," Halnon says. "Even though it is a cloud application, it required some customization and configuration to fit our needs. Just like we would go out and look for an SAP partner, we took the same route with Salesforce.com."…

November 16, 2012 Off

Microsoft completes its purchase of cloud computing firm StorSimple

By David

Grazed from The Next Web. Author: Alex Wilhelm.

The deal’s terms were not made available, however the purchase price could have veered into the low nine-figure range, as StorSimple had raised some $31.5 million prior to its purchase. In Microsoft’s eyes, the company was right in the middle of big data and cloud computing, areas that it itself is investing into quite heavily, with its work on Azure and work with Hadoop. StorSimple, Microsoft told TNW, brings “together on-premises and cloud storage [and] data management.”

It was our perspective then, and remains, that this purchase is essentially a talent and customer acquisition pickup for Azure, a product that is technically capable, but lacks mindshare in the public market, as it competes with rival offerings from Rackspace, and sits in Amazon’s shade…

November 16, 2012 Off

BotClouds: How Botnets Now Offer Crime-as-a-Service

By David
Grazed from ReadWrite.com.  Author: Brian Proffitt.

Botnets, networks of compromised end-user computers and servers, are hugely sophisticated engines of computation and messaging these days – just like cloud computing. Botnet creators can now sell their criminal and fraudster clientele capabilities to do a variety of tasks, from trying to crack into banks to creating fake grassroots political campaigns.

Bots Grow Up, Get Meaner

The use of botnets for straightforward criminal activity is nothing new, of course. By marshaling the resources of hundreds of thousands of infected computers at any given time, botnet controllers can use sheer brute force to bring down relatively unprotected websites just be directing thousands of traffic requests per second. Or they can use such an event to mask a more surreptitious attack into a bank’s online data…

November 16, 2012 Off

Microsoft’s Ballmer Touts Tablets, Phone, Cloud

By David
Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer described the departure of Steven Sinofsky as the head of Windows 8 development as "amicable" and said that Microsoft is well positioned in tablets, phones and cloud computing to start expanding its business again.

"He’s made one of the most amazing contributions anyone could make to a company. We certainly wish him well," Ballmer said of Sinofsky, who until Monday had led the development of Windows 8. He added that Julie Larson-Green, who will take over the Windows product, "has worked with us for 20 years and will provide the leadership needed to continue to advance Windows 8."…

November 16, 2012 Off

CloudNOW unveils its 2013 cloud computing predictions

By David
Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Reuven Cohen.

CloudNOW, a non-profit world-wide consortium of cloud computing thought leaders has released it’s annual predictions for cloud computing. For those unfamiliar with CloudNOW, the consortium was founded by Jocelyn DeGance Graham with a focus on using technology for the overall professional development of women from around the world by providing a forum for networking, knowledge sharing, mentoring, and economic growth. (Membership is open irrespective of gender.)

The predictions were authored by CloudNOW members and advisors Lori MacVittie, Jocelyn DeGance Graham, Bernard Golden, and Margaret Dawson. The 2013 predictions include a particular focus on cloud federation, an accelerated adoption of cloud stacks, and greater control over cloud resources through what they describe as enterprise-class features…

November 16, 2012 Off

How Cloud Computing Helped Obama Win the Presidential Election

By David
Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Reuven Cohen.

Jeff Barr, a web services evangelist at Amazon.com has written an interesting blog post on how Amazon’s cloud helped Barack Obama win the election. In the post Barr says “imagine setting up the technology infrastructure needed to power a dynamic, billion-dollar organization under strict time limits using volunteer labor, with traffic peaking for just one day, and then shutting everything down shortly thereafter. The words “mission critical” definitely apply here. With the opportunity to lead the United States as the prize, the stakes were high.”

He goes on to outline how “the campaign used AWS to avoid an IT investment that would have run into the tens of millions of dollars. Along the way they built and ran more than 200 applications on AWS, scaled to support millions of users. One of these apps, the campaign call tool, supported 7,000 concurrent users and placed over two million calls on the last four days of the campaign. Here’s a graph which depicts the growth in call volume in the days leading up to the election.”…

November 15, 2012 Off

ServiceMesh CEO Eric Pulier Discusses Impact of Cloud Management

By David

Grazed from WHIR. Author: Justin Lee.

With the growing complexity of cloud computing and the coexistence of private, hybrid, and public cloud systems and infrastructures, cloud management tools have become more important than ever. There is certainly a need for these tools to offer the same flexibility and scalability as a company’s cloud strategy, as they ensure the company’s cloud-based resources are effectively working and interacting with end users and other services.

A cloud management strategy often involves a range of tasks, such as performance monitoring, security and compliance auditing and management, and the launch and operation of a disaster recovery and contingency plans…

November 15, 2012 Off

Employees In the Dark on Cloud Policies

By David

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Petra Jorgenson.

The development and evolution of cloud computing is a double-edged sword for midsize businesses. The technology enables companies to streamline processes and scale resources to meet the needs of the organization–all the while reducing or eliminating overhead–but just like with mobile computing, employees can abuse the cloud and put a business at risk.

Symantec released a study in November, "The Myth of Keeping Critical Business Information Out of Clouds," that reveals just how common abuse of cloud services is in the workplace. According to the 165 IT managers and staffers questioned, most employees use unauthorized cloud services behind the IT department’s back; around 80 percent of workers access email and communications services, file-sharing software, online storage services, and contact manager applications without permission…

November 15, 2012 Off

Can Amazon Web Services’ cloud offerings evolve with the times?

By David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Amazon Web Services EC2 has been the gold standard for cloud computing since cloud became a household name. For many, it’s also been a bastion of proprietary defense in an open source world. Since its inception, AWS Elastic Compute Cloud has evolved and gone through more than a dozen price decreases. But questions remain about exactly how big a lead Amazon has in the cloud market and what it’s doing to increase that lead.

Essentially, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a set of cloud APIs that let users host resources on remote servers and storage. AWS APIs include support for block storage, relational databases, email and tools for everything from Web hosting to content delivery. AWS EC2, its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, is a set of AWS APIs that allow consumers to control the hosting of machine images on Amazon servers…