Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

I was recently invited to Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, Ontario, to attend an event hosted by the Canadian Cloud Council. The focus of the event was to discuss ways to help accelerate the adoption and proliferation of Canadian cloud centric products in services. Before I get into what was discussed, I need to provide some context to the current state of Internet connectivity in Canada. To understand the Internet landscape in Canada is to endeavour into the realm of duopolies, bandwidth caps and mediocre Internet connections. As it stands today, Canada has effectively become the Digital Third World.

A recent video interview with The Globe and Mail’s Omar El Akkad and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings summaries the problems with cloud computing in Canada. Hastings’ specifically calls out capped Internet plans as compared to the rest of the world saying “Canada has the misfortune of being the country with the lowest internet caps maybe in the world but certainly in the developed world and in all of the Netflix world. In Mexico, Internet is largely uncapped; in the US it’s largely uncapped; in the UK it’s completely uncapped; in Canada there’s a number of providers with very low caps…I don’t quite understand it.”…

Grazed from iHotDesk. Author: Editorial Staff.

Because of its massive manufacturing output, China is amongst the biggest polluters in the world. But according to a new report it could clean up its act with cloud computing. A study conducted by Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) found that use of cloud computing services in the country could reduce its annual greenhouse gas emission by almost two mega tonnes.

That is the equivalent of taking more than 700,000 cars off the road which would save more than 900 million Yuan (approx. £89.9 million) in energy costs. The study, which is entitled ‘The Enabling Technologies of a Low-Carbon Economy- a Focus on Cloud Computing’ looked into how the cloud could help to reduce CO2 emissions in Canada, Brazil and seven European nations as well as in China…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Savvis, a CenturyLink company (NYSE: CTL) and global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, has been positioned by Gartner Inc. as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service. The report can be accessed at http://savvis.com/magic-quadrant-leader.

"Enterprises need perspective in today’s competitive cloud landscape, and we consider our position in the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service a strong testament of Savvis as a global cloud leader," said Bill Fathers, president of Savvis. "Enterprises turn to Savvis for the unmatched support and security that comes with having an extensive data center footprint, comprehensive suite of Symphony cloud services and high-performance global network integrated across our extensive portfolio of services."…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Jason Verge.

There is a shift underway in how Wall Street trading firms manage their technology, as financial cloud services aim to reduce the cost of low-latency trading infrastructure and to streamline access to a wide variety of trading applications. Cloud computing has been a savior to those in expense management mode, as well as has been a boon to startup firms.

Several cloud offerings have lowered the barrier to entry, while providing compelling financial considerations to go with a financial cloud service. NYSE EuroNext and NASDAQ OMX Group came to market with financial cloud services in a bid to fill up their data centers, as well as diversify and increase revenue on coattails of their respective brands. Colocation providers like FiberMedia have gone to market with their own vertically-targeted offerings as well, while financial infrastructure services have also become key offerings for providers like Equinix, Telx and Savvis, who all continue to court the financial vertical…

Grazed from 4-Traders. Author: Editorial Staff.

Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP), a provider of intelligent IT Infrastructure services, today announced that it has been named a 2012 Cloud Computing Excellence Award winner, presented by Cloud Computing Magazine. The award recognizes companies that exhibit innovation and excellence in bringing cloud services to market and that advance the technology to deliver an improved experience for enterprise customers and their end users.

Internap was honored for its Agile Hosting service, a high-performance, instantly scalable, global hybrid cloud offering that enables businesses to optimize their multi-tiered web applications by mixing and matching "bare metal" physical and virtual cloud infrastructure. Internap’s solution maximizes application performance and efficiency – all while achieving web-scale within a single, hybridized environment…

Grazed from RCRWireless. Author: Roberta Prescott.

Global data center traffic is forecasted to grow fourfold to reach a total of 6.6 zettabytes annually by 2016, while cloud traffic is expected to achieve 4.3 zettabytes by 2016, a 44% combined annual growth rate (CAGR), from 683 exabytes of annual traffic in 2011. These forecasts were released by Cisco in its second annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (GCI), 2011-2016.

Although in general, fixed networks offer better upload and download speeds, and latencies than mobile networks, Cisco said the performance gap between fixed and mobile networks will begin to close in the near future. This might happen because of the growing global adoption of advanced mobile technologies, such as third- and fourth-generation (3G and 4G), and the worldwide demand for wireless support of next-generation devices…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Information Service Industry Association of Chinese Taipei (CISA) today forms a Taiwan Delegation — a group of approx. 40 members with the majority coming from renowned Taiwan ICT companies and associations including telecom, R&D, software & hardware in cloud computing areas, all appearing in the 2012 WCIT Show held in Montreal, Canada. The Taiwan delegation will showcase its latest Cloud Computing technologies in the Taiwan Pavilion booth during the 3-day show, followed with a workshop presentation on Cloud Computing to report achievements and future development in Taiwan.

Kicking off with a special "CLOUD" opening ceremony and cocktail reception on Day 1 of the 2012 WCIT show, Taiwan delegates will showcase the latest cloud computing products in the Taiwan Pavilion at Montreal. Ming-Ji Wu, chief representative of the delegation, who is also Deputy Minister of Council for Economic Planning and Development, leads the delegation and to demonstrate Taiwan cloud computing achievements at the event…

Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications. Author: Editorial Staff.

As Mark Neider of Cbeyond (Nasdaq: CBEY) noted in a presentation at TMCNet’s ITEXPO earlier this month, cloud computing is gaining momentum and driving more bandwidth consumption as businesses large and small increasingly take advantage of the opportunities cloud provides. The biggest advantage, of course, is being able to purchase services once available only to enterprise-level companies–including business voice, back office and billing support, and data storage and security–at a very affordable rate.

But cloud services is still quite young–not in its infancy any longer, but perhaps headed for its terrible twos phase. And it faces some significant threats to its ability to grow. Here are three threats to cloud computing that businesses can’t afford to ignore…

Grazed from TNS. Author: PR Announcement.

Adobe Systems, San Jose, Calif., has been assigned a patent (8,296,763) developed by Mark S. Peercy, Cupertino, Calif., and Danny D. Loh, Menlo Park, Calif., for a "system and method for personal cloud computing."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A system and method for providing Personal Cloud computing and for hosting applications and/or content may employ a network attached storage device on which virtual machine monitors (T-cups) and logical devices (Ts) are instantiated in memory. Each T may include hosted content, application modules, a server module configured to host the modules and/or content, and an interface module configured to provide access to the modules and/or content in response to detecting an authorized key…