Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Saroj Kar.

Cloud computing does not always prove to be an ecological choice. New research compiled by the WSP Environment & Energy and the Natural Resource Defense Council shows that cloud is not always as efficient for IT solutions for SMEs.

The results of the new study confirmed that rely on a server is generally more environmentally friendly, although care must be taken to a whole series of parameters to calculate the best real efficiency of the clouds.

“There are many reasons for moving to cloud computing, but a company choosing to do so for pure energy-efficiency reasons need to look closely at their whole IT set up as well as those of third-party offerings,” WSP director David Symons said. “Not all clouds are created equal. An on-site server room that is run with energy-efficiency best practices may be a greener alternative to a ‘brown cloud’.”

According to a new research from Pike Research, the global market for green data centers will grow from $17.1 billion in 2012 to $45.4 billion by 2016…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

It was a busy week in cloud, bookended by Amazon and Google App Engine outages. In between those snafus, OpenNebula updated its cloud and stealthy startup Yottabyte launched technology that it says will let companies yoke commodity hardware into clouds of their own.

Last week’s cloud computing news was highlighted — if that’s the right word — by major outages affecting Amazon Web Services on Monday and Tuesday and other snafus with Google App Engine, Dropbox and Tumblr on Friday. Amazon released a post-mortem late Friday attributing its problem to a memory leak. Google said its problems originated when traffic exceeded the capacity its routing capacity. (Cedexis posted its look at the GAE snafu here.)

But there was other news in cloud computing. Here’s a taste…

Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Xath Cruz.

Nowadays, more and more businesses are moving their operations to the cloud as the industry starts to realize the benefits that the cloud brings, whether it’s cost-efficiency, improved flexibility and agility, or any of the myriad advantages that comes from cloud computing. However, before you start migrating all of your data to the cloud, there are some considerations that you need to think about first, such as:

Bigger is Not Necessarily Better

Due to the popularity of cloud computing, you’ll see a lot of large companies from other IT related sectors now staking their claim on the rapidly growing cloud market, but don’t always assume that you’ll be better off with a certain provider just because they are a large, popular company – as they could have earned their reputation in another field and are still not used to the cloud business. It would be wise to do your research first and focus on the provider’s reputation regarding cloud services before signing up with one…

Grazed from CloudPro.  Author: Davey Winder.

There’s a lot to be scared about at this time of the year, not least the shameful lack of creativity displayed by your average ‘trick or treat’ teenager when it comes to outfit choice. Just repeating ‘I want your candy’ over and over while wearing a monster mask is not enough to scare me.  However, it would appear that many enterprises are scared enough of the looming threat of someone in an Uncle Sam mask demanding ‘I want your data’ to either avoid cloud storage altogether or rule out what might otherwise prove to be more economical provider choices. Yes, I’m talking about the Patriot Act, as is a newly published International Data Corporation study. 

In a nutshell, what IDC is saying is that European business fears about the Patriot Act and access it provides to data stored within the cloud are largely misguided. The ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001‘ is thankfully more commonly known as the Patriot Act, and simply put it allows data that is stored by a US company to be susceptible to potential seizure or unwarranted search by US Government agencies…

Grazed from SiliconRepublic. Author: John Kennedy.

Instead of resisting change and viewing cloud computing trends as a threat, CIOs need to start building services for their organisations and focus on protecting their organisations’ data, Christian Verstraete, the CTO of Hewlett-Packard’s Cloud Strategy Team Worldwide, told Siliconrepublc.com.

Verstraete is responsible for the definition of HP’s cloud functional and reference architectures, as well as the co-ordination of cloud activities across HP. He is effectively the link between the CTO community inside HP, as well as the tech giant’s customers and partners…