Grazed from TheHeroldOnline.ca. Author: Brett Bundale.

A Halifax cloud computing startup has raised $1.1 million to advance its file-sharing technology and expand into new markets. TitanFile Inc.’s latest round of fundraising is backed by Innovacorp, the provincial government’s high-tech funding body, the First Angel Network, and a handful of private donors.

The fledgling firm, which specializes in encrypting data to help organizations and individuals share documents securely over the Internet, has diluted its shares by 30 per cent as a result of the financing. Co-founder and chief executive Milan Vrekic, 27, said the cash will help the startup break into the lucrative United States market with its latest technology…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: James Staten.

Well if you’re going to make a dramatic about face from total dismissal of cloud computing, this is a relatively credible way to do it. Following up on its announcement of a serious cloud future at Oracle Open World 2011, the company delivered new cloud services with some credibility at this last week’s show. It’s a strategy with laser focus on selling to Oracle’s own installed base and all guns aimed at Salesforce.com.

While the promise from last year was a homegrown cloud strategy, most of this year’s execution has been bought. The strategy is essentially to deliver enterprise-class applications and middleware any way you want it – on-premise, hosted and managed or true cloud. A quick look at where they are and how they got here:…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

OpenNebula, the European-rooted open-source cloud platform is used by more businesses and in more countries than many might expect. At the ripe old age of 7, OpenNebula remains a quiet force compared to say, OpenStack. OpenNebula — the open-source cloud behind the European Space Agency and CERN – may be bigger in private industry business than many may have anticipated.

According to new survey data from C12G Labs, the company behind OpenNebula, 43 percent of 600 users responding are in business accounts compared to 17 percent in research, and less than 10 percent in academia. Maybe this shouldn’t be a shocker given that OpenNebula’s customer page lists such companies as Akamai, Dell, IBM, SAP and Telefonica…

Keynote themes include Big Data and analytics, next-generation data protection, datacenter networking as well as a diverse range of sessions on virtualization and cloud computing. In addition, the conferences will feature a number of leading analyst houses and independent commentators hosting a series of half-day Spotlight sessions addressing the key issues and topics affecting most organizations’ IT strategies and needs.

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Broadview Networks, a leading provider of hosted voice, data and cloud computing solutions, took home two Stevie® Awards from this year’s American Business Awards, announced last night in San Francisco. Broadview’s OfficeSuite® website won a Silver Stevie award in the category of Outstanding Telecommunications Website and its Office Anywhere® application won a Bronze Stevie award in the category of New Cloud Service of the Year.

“The American Business Awards have set the industry standard for years,” said Broadview’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Officer, Ken Shulman. “We are deeply honored to be recognized by the ABA’s panel of experts and we look forward to many more years of providing world-class products and services that push the boundaries of the telecom industry.”…

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…