Grazed from The National Journal. Author: Juliana Gruenwald.

After 24 years, the Business Software Alliance is rebranding itself as BSA, the Software Alliance with a renewed focus on combating piracy and promoting cloud computing. The group formally unveiled its new look and focus Thursday. Along with the new name, the group will sharpen its focus on three main areas: combating piracy, opening global markets by fighting trade barriers, and advancing cloud computing.

When the group was first launched more than two decades ago, it was aimed at promoting the interests of the business software market. Since then, the distinctions between business and consumer software have largely disappeared, BSA President and CEO Robert Holleyman said in an interview Wednesday…

Grazed from CloudTimes.org. Author: Florence de Borja.

A term most internet enthusiasts are aware of, the cloud provides huge storage capacity hosted remotely in data centers found anywhere in the world and can be accessed through a stable internet connection using different devices such as a laptop or a mobile phone. This relatively new technology has greatly evolved into a public cloud and a private cloud.

Cloud computing services are offered by various providers in various forms. According to technology research company Gartner Inc., cloud computing will grow tremendously and the personal cloud will soon be the focus of each individual who has a cyberlife. Cloud computing provides not only reliability but convenience as well. A person can access personal data anywhere as long as there is stable internet connection. Today, cloud computing also provides an innovative way to backup data without fear of losing data due to hardware failure…

Grazed from Huffington Post. Author: Michael Rundle.

When a company like Microsoft releases a rap video to celebrate its own products, you’re likely not going to enjoy the results. (Remember this?) And when that product is a relatively obscure cloud computing system named Windows Azure, that likelihood is only increased.

Amazingly then, while Microsoft has just done exactly that the results aren’t completely and utterly terrible. Wisely Microsoft opted to have NoClue, who is officially the ‘world’s fastest rapper’, take the mic and not one of its own staffers…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

It’s not uncommon for a technology to gain publicity faster than it gains implementation traction among enterprises, and that’s certainly been true for cloud computing. Some enterprises claim two factors are slowing cloud adoption: difficulty in proving cloud’s benefits and an inability to make cloud operations run as efficiently as data center operations. DevOps could offer at least a partial solution to both problems.

DevOps is an attempt to pass along knowledge about an application’s need for resources and connectivity from the developers — who build in those dependencies — to the operations teams. The goal of DevOps is to describe application needs in a way that provisioning tools can read so that deployment becomes automatic. By organizing how applications are deployed, it’s possible to automate the processes that monitor application health and restore functionality if a failure occurs. Central to the DevOps concept is the ability to determine application resource needs. Depending on the specific DevOps tool, this is determined by a feature called a "template," "model," "container" or even "charm. "…

Grazed from TheStreet.com. Author: Chris Ciaccia.

Cloud computing company Workday is seeing such strong demand for its initial public offering that the offering price of its shares has been raises, according to a company filing.

The Oracle (ORCL), SAP (SAP) and Salesforce.com (CRM) competitor raised the offering price from $24 a share to $26 a share, up from $21 to $24 a share earlier this month. The company intends to sell 22.75 million Class A shares in the offering, raising as much as $591.5 million. The IPO will price Thursday after the close of trading, and shares will trade on the New York Stock Exchange Friday under the ticker "WDAY."…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

OwnCloud released its community edition and updated the business version of its service which lets IT store employee files in its cloud of choice. Cloud storage for business is a white hot market at least in terms of vendor activity.

The battle for corporate cloud storage continues. OwnCloud, which positions itself as a business-focused, open-source alternative to Box and other file-sync-store-and-share services, released its community edition Thursday and updated its commercial version with faster sync speeds and more finely tuned file access controls…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Gregory Musungu.

Cloud computing is a promising technology; however, uptake by businesses remains slow in some industries despite the many benefits of cloud computing. Productivity, lower costs, and efficiency are some of the open benefits of the cloud. Even so, some businesses will never come on board. How can cloud computing providers convince businesses to adopt their services?

Close the cloud computing knowledge gap

Apparently, very few people understand what cloud computing is. According to the results of a survey, less than 50 percent of the U.S. population knows what cloud computing it. In the less developed countries, where there are less opportunities for new technology, this figure could be lower. Cloud computing companies need to move faster and spread the information about the benefits of their services. Once the people understand the basics of the cloud, its benefits, platforms and uses, more and more companies and businesses will buy into it…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

It’s obvious that cloud computing imposes vast change within IT organizations. I’ve written repeatedly on this topic, addressing issues such as cost allocation, job opportunities, automation requirements, security and the relationship between application and operations groups.

Cloud computing represents the most profound change in computing that the industry has ever seen. The reason is simple. Cloud computing is not just a platform change implementing a better price/performance capability based on Moore’s Law. It represents, instead, a move to an automated computing capability. In this sense, it is akin to what mass production brought to automobile manufacturing, a change so profound that our entire society is completely different than it was before Henry Ford married an assembly line to standardized manufacturing…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Robin Berry.

Following the high-tech bubble burst at the start of this millennium, there have been very few advents in the IT industry that have caused much excitement in industry leaders, thinkers, watchers, and consumers alike. The beginning of 2011 saw a new buzz around the globe—cloud computing.

For the average individual, cloud computing doesn’t have the much marketed appeal that the iPhone has, for example. Cloud computing, in simplest terms, is a method for accessing remotely an operating system, a software application, a data bank etc. The tools you need are not dependent on your hardware, but are running on a complex system of servers and high-powered computing devices that you connect to via Internet…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

The chips are aimed at helping businesses ease the bandwidth crunch on networks caused by such trends as BYOD, mobile computing, video and cloud. Tilera and Freescale Semiconductor are both coming out with new processors targeting corporate networks that are increasingly finding themselves under pressure from the explosive growth of mobile devices, network traffic and cloud computing.

Freescale on Oct. 10 unveiled four additions to its QorIQ T1 and T2 families of 64-bit processors, including the T1040, a quad-core chip with an integrated Gigabit Ethernet switch that the company calls a “router on a chip.”…