Grazed from NASDAQ. Author: Editorial Staff.

On Tuesday, NASDAQ OMX Group Inc. ( NDAQ ) announced the launch of an Amazon Web Services-powered cloud computing platform – FinQloud. The platform has been created to assist the financial services industry in storing and managing financial data with a view to simplifying operations and helping companies meet regulatory requirements.

Global regulators are coming up with stringent regulatory requirements and gaining access to more in-depth data in order to boost transparency. This is increasing the pressure on financial services companies since they have to manage larger volumes of data, resulting in high data management costs…

Grazed from Xconomy. Author: Curt Woodward.

Cloud-computing service provider Tier 3 has raised another $10 million to expand its IT products for big businesses.

The new money first showed up in a filing with the SEC. A company spokeswoman says new investor Intel Capital led the Series B round, which also included investments from existing backers Madrona Venture Group and Ignition Capital. The new cash brings the total venture investment in Tier 3 to $18.5 million…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

With the cloud computing business still in its relatively early days, the European Union moved on Thursday to secure a toehold in a potentially lucrative market it says could deliver 2.5 million new jobs. "We want to make Europe not just cloud-friendly but cloud-active," said the EU’s commissioner for digital affairs Neelie Kroes, announcing plans to develop European standards and certifications to get business to join the cloud.

"Cloud computing" consists of storing data and software on remote servers accessed over the Internet by e-mail, social network or video-game users without having to invest in added software. Using remote servers in centres that can be the size of football fields is popular with services such as Facebook and Spotify but as an economy of scale, the system cuts IT costs for businesses by 10 to 20 percent…

OpenStack Folsom, the sixth release of the open source cloud computing platform, saw a 65 percent increase in contributors, as well as the addition of Networking and Block Storage services, architected in line with the OpenStack philosophy of pluggability and extensibility. While work was underway to establish the new OpenStack Foundation, the thriving community once again delivered the release on-time and with all planned essential features.

OpenStack Folsom automates pools of compute, storage and networking resources, now including emerging Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions via OpenStack Networking plug-ins, to build private and public cloud infrastructures without vendor lock-in. OpenStack Networking currently includes plug-in support for Open vSwitch, the Ryu open source network operating system, standard Linux bridge networking and commercial solutions from Cisco, Nicira, and NEC, with others in development. Written by more than 330 contributors, the Folsom release features a continued focus on stability and extensibility, while adding considerable new features like Networking, Block Storage and Hyper-V support. The community also made significant progress with localization efforts, introducing a new translation framework for the software, user-facing guides and documentation.

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

ProfitBricks, the cloud computing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider that has completely reengineered the delivery of cloud computing, announced today a partnership with MassChallenge, the largest-ever startup-accelerator, and the first to support high-impact, early-stage entrepreneurs with no strings attached. ProfitBricks partnered with MassChallenge to support its mission of helping entrepreneurs win by providing state-of-the-art cloud computing solutions.

MassChallenge companies have raised more than $260 million in funding and created 2,150 jobs in the last three years. ProfitBricks, in partnership with MassChallenge, will enable each company to receive new, second generation cloud services including virtual servers with almost double the performance of existing cloud providers, flexible minute-by-minute pricing that facilitates real-time scaling of compute resources, and dramatically more simple cloud deployment and management through a completely new Graphical User Interface, known as the Data Center Designer…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

There’s nothing like the holiday shopping season to test an e-commerce site’s ability to ramp up and down as needed. RightScale says it can help sites proactively respond to changing loads so they don’t run out of juice and don’t pay for more resources than needed.
rightscale

The beauty of cloud computing is that it can scale up and down as needed. This is particularly helpful for retail businesses, which see huge spikes and valleys in demand during the holidays. Now RightScale says it can help them more proactively manage their cloud resources to meet demand and ramp down resources as demand fades…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Caitlin White.

Nobody said life in the cloud was going to be simple. Sure it’s chock full of benefits — high availability, flexibility and potential time and cost savings — but cloud computing brings about a different set of headaches. Whether there are unforeseen money drains, compatibility issues or cloud fatigue in general, cloud administrators and experts are bound to express frustrations with their own IT environments and cloud providers. "I’m a big believer in SaaS solutions, but there’s a lot of stuff under the hood that you’ve got to think about."

Adopting Software as a Service (SaaS) in an enterprise can mean simplified management and cost savings, but at least one IT pro cautions potential customers to peek behind the curtain of benefits and see what’s really back there…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steve Ranger.

Companies are forgetting about their data protection responsibilities when they shift data into the cloud, according to the UK’s privacy watchdog. As cloud computing slowly moves into the mainstream, more and more personal data is being moved out of companies’ own datacentres and into the cloud, which means the data could potentially reside on servers anywhere on the planet.

But the UK has strict rules around how data can be processed, and UK data protection watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is concerned that many businesses do not realise they remain responsible for how the data is looked after, even after handing it over to a cloud provider. ICO technology policy advisor Dr Simon Rice said the law on outsourcing data is very clear…