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…

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…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

As the Google Postini brand begins to fade away, Google Apps partners and rivals are seeing a lot of activity with email security migrations. The latest evidence comes from Reflexion Networks, Spam Soap and TestudoData — three very different companies that have expertise in the cloud-based email security market.

Google in mid-2012 announced a plan to phase out Postini while introducing similar services in Google Apps. Numerous rivals and partners immediately weighed in with their own migration and support plans. That chatter is starting to heat up again…

Grazed from LiveTradingNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing continues to be hearled as holding many of the answers to taming the exponential rise of ‘Big Data’. But issues of compliance, reliability and security persist as some financial services firms remain reluctant to move into Cloud computing, which is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage and process data, rather than on a local server.

With the amounts of data that firms are now being forced to use and hold escalating at a rapid rate, cloud computing-which is an increasingly mature technology that has now been around for a few years-is becoming an attractive option for many firms in dealing with these Big Data needs. Financial services watchdogs, especially in Europe, continue to have concerns as to where the data in a Cloud actually resides. Regulators have serious issues if a firm cannot identify where its data is being stored and how it got there…

Grazed from IBS. Author: PR Announcement.

International Business Systems (IBS), a global leading integrated ERP and supply chain provider, today announced the expansion of its traditional on-premise applications into the cloud, making it the industry’s most secure offering available with service level agreements with guaranteed performance. IBS Cloud applications are scalable and designed specifically for the changing needs of distributors and manufacturers.

According to IDC, 80% of new commercial enterprise apps will be deployed on cloud platforms and 64% of all businesses already have at least one cloud application deployed. "Distributors were looking for an ironclad cloud solution that was secure, flexible, agile and most importantly, put the onus on IBS for reducing business risk by guaranteeing system performance," said Doug Braun, CEO of IBS. "To meet this need, IBS designed a cloud offering specifically for distributors and manufacturers who want to accelerate the value of their business today and in the future, and backed it by a technical team with more than 400 combined years of experience and a track record of success."…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

Cloud computing is turning into a true utility, as essential to any business as water or electricity. This evolution is driven by massive investments by cloud companies, itself funded from businesses’ increased reliance and spending on cloud services over their traditional, internal IT.

How this shift plays out will determine the fates of many of the world’s leading technology companies – some stand to benefit and some stand to lose – and will fundamentally change how businesses are structured. It will also create a new and important commercial landscape. Economists have a term for this: the cloud is industrialising…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Robert Shaw.

Around the country, many corporate and small business IT professionals are downright scared about the future of their careers. Due to slow adoption in the corporate world and general unfamiliarity with administrating cloud services in the small business sector, the IT field has yet to undergo any massive shifts. But IT workers shouldn’t count on that pattern holding forever.

According to Gartner’s research director, Bryan Britz, “Public cloud adoption is accelerating and public cloud services do, and will, cannibalize IT services spending in the coming years.” In other words, more and more companies are likely to ditch their Exchange servers, Active Directory deployments, on-premises line-of-business applications, onsite data storage, and all of the administrative and personnel overhead associated with such infrastructure…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Rick Robinson.

New data privacy regulations in both the EU and US could impose additional security management and privacy protection standards for cloud computing. And for IT managers at midsize firms the new rules could end up being a good thing.

Yes, the new rules will mean more work for IT, in learning and applying them. And no one really likes having to follow regulations imposed from outside. But especially when it comes to the cloud, the privacy that firms will be called on to protect could include their own…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Web-hosting giant GoDaddy is trying to grow into a products company to help its small business customers move into the modern computing era rather than just hosting their websites. A conversion to mobile websites is first, but cloud services are on the horizon.

GoDaddy, the web-hosting and domain-name giant — and erstwhile cloud computing provider — has a plan to bring both itself and millions of its small-business customers into the 21st century. News on Thursday that the company is getting into the mobile website space is just the beginning of the company’s plan to become a product company — something like Intuit for the front office. But GoDaddy will be leaving the desktop behind…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

The technology around cloud computing has proven to be very beneficial to many organizations. Surrounded by virtualization, cloud computing is a means to consolidate and create a more efficient environment.

Many IT environments have seen a reduction in their data center space requirements and are deploying fewer hardware components to support their infrastructure. Still, there are administrators and managers out there who, although not confused by the cloud, aren’t seeing any direct benefit to moving to such a platform…