Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

Cloud computing is moving away from being monolithic, where Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the only major cloud service provider, to a marketplace technology, with several cloud-based service providers, as users’ appetite for cloud grows, according to analyst firm 451 Research.

“It has taken a few years, but 2012 is the year we have seen some big difference, most of it driven by Openstack providers such as Rackspace,” said Simon Robinson, research vice-president of 451 Research, at the SNW Europe 2012 conference in Frankfurt…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

It’s just a matter of time before we migrate our existing IT assets to public cloud systems. Additionally, it’s a short window until the dead rise from the grave and attempt to eat our brains. In other words, "The Walking Dead" could be a documentary.

The first thing we must ask ourselves as lumbering corpses make their way to our office building: How can the migration to the cloud save us from forever roaming the earth as zombies? Here are some guidelines that should keep you safe in case of the zombie apocalypse…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Steven Burke and Jack McCarthy.

For Tim Shea, the founder and CEO of Alpha NetSolutions, a 10-year-old managed services and cloud computing provider based in Millbury, Mass., Hurricane Sandy was a non-event for his customers. That’s because of the technology advances that have come with dramatic improvements in cloud computing, Shea said, and its accompanying backup disaster recovery.

"We had a few calls, but it’s business as usual," said Shea, discussing the impact of Hurricane Sandy that wreaked havoc up the East Coast. "No one has lost data. All our managed services clients are prepped for this, and we have contingencies in place. None of my customers are in fear of losing their data. If something happens we know what to do. We have been through this so many times it isn’t even funny."…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Don Magrogan.

While many organizations have signed on to SaaS or piloted cloud computing deployments, lots of businesses continue to run critical production enterprise services in traditional data centers with applications running on dedicated hardware.

Why? Moving to a virtualized environment for new applications is easy; moving legacy applications and services is tough. Given the unique application-by-application analysis that is required to move environments to a virtual environment, whether a hypervisor in the data center, or a private or public cloud, many enterprises struggle with a psychical-to-virtual migration…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Dell’s Data Center Solutions group recently shipped its 1 millionth server just five years after coming into existence. It’s proof of how important webscale buyers have become to the server market, as well as how different their demand are than those of traditional IT buyers. Dell is reporting today (on no less than three corporate blog channels) that the company’s Data Center Solutions unit shipped its 1 millionth server earlier this week. The DCS division, which sells stripped-down, energy-efficient servers by the thousands to hyperscale customers, has been a shining star for Dell over the past few years.

DCS doesn’t sell to just anyone, though. The unit’s banner customer used to be Facebook (although it has since begun building much of its own gear, and claims to be off vendor gear entirely for its newest data center), and others include Microsoft, Salesforce.com and eBay. In fact, Dell provided the bulk of the web servers for eBay’s Project Mercury data center that I profiled in April. Outside the web space, Dell’s DCS customers include large oil & gas companies and research centers…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Dawn Altnam.

While some critics would have you believe otherwise, cloud computing is not a fad. It is here for the long haul. Odds are, your business is already using cloud services without realizing it. However, many businesses start using cloud services without having an adequate understanding of their data needs, budgetary resources or the ability of a specific cloud provider to meet business needs.

Let’s dive into some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your data by using cloud-based services…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: Cheryl McKinnon.

Earlier this month, OASIS hosted a forum to discuss standards and interoperability issues for cloud computing. As a technical community dedicated to creating and promoting open standards, OASIS tackles many of the tough challenges that government institutions, private enterprises, software vendors, academics and system integrators face when creating applications and platforms to run our digital economy. Business is global, systems must interoperate, and content flows from person to person both inside and outside the firewall. Sharing and re-use of information is made possible only by letting diverse systems work together. This is the beauty of standards.

Speakers throughout the event — representing governments in the US, Europe and Canada, as well as regulated industries, such as banks and pharmaceuticals — highlighted several consistent themes. One presenter, Sounil Yu, shared his perspectives gleaned from the world of financial services, nicely encapsulating five key points made by several of the speakers…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Jacqueline Vanacek.

Imagine a world in which researchers share data via one massive supercomputer to advance medicine, energy, agriculture … where nations respond in unison to natural disasters … and governments share services around the world.

This is what I envisioned as I spoke with Chris Kemp, founder and CEO of Nebula and co-founder of OpenStack. It’s a world in which business and government can deliver only their core competencies – while buying other services from global partners to fulfill their needs. As we increase the scale of cloud computing to manage big data, we increase our ability to “operate as one” — in research, business, government, everything. Chris Kemp confirmed that we are building the elements of a global cloud architecture that can make that vision real…

Grazed from ZDnet. Author: Phil Wainewright.

People in the tech industry generally prefer not to get caught up in politics, but it’s now becoming vitally important to do so, especially if your business is in any way connected to cloud computing in any European market. Read on for the back story of how policy makers at the EU have now officially discovered the cloud, and the decisions they’ll take over the coming year about regulation of the industry. This is something I’ve been close to as chair of EuroCloud UK and a vice-president of EuroCloud in Europe (both unpaid roles). It’s now time to for everyone to take note of what’s going on.

First of all, a bit of context. In the tech industry, all eyes tend to be on the US and thus it’s easy to underestimate the size and complexity of the European market. Europe is a bigger economy than the US — $17.5 trillion in the 27 EU member countries alone, according to World Bank figures for 2011, compared to $15 trillion for the US. So why does it have less impact in tech? The trouble is, it’s far more difficult for any one business to exploit that market value (even a cloud business) because of the EU’s 23 different languages, 11 currencies, and a myriad of different business regulations, practices and cultures. US tech companies find it much easier to scale up fast because they don’t have to contend with such barriers…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

As data centers struggle to fend off or repair the effects of superstorm Sandy, Netflix says lessons it learned from past Amazon Web Services outages helped it dodge a bullet last week when Amazon’s US East data center complex went down again. Other companies that have been impacted by cloud outages might be able to apply these lessons as well…