Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud computing is pitched as a great solution for applications that are temporary or run on bursty workloads. What could be more temporary and bursty than a political campaign? Amazon’s Jeff Barr just revealed that President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign’s technology was running on the cloud — Amazon Web Services’ cloud, to be exact.

“The campaign’s technology team built, deployed, ran, and scaled up their applications on AWS,” Barr reports at the AWS blogsite. “The campaign used AWS to avoid an IT investment that would have run into the tens of millions of dollars.”…

Graze from GigaOM. Author: Mark Thiele.

There’s a common assumption that the Cloud’s destiny is to be a public utility. Mark Thiele, of data center operator Switch, argues that would kill competition and innovation, and that IT can be a better option. One of the prevailing assumptions around the cloud computing market is that it will drive towards an über-simplified delivery model that is similar to a utility. Further, this utility model will largely remove the potential for differentiation by most vendors and will lead to a race to the bottom from a pricing perspective.

There is ample evidence commoditization is occurring, and we could point to almost any area of IT to see it, from servers, PCs, virtualization, storage, networking, and so on. However, what is often lost in the obvious is that it’s not that simple…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: David Chernicoff.

Automation software for IT has always been an important, if low profile, part of the IT management tool box. Building automation sequences using software tools to make IT tasks that were formerly complex series of steps to accomplish regular tasks has always been a highlight of the capabilities of automation tools. But with the move towards cloud computing and on-demand provisioning of cloud services, automation moves from the category of nice to have to absolutely critical for success.

Fewer things could make the importance of automation tools in successful cloud management more clear than the acquisition this week by Dell and Cisco of companies known for their automation and cloud management tools. Cisco announced that it would be acquiring Cloupia, known for their datacenter management software and Dell announced the acquisition of Gale Technologies, a datacenter ISV known for their datacenter infrastructure automation software and cloud provisioning and monitoring software. Gale Technologies has been a Cisco partner, but with Cisco’s acquisition of Cloupia, being acquired by Dell might have been the best outcome for the company…

Grazed from Statesman.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

Dell Inc. said Friday it had bought Gale Technologies, a leading provider of management software that eases the the setup of diverse computing operations. Gale, founded in 2008, is based in Santa Clara, Calif., and builds software that enables companies to easily manage data operations in multiple kinds of cloud computing installations. No terms of the deal were disclosed and Dell would not say how many people Gale employs.

Analyst Patrick Moorhead with Moor Insights & Strategies said Gale gives Dell an important piece that it lacked in selling and deploying big cloud computing systems. That’s because Gale’s software lets companies track their data across multiple locations, whether it is in a private customer-owned cloud or in a public cloud that is shared with multiple companies…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Editorial Staff.

Webinar hosted by HP. We live in an age of digital fluidity, where technology has made it possible for people to stay connected to any network, anywhere, through any device. The explosion in rich media applications and innovations in virtualization, cloud computing and most recently Software-Defined Networking (SDN) — are changing the way business is conducted and impacting the way organizations view networking.

Join IDG Enterprise Editor, Joyce Chutchian, and networking experts from Hewlett-Packard in this roundtable discussion. In addition to exploring the IT trends driving this fundamental shift, the experts will discuss emerging technology, real-world use cases for SDN capabilities and best practices that will allow you apply business logic to network behavior in a dynamic fashion…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Lori MacVittie.

Surveys, polls, research — organisations conduct all three to try to take the pulse of the market and understand where a particular technology might be in terms of adoption. This is the second year that Northbridge Ventures conducted its Future of Cloud Computing survey and, like most cloud-related surveys, the results offer up interesting titbits in terms of trends and data points — especially when compared with previous years’ findings.

The inhibitors remain fairly constant — security still tops the list — but the drivers have changed over the past year. Where last year agility topped the chart, followed closely by scalability and cost factors, this year scalability moved past agility and cost actually decreased in significance as a driver for the cloud. What’s interesting and frustrating about these kinds of summary surveys is the lack of definition of categories. Scalability and agility are as nebulous and open to interpretation as security, which makes it difficult to understand exactly what aspect of cloud is driving or inhibiting adoption…

Grazed from Network World. Author: David Grimes.

As companies embrace cloud computing, many are finding it advantageous to use external clouds to host non-critical IT services and data while keeping business-critical applications on internal-cloud infrastructure. However, this hybrid approach can create significant management challenges. The clouds must tightly integrate with each other, and legacy systems and data and workflows must be managed across the clouds and systems. Since hybrid clouds typically involve a mix of technologies and vendors, and there is the constant need for new capabilities, the level of complexity and amount of attention required to properly manage these platforms is increasing at a rapid rate. That means the management platform for hybrid cloud solutions is a critical, if often overlooked, piece of the proverbial puzzle.

Managing the hybrid cloud involves much more than tools. After all, vendors for each separate component of cloud infrastructure provide their own "stovepipe" of managerial tools. But since there isn’t a true "single-pane-of-glass" tool, you will need a more strategic perspective and framework to succeed with hybrid cloud computing. The following principles and practices can shape this meta-cloud management initiative…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Stephanie Mann.

IT services firms may shift some of their traditional efforts as customers seek to move business functions to cloud computing platforms. Such IT services firms, which provide outsourcing of data center functions, and often consulting services as well, could bring better understanding to cloud transformation projects, according to an industry viewer.

While migrating an application to the cloud might not be difficult in itself, challenges may await you, said Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst James Staten. Cloud services are often difficult to square with current business requirements, environments and legacy applications. Moreover, establishing a solid cloud transformation strategy requires knowledge that evades many new cloud adopters. A lack of understanding about how the cloud works is a main source of problems for many organizations, according to Staten…

Grazed from NEurope.eu. Author: Nerea Rial.

The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) adopted on 16 November its opinion on the Commission Communication on "Unleashing the potential of Cloud Computing in Europe”, which establishes key actions and policy steps to promote and accelerate the use of cloud computing services across Europe.

Besides, because the relationship between cloud computing and data protection is currently being discussed, the supervisory authority also highlights the challenges generated by this new communication system and how the proposed Data Protection Regulation will tackle them. Likewise, the EDPS identifies areas that require further action at EU level…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

The cloud architect is much like Bigfoot: There are sightings, even some blurry video, but we really don’t have solid proof that this creature exists. The problem is cloud computing is so new that it’s tough to find people who understand how all of it fits together for enterprises. Indeed, this is one of the biggest limitations around cloud adoption.

I call myself a cloud architect, and a few people like me are running around out there. But there aren’t many, and even fewer who use the label correctly. How can you find one of your own? How can you become one? I believe the first step is defining the knowledge required for the job, so you know what to look for or what to learn. Here is my short list:…