Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Chris Kanakarus.

Oracle has finally answered a big question hovering over its emerging family of cloud services: What do they cost? While not giving a public price for every one of its cloud products, Oracle’s website now has pricing for its on-demand database and Java development service, as well as for some applications.

Pricing for the database service, which uses version 11g R2, starts at $175 per month for one schema, 5GB of disk storage and 30GB of data transfer. A midtier option costs $900 per month with one schema, 20GB of storage and 120GB of data transfer. For $2,000 per month, developers get 50GB of storage and 300GB of data transfer, but still only one schema…

SafeNet, Inc., the global leader in data protection, today announced the immediate availability of SafeNet Authentication Service, a new cloud-based authentication service. The cloud authentication solution was designed and engineered specifically for the service provider environment and allows service providers to rapidly introduce authentication-as-a-service to their enterprise customers. By doing so, it enables service providers to increase their average revenue per user (ARPU), significantly reduce the cost and complexity associated with offering and implementing strong authentication, and strengthen their security and compliance posture.

Today’s launch builds on SafeNet’s industry leadership in authentication, which was recognized earlier this year when Gartner placed SafeNet in the “Leaders’ quadrant” in its January 2012 Magic Quadrant for User Authentication. SafeNet Authentication Service extends the company’s portfolio of two-factor authentication solutions, providing enterprise and government organizations with unprecedented choice and flexibility to best customize their authentication solutions to meet current and future security needs.

Anticipating rapid growth during the next year, Waterton Residential, a leader in the multi-family residential industry, has selected CenterBeam Inc. to be its supplier of a broad array of cloud computing and IT solutions. CenterBeam will assist Waterton Residential with moving to the cloud, offering the infrastructure management, communications and collaboration solutions, endpoint security, backup, helpdesk and professional services the company needs to maintain its competitive edge.

“CenterBeam’s comprehensive suite of services is making it very easy for us to maintain top-quality IT infrastructure and services while our company expands,” said Gregory J. Lozinak, executive vice president and COO of Waterton Residential. “CenterBeam will free our internal IT staff from day-to-day issues, enabling them instead to focus on strategic projects designed to add value to our core business. In addition, CenterBeam will deliver a consistent level of helpdesk support for our employees, who are spread across more than 50 locations in 13 states, as well as our mobile workforce.”

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Technology professionals are embracing the cloud with an increased vigor due in large part to the inherent cost savings the cloud offers with regard to storage. For those still on the fencepost, Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider, today announced a step-by-step guide for assessing and implementing a cloud-based storage solution.

“The amount of data companies need to store today is growing at an astounding rate,” says Victor Dermott, solution architect, cloud computing, for Logicalis. “So too is the cost to manage and maintain a secure, compliant environment. That’s why cloud-based storage as a service is becoming so attractive to CIOs and CFOs alike; reducing significant capital expenses for storage hardware and software as well as the associated management costs for maintaining these huge storehouses of data to a much smaller recurrent monthly operational cost makes both financial and technological sense.”…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Editorial Staff.

The advance of cloud computing has significantly simplified the life of modern start-ups by offering all the necessary technical resources without wasting time on maintenance. This model is indeed effective. But is it possible to create an equally effective business model to offer professional “cloud” development team’s services?

Having analyzed the most common problems faced by business owners engaging offshore service providers to tackle their web development projects, QuartSoft Corp., a technological partner for many start-ups with an office headquarter in Silicon Valley highlights a few major complaints:…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

The empire strikes back: Amazon Web Services adds the Oracle database — actually the whole RDS lineup — to its free usage tier. Anyone who doesn’t see Oracle’s new Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Amazon Web Services as potential competitors should probably look again.

Within a day of Oracle unveiling its all-Oracle Cloud plan, Amazon Web Services announced a “free taste” of Oracle’s database on its own cloud. Sort of.

On Monday, Amazon added its Relational Database Service (RDS) to its Free Usage Tier, according to the AWS blog. That means new customers can try out MySQL, the Oracle database or Microsoft SQL Server for free. Usage is restricted to a small “MicroDB” instance and one really important caveat is that Oracle database users have to bring their already bought-and-paid-for licence to the table. But the underlying Amazon infrastructure usage is free. More details are here…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Eric Goldman.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar has introduced a new bill, the “Cloud Computing Act of 2012” (S.3569), that purports to “ improve the enforcement of criminal and civil law with respect to cloud computing.” Given its introduction so close to the election, it’s doubtful this bill will go anywhere. Still, it provides an excellent case study of how even well-meaning legislators can botch Internet regulation.

What the Bill Does

From its 1980s origins as a law restricting hacking into government computers, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) has morphed into a general-purpose federal law against trespassing on anyone else’s computers. With that breadth, the CFAA extends to a wide variety of activities, ranging from data scraping (see, e.g., EF Cultural Travel v. Explorica) to fake profiles (see, e.g., the Lori Drew prosecution related to Megan Meier’s death) to ex-employees walking out the door with competitively sensitive information (see, e.g., US v. Nosal and WEC v. Miller)…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Sharon Hurley Hall.

Business adoption of cloud computing is happening fast. This sector alone is predicted to outpace growth in the overall IT industry fivefold. But this brings challenges for hardware and software vendors and for the IT administrators who are using their products, says Antone Gonsalves in ReadWriteWeb. The IDC research he quotes suggests that by 2016 companies will spend $100 billion on cloud services, an annualized growth rate of 26 percent. And the SaaS market will be a huge chunk of that, accounting for 60 percent of the public cloud by 2016.

New Models for Vendors

Both software and hardware vendors will need new revenue models in this new cloud-based business environment, and that could bring benefits for IT administrators at midsize businesses. Software vendors will have to broaden their offerings beyond the Fortune 5000 to target a wider range of customers. That may lower the entry point for IT administrators looking to get into cloud services at an affordable price. (And they WILL have to get in. A Washington Technology article points out that cloud computing is no longer an optional extra, but a must-have in business.) Within the hardware business, providers that now target IT departments directly will shift to supplying the companies providing cloud services. Those companies will ramp up demand as cloud business becomes more widespread…