Grazed from InforSecurity Magazine. Author: Editorial Staff.

During a keynote session at today’s RSA Europe Conference in London, Qualys chairman and CEO, Philippe Courtot, said the cloud can be a security enabler, despite many organizations’ continued hesitance to adopt widespread cloud technologies out of concerns over security and a lack of control

Courtot did not deny the fact that he has been a staunch proponent of cloud adoption for more than a decade, despite many in the IT world continuing to voice objections to the model over security issues. “At times I’ve felt like Galileo trying to convince the Catholic church that the sun does not revolve around the earth”, he quipped. Those who contend the cloud is an unsafe place to store assets like mission-critical applications are basing this opinion on false assumptions, the Qualys CEO proclaimed…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Julian Box.

Vertical clouds are not hitting public consciousness but they’re going to have an impact in the future. Having been designing, building and consulting on cloud computing for over five years now, I’ve started to think that the importance of vertical clouds is under-estimated. But is it really the time for vertical cloud-based offerings to establish themselves as the standard to which organisations interested in cloud computing should look to?

Let’s start with what makes a vertical cloud and why does it have the potential to change the current landscape of cloud-based service offerings. For me, vertical clouds cover both business and jurisdictional needs. I envisage there being very specific cloud offerings for areas such as pharmaceuticals, finance, health care – even this area is likely to have multiple offerings – than more generalised offerings around law firms, manufacturing and retail…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Rich Miller.

In the long-running debate about the definition of cloud computing, many cloud-watchers insist that a true cloud must be self-service, allowing users to provision and deploy their own servers. With its new savvisdirect service, CenturyLink is bringing that capability to its Savvis suite of cloud services. Today CenturyLink announced that it is accepting applications for the public beta offering of savvisdirect.

Savvis has historically focused on managed hosting services for the enterprise, with a particular focus on the financial services vertical. That included “utility computing” services that were integrated into a suite of cloud services in 2009. But the company’s cloud offerings have mirrored the high-touch model of its managed services, with Savvis staff helping provision services that were requested through a customer portal…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

As government agencies continue to adopt cloud computing, Amazon is among those reaping the rewards: the company announced Wednesday that more than 300 government agencies and 1,500 educational institutions now use Amazon Web Services. According to Amazon, the 1,800-plus customers represent its "rapid growth in the public sector."

"Government agencies and education institutions are rapidly accelerating their adoption of the AWS Cloud," Teresa Carlson, VP of Amazon Web Services’ public sector business, said in a statement. Amazon’s growth isn’t surprising. State and local governments have been moving quickly to cloud services as a way to save money. Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel and his predecessor Vivek Kundra have been championing the adoption of cloud computing at the federal level to cut costs and improve government IT services with a Cloud First mandate, which requires federal agencies to consider cloud computing as part of most new information technology acquisitions…

Grazed from Targeted News Service. Author: PR Announcement.

Dell today is announcing a host of new and enhanced industry-leading cloud client computing solutions (http://content.dell.com/uk/en/enterprise/virtual-client) that provide organizations with the broadest choice in how to implement, manage, deploy and access virtual computing environments using VMware. Coming on the heels of recent cloud client computing developments (http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/2012-08-20-dell-desktop-virtualization-cloud-client.aspx), Dell, the market leader in thin-clientss, is expanding support for VMware View and PCoIP protocol on its zero- and thin-clients, Desktop as a Service (http://content.dell.com/uk/en/enterprise/d/flexible-computing/dvs-simplified-daas.aspx) (DaaS) with PCoIP support and new channel partner solutions to Europe.

Cloud-Based Virtual Desktop Solution Now Available in Europe

Dell Desktop as a Service (http://content.dell.com/uk/en/corp/d/secure/2012-05-15-dell-uk-desktop-virtualization-solutions.aspx) (DaaS) is now available in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Netherlands – from Dell’s data center in Slough, UK which boasts nearly continuous uptime and application availability. With DaaS, customers can focus on managing only the OS, applications and user profiles while leaving the management of the VDI infrastructure to Dell. This solution provides IT departments with the flexibility to scale from only a few users to thousands, enables access from a range of endpoint devices, simplifies desktop virtualization deployment and management and provides a predictable monthly price. Pricing for DaaS starts at Euros35, Pounds29 and $36 per seat per month…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

ComodIT, a startup in Liege, Belgium wants to take the IT management world by storm with its product that’s adapted for cloud computing as opposed to legacy IT. The startup, which is a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition is seeking a Series A round.

Instead of telling a server to take an action, what if instead you could just tell your infrastructure in which computing state you wanted it to arrive? That’s the goal of ComodIT, a Belgian startup that is a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition. The company’s cloud management software wants to take the scripting out of cloud management and let anyone –from IT to business employees be able to order up new instances and compute resources across clouds…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Brian Proffitt.

Despite all of the hype that cloud computing is getting, a recent survey shows that in terms of actual pace of deployment, three popular open source cloud computing platforms are not exactly seeing growth to match that hype. The results might be surprising for followers of cloud computing, but not to the company that conducted the annual "State of the Open Source Cloud" survey, Zenoss. This news is just confirming what they already knew: that cloud is a ways off from being a ready-to-use tool and customers know it.

Just ask Floyd Strimling, VP of Community at Zenoss. Actually, you probably won’t have to ask him – he’ll most likely tell you anyway. From Strimling’s point of view, cloud adoption is very much like the perceived U.S. political landscape, with a very loud one percent actually adopting and hyping the cloud, with the rest, "the 99-percenters," having little to no idea what to do with cloud computing…

Grazed from CropLife. Author: Matt Hopkins.

Are you a little unclear when it comes to understanding cloud computing? Partly cloudy on the cloud? You’re not alone. A Google search of "What is Cloud Computing?" returned 245 million results. People want to know about the cloud.

Cloud computing — or the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server — has been gaining serious momentum in the last year in many data-driven industries. And agriculture is taking notice…

Grazed from ITPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

Cloud service provider Rackspace has been cleared by an advertising standards regulator to continue using its "100% Uptime Guarantee" slogan in its marketing materials. A single complaint was made to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) by an unnamed party regarding the sponsored search advert, which described Rackspace as “The World Leader in Cloud Computing & Hosting" and promised a "100% Uptime Guarantee!”

The complainant claimed the advert was misleading, as they did not think it was possible to provide 100 per cent uptime for that kind of service. However, Rackspace successfully argued that consumers would understand the company was offering a guarantee of service and, if a customer did not receive 100 per cent uptime, they would be reimbursed…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Zyncro, your Enterprise Social Network, has been selected as Best European Startup by EuroCloud from among all the leading cloud-computing solution nominations in an evening ceremony held on October 8 in Luxembourg. EuroCloud is an independent non-profit European organization for SaaS and cloud-computing providers, with members in 27 countries and presence in 17 countries. Last night, it presented its European awards to this year’s best cloud-computing solutions, which included Zyncro as best European startup.

Zyncro, headquartered in Barcelona and present in 14 countries, has already more than 140,000 users. The key to its success lies in the creation of a cloud-based social software solution that adapts to the specific needs of each company. Enterprise Social Networks enable information exchange in an organized, secure and fluid manner, boosting internal collaboration and improving productivity…