Grazed from Business Standard. Author: Pradeesh Chandran.

The adoption of cloud computing in India is witnessing a strong growth and the rate of adoption has witnessed a growth of around 25% over last year. A study conducted by cloud service provider Vmware and Forrester Consulting also said that the more companies are planning to deploy cloud solutions within he next 18 months.

The study VMware Cloud Index 2012 conducted in 11 Asia Pacific countries said that around 40% of respondents feel that there is internal resistance to change that is hindering the adoption of cloud, suggesting that faster cloud adoption is possible for Indian organizations if these hindrances can be overcome. “The survey demonstrates the potential for cloud computing in the country and reflects a double digit rate of adoption,” said T Srinivasan, Managing Director, VMware (India and SAARC)…

Grazed from Business Review Europe. Author: Matthew Staff.

When cloud computing first emerged as the ‘next big thing’ five years ago, it was written off by some as a passing craze without any real substance. Today, industry analyst Gartner lists it as one of the four main forces transforming the IT landscape. The term ‘cloud’ covers a range of different hosted platforms and services. Its many benefits include an ability to store vast amounts of data and supply the very latest editions of software applications, often with real-time updates, accompanied by lower costs and greater convenience, flexibility and scalability.

Rapidly growing firms, international companies or those with an increasingly mobile workforce are examples of the kind of businesses that stand to gain from centrally hosted information and applications. Customers pay only for what they use, and are free to expand or contract capacity to suit demand. Not surprisingly, many organisations are looking to abandon their traditional, in-house, hardware-based systems to migrate to a cloud set-up…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

A quarter of CIOs view cloud infrastructure and virtualisation as their current top investment priorities, research suggests. The investigation, carried out by Research in Action on behalf of software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Compuware, also found that CIOs believe end-to-end performance visibility and robust service level agreements (SLAs) as key to achieving good return on investment from cloud computing.

Over the next five years, full integration of public, hybrid and private cloud will be the single most important priority for CIOs, with 34 per cent of the 200-plus respondents surveyed saying it was their primary focus between now and 2017…

Grazed from WorldCrunch. Author: Daniel Bastien.

The new tablets and smartphones have blurred the boundaries between businesses and their employees, partners and customers. The danger of computer piracy has never been so great. The threat is invisible but incessant, as the recent large-scale attack on British bank HSBC shows. In information technology, we live in a time of fantastic new breakthroughs, but it is also a time of cold sweats for businesses. Their fears are well founded.

During a recent Paris workshop on "Security: Info Systems and the Challenge of Mobility," a young research engineer calmly took control over another person’s iPad from his own laptop via Wi-Fi. To make his demonstration more spectacular, he even made the microphone work remotely. To the mesmerized audience, it looked like a spy movie…

Grazed from Talkin’Cloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

The cloud computing skeptics may still think keeping data locked away within the four walls of a business is the best way to protect data, but as Hurricane Sandy continues up the Eastern Seaboard, the best place to store data may very well be the cloud. In fact, it’s fairly likely — at least if you still want access to it as Sandy starts to take its toll on IT infrastructure.

A team of engineers at Johns Hopkins University led by Seth Guikema is predicting up to 10 million people on the U.S. East Coast could lose power because of Hurricane Sandy. Imagine how many businesses will be affected, suffering downtime. And it’s not just those on the East Coast that have to worry — customers with remote and branch offices to the west that won’t be directly affected could still suffer access outages if proper measures aren’t taken…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Data centers up and down the eastern seaboard went into emergency mode to keep up and running as Hurricane Sandy churned northwards. But the key to survivabilty is not last-minute prep but long-running practices.

As Hurricane Sandy swept north and toward landfall, data centers from Florida to Boston and further north did their things to prepare. Verizon’s Terremark unit went on high alert last week as Sandy approached Terremark’s Miami-area sites. Then it replicated the process for its major facilities in Culpepper, Va., and the New York area, said spokesman Xavier Gonzalez…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Rackspace is busy building a Hadoop service, giving the company one more avenue to compete with cloud kingpin Amazon Web Services. However, the two services — along with several others on the market — highlight just how different seemingly similar cloud services can be.

Rackspace has been on a tear over the past few months releasing new features that map closely to the core features of the Amazon Web Services platform, only with a Rackspace flavor that favors service over scale. Its next target is Amazon Elastic MapReduce, which Rackspace will be countering with its own Hadoop service in 2013. If AWS and Rackspace are, indeed, the No. 1 and No. 2 cloud computing providers around, it might be easy enough to make a decision between the two platforms. In the cloud, however, the choices are never as simple as black or white…