StratoGen today announced the launch of a free migration service aimed at helping larger businesses migrate their on-site VMware estate into a hosted environment.

The move will significantly ease the transition to the cloud, whilst keeping costs low.

"I’m really delighted to be able to announce this service" said Karl Robinson, Vice President of Sales. "For larger organizations moving to the cloud can be a hugely expensive and complex process. Careful assessment and planning is needed to ensure business continuity, along with comprehensive testing to ensure security policies are in place and business applications function correctly. By offering this service free of charge we have taken away one of the last barriers for cloud adoption."

Grazed from Washington Technology. Author: Jim Sweeney.

A number of the game-changing trends highlighted in a recent Deltek report on the government market revolved around cloud computing; and how contractors need to think strategically to address agency challenges.

The market research firm’s Federal Information Technology Hardware Market, 2012-2017 report included the following as major challenges facing agencies:

• Managing data, not infrastructure
• Increasing efficiency
• Enhancing enterprise services
• Accelerating innovation
• Consolidating acquisition avenues…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Jacqueline Vanacek.

When purchasing cloud computing services, here are nine practical considerations to manage your business and legal risks to ensure successful adoption of this emerging compute model. These recommendations were presented at the San Francisco-based CloudCon Expo by Riaz Karamali, legal expert and partner at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP.

Mr. Karamali first suggested that if click-through terms do not fully meet your needs, writing the initial cloud contract to “factor in your business realities, compliance requirements and expectations” is the best way to ensure that your unique needs are met. While cloud services vendors usually offer one-size-fits-all terms, be sure to negotiate all ways to mitigate your risk.

The following checklist of nine practical tips can help you do that…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Dublin-based Cloud Vertical, which wants to help companies get the most bang for their cloud computing buck, now has cash and backing from the Citrix Startup Accelerator to build its business, says Cloud Vertical CEO Ed Byrne.

Cloud Vertical, a Dublin-based startup that helps companies maximize their public cloud spending, got a boost this week with new funding from the Citrix Startup Accelerator. While not disclosing the amount of the investment, Cloud Vertical CEO Ed Byrne said it’s an important vote of confidence given that Citrix is the company behind both Xen, the virtualization foundation of Amazon Web Services (AWS), and CloudStack, an open-source platform that powers private clouds…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: James Clark.

While we are all very happy about the entire cloud data storage concept and feel that it’s a breath of relief from the constant battle against malware, key loggers, PC monitoring software, and whatnot, we tend to forget that there are steps which we need to take to ensure security even after we have shifted all our digital luggage to the cloud.

It’s not as difficult as putting security barriers on an Android but sometimes it isn’t a walk through the park either. So to cut down the confusion and help the technologically helpless, here are ten steps that will make your life on the cloud a smooth experience…

1. Password First.

If we are talking about ideal scenarios, then your username and password should be unique for every service or site you have to use credentials for. The reason is simple enough: if one gets compromised, so do the rest of your accounts…

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Editorial Staff.

It’s 11 p.m. Do you know where your data is? If your enterprise has transitioned to the cloud for data storage the answer almost certainly is “no.” Portions of it might be in Malaysia; other bits in Antigua. Today, governments across the globe are deeply uncomfortable with that answer — but they don’t need to be. Just a small application of technological magic through encryption at rest can dispel concerns about data’s location.

The underlying problem is familiar to most cloud-sophisticates. Cloud architecture is a distributed network. Optimizing efficiency means locating server farms wherever energy and labor costs are cheapest. And, given the speed with which information transits the network, there is no need to build data centers close to where the data users reside — data can be almost anywhere in the world in milliseconds…

Grazed from The Guardian. Author: Editorial Staff.

That software is everywhere is so commonly accepted that it hardly needs repeating. Take, for example, Getaround. To consumers it’s a marketplace where the car-having and car-needing come together to work out short-term rentals mano a mano. But the people at Getaround aren’t running a car rental company – they’re running a software company. And a small one, at that. They, along with lots of other small firms and start-ups, are competing against giants in their fields: established, mature, enterprise-type companies that not only have market share, but the capital and cash resources that come with it. We’ll call them Goliath.

So what’s a young David-like up-start to do, armed only with a brilliant idea, raw talent and a willingness to put in long hours? How do they deliver quickly, and on a shoe-string budget? They reach for the slingshot in their back pocket: cloud computing…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Forty-four percent of U.S. executives aim to tackle current IT challenges through leveraging cloud solutions, and they are planning to invest more in cloud computing in the future. That is the finding of an IDC survey commissioned by T-Systems. Corporations expect cloud computing to deliver lower IT costs (26 percent) and to enable them to replace legacy systems (21 percent) and adopt new applications more flexibly (14 percent).

"As the U.S. cloud services market continues to mature, enterprises find that overall business impact and productivity gains from the cloud are as significant as achieving cost reductions," said David Tapper, IDC VP Outsourcing and Offshore Services Market Research. Cloud computing is seen as most likely to deliver solutions for Customer Relationship Management (31 percent), productivity tools like email, collaboration or Office packages (28 percent), online stores, and Enterprise Relationship Management (26 percent each)…