Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Paul Miller.

The cloud computing market continues to explode. It will expand nearly six-fold by 2020, making it one of the fastest-growing industries on the planet: Forrester last year predicted market growth to $241 billion by the end of the decade, from $41 billion.

With healthy competition between incumbents and ambitious startups, it’s unlikely any single player will dominate for the foreseeable future. And yet, the hype blitz around big vendor showcase events is almost enough to persuade us they really do sell everything we’ll ever need…

Grazed from PropertyCasualty360. Author: Robert Regis Hyle.

How many transformative technologies can one industry endure in a 12-month period? Transformative itself may be the early favorite for Word of the Year in insurance technology if it’s not beaten out by another serious contender: disruptive.

We may go out of our way to place too much pressure on one piece of technology—such as telematics—to lead the industry into the promised land, but despite the hype it’s hard to argue that the use of cloud computing is going to have a powerful effect on the industry. The next 10 years will offer great challenges as carriers look to secure their operations via a private cloud yet still have access to large amounts of third-party data and—even more important—tremendous computing power to analyze all that data…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Caitlin White.

Whether it’s for the grocery store or for your cloud computing project, a list will keep you focused. Fortunately, SearchCloudComputing.com has done some legwork for you and created a countdown of our most helpful cloud adoption lists.

So whether you’re migrating virtual machines to the cloud, trying to avoid common cloud computing mistakes or shifting to the next stage of your private cloud build, you can consult these lists for quick answers. We can’t remind you to pick up milk on the way home from work, but we can remind you what not to do in the cloud…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

In August, more than 10,000 jobs were advertised online for technology positions that need experience and knowledge of cloud computing in the United States, according to WANTED Analytics™ (http://www.wantedanalytics.com), the leading source of real-time business intelligence for the talent marketplace. Cloud computing has been a growing skill as more companies move data to virtual servers and there is a need for talent to develop, manage, and secure the flow of information online. The number of job ads increased rapidly in 2012, reaching new highs in demand each month and is now up 80% since August 2011.

The most commonly advertised job titles for IT talent with cloud computing skills are:…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Many interested in deploying software defined networks are eager for the agility and programmability they can provide. But the fear of breaking their network means IT is leery of deploying SDNs. Apigee has updated its API management products to work on SDNs to alleviate those fears.

Apigee, a company that helps customers manage application programming interfaces that developers use to build services, is introducing a product specifically for software-defined networks that will help its telco customers manage their APIs based on the state of the network and policies already in place for specific users. Apigee, which counts customers such as Walgreens, Telefonica and AT&T, is adding software that can be deployed on controllers such as those offered by Nicira, BigSwitch, IBM and others as well as a platform that will help apply analytics to the network to determine when to take specific actions based on polices or the network’s health…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Rosalie Marshall.

The lack of industry-wide security standards is slowing business adoption of cloud services, according to cloud computing firm Mimecast. Speaking at the V3 Security Summit, Mimecast chief scientist Nathaniel Borenstein said often businesses will not move to the cloud if they are unsure about which providers to trust when it comes to security.

He renewed previous calls he has made for industry standards that will allow businesses to properly evaluate cloud providers. "All clouds are not created equally. The decision about who to trust is absolutely critical. There’s a lack of evaluators telling you who to trust," said Borenstein…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Jim Thompson.

Cloud computing can mean many different things depending on whom you speak with and what their experience has been thus far with the cloud. I think we would all agree about the significance cloud computing plays and that it will continue to positively impact us within the communications industry. It’s a fast-growing segment as noted by Altman Vilandre & Company, which reported worldwide revenues from cloud services are expected to reach $31 billion by 2013. In the U.S. alone, revenue could exceed $10 billion by 2014.

Knowledge is Power

Fully understanding what’s available and the differences in cloud models will help you optimally structure your IT environment and capitalize on the benefits, as well as plan for future growth. If you are an IT professional managing network and data resources in a data center environment, you will most likely have access to a variety of resources and tools to help you leverage the cloud for your company…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Nasdaq OMX is offering a new service called FinQloud for financial services clients that want to store regulatory data or analyze trade data using on-demand resources. Built atop Amazon Web Services, the service seems to be the result of a close partnership between the two companies.

Nasdaq OMX is offering a new cloud computing service for storing and analyzing financial trading data, and it’s built atop the Amazon Web Services cloud. The service, named FinQloud is comprised of a regulatory data retention product called Regulatory Records Retention, or R3, and an on-demand analysis tool for trade data called Self-Service Reporting, or SSR. Given the seemingly close partnership between AWS and Nasdaq, FinQloud looks like another step in AWS’s quest to prove itself ready for enterprise workloads and might suggest more such partnerships to come…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Who would have thunk it. The OpenStack Foundation now has a 24-person board, $10 million in funding, and, oh, yeah, 5,600 members. This is becoming more than momentum in the cloud computing market, and it certainly exceeds my expectations from when the standard was first launched.

OpenStack provides a platform to run a private cloud infrastructure, and it now boasts about 550,000 lines of code. Some cloud hosting providers, such as Rackspace and Hewlett-Packard, use the software to host their own services. More are working on OpenStack integration into public cloud services. What’s interesting about OpenStack is not the fact that’s it’s cloud code free for the download, but that so much progress has been made in just two years. We can thank Amazon.com for that, coupled with huge and continued interest in open standards…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is becoming a mainstream technology. However, cloud providers are beginning to see price pressure to reduce their costs to remain competitive. CIOs need to be aware that with downward price pressures, the excess capacity that cloud providers have available for peak traffic drives cloud provider’s profits down, which may alter the relationship and service the CIO receives.

A behemoth cloud provider like Amazon can afford to have excess capacity, while for smaller providers, it’s a challenge that must be solved in order to compete and survive. Larger cloud providers have already started to differentiate themselves through new and alternative services. It’s how they compete with Amazon and also how they entice CIOs at large enterprises to commit to cloud adoption…