Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

The growth of cloud computing will affect the economic nature of the industry as much as its technology. The huge scale at which the hardware and software of the cloud operates is having a significant affect on not only the types of technology being used in the industry, but which companies stand to benefit from its rise.

A round of interviews with executives within cloud companies, hardware vendors and analysts underlines the trend towards the growing influence of the cloud over the structure of the IT industry, and identifies the likely winners and losers among IT suppliers…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

You know when you hear someone say, “I swear, you can’t make this stuff up,” well let’s just say I had one of those moments when I came across a national survey conducted by Wakefield Research. Sadly, of the more than 1,000 adults surveyed, the majority of respondents actually believe the cloud is related to weather, pillows, drugs, and even toilet paper.

The good news, however, is that those who may not understand the cloud, do understand its economic benefits and ability to act as a catalyst for small business growth. In fact, 59 percent believe the cloud is the “workplace of the future.”…

Grazed from 4Traders. Author: Editorial Staff.

Symantec today launched its first Digital Information Index highlighting the significant impact that cloud computing and mobility are having on businesses today. The 2012 State of Information Report reveals the benefits but also growing challenges of "information sprawl" as organizations increase the level of information stored and accessed outside of the firewall.

"Businesses are undergoing a transformation unlike anything we’ve seen before. With mobile devices and cloud giving employees access to information from nearly anywhere, we’re also seeing more sensitive information living beyond the traditional IT boundaries," said Francis deSouza, group president, Enterprise Products and Services, Symantec Corp. "This is creating concern about how to best protect this information."…

Grazed from Vitual Instruments. Author: PR Announcement.

Virtual Instruments , the leader in Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) for physical, virtual and cloud computing environments, today announced that its VirtualWisdom platform has been certified on VCETM VblockTM Systems as "VCE Vblock Ready." The VirtualWisdom platform provides real-time, system-wide visibility into the performance, utilisation and health of Vblock systems as well as broader physical, virtual and private cloud computing environments.

Vblock systems integrate leading Cisco networking and server, EMC storage and VMware cloud infrastructure technologies into a single intelligent converged infrastructure system with seamless support. This certification provides customers with the assurance that the Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom platform will interoperate with Vblock systems…

Grazed from The Next Web. Author: Nick Summers.

Only three or four years ago, mentioning the phrase ‘cloud storage’ would produce shrugs and vacant stares from most of the general public. Oh, but how times have changed. With Apple, Google and Microsoft all entering the fray with their own homegrown services, the marketplace for cloud storage has suddenly become very crowded.

SugarSync, however, has experience on its side. The company has been operating since 2008, only a year after one of its most reputable rivals, Dropbox, opened its doors and started making cloud storage a normal part of computing and daily Internet use…

Grazed from CNBC. Author: Jennifer Parker.

Cloud computing is fast becoming as ubiquitous as the clouds circling the Earth. As more and more people depend on “the cloud” to store sensitive data, they also realize it isn’t perfect —and sometimes it fails because of storm surges or human error. The fact is there will be outages. If you only have one server location, you are exposed,” said Bernard Golden, vice president at enStratus Networks, an IT consultant supporting providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Storage, and VMware. “The appropriate response is to operate switch regions,” he said.

Events such as Amazon Web Service’s outage in October, which affected its most heavily used data center in Virginia, support Golden’s claim. Some AWS customers, such as Netflix, have duplicate cloud systems. As a result, their businesses stayed up and running during the outage. Others, including popular sites like Reddit and Pinterest, temporarily went dark…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

C12G Labs announces a new release of OpenNebulaPro, the enterprise edition of its widely-deployed open-source management solution for enterprise data center virtualization and private cloud computing. OpenNebulaPro integrates the most recent stable version of OpenNebula (3.8) with bugfixes, performance, and scalability patches developed by the community and by C12G for its customers and partners. OpenNebula 3.8 (codename Twin Jet), released one month ago, enhances its AWS and OCCI API implementations and provides a tighter integration with VMware and KVM.

C12G also announces the first stable release of the OpenNebulaApps, a suite of tools for users and administrators of OpenNebula to simplify and optimize cloud application management. OpenNebulaApps provides a service management layer on top of OpenNebula by configuring the software stack in the applications, managing multi-tiered applications, providing configurable services from a catalog, and building your own private market to distribute applications across several OpenNebula instances. Cloud applications consist of complex software stacks, OpenNebulaApps helps to manage their life-cycle and contributes to significantly reduce the time needed to build, distribute, and deploy cloud applications…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Big Switch Networks has come a long way since it launched in June of 2011, and two big announcements today showcasing its ecosystem and its newly launched products are signs that its going on the offensive in the software-defined networking space.

Big Switch Networks, the software-defined networking startup that last month scored $25 million, has pulled the covers off an impressive an ecosystem built around its Open Flow-based controller as well as applications built on top of that controller. The announcements, expected on Tuesday, should make Big Switch a force to be reckoned with in the software defined networking sector…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Samantha Robinson.

As more businesses are employing cloud computing for storage, information transfer and communication, the reality of adapting to a complex new system can seem daunting. This is partially because while many businesses are slowly reconciling themselves with cloud usage, they are not necessarily aware of cloud management strategies available to ensure a smooth transition to the cloud. These professional tools maintain the seamless running of infrastructure even without direct and immediate physical server access.

Cloud management is a term that refers those tools used to operate the data and services available on the cloud. Cloud management can include monitoring performance, security, and planning contingency plans for data loss. Cloud management tools need to be robust and flexible in order to ensure the safety of public-cloud networks. This article will explore the ways that cloud management makes cloud computing safer, more understandable for your staff, and a smart move for you business…