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…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Jack McCarthy.

As Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) CEO Meg Whitman tries to ignite momentum for the tech giant following a lackluster quarterly report last month, she is counting on growth stemming from the company’s cloud computing segment.

As part of that focus, HP has set up an internal division to unify several disparate units that handled cloud products and services, according to an internal HP memo obtained by CRN. The division will be run by Saar Gillai, formerly vice president of cloud networking. The memo, written by Zorawar Biri Singh, senior vice president and general manager of HP Cloud Services, follows the company’s launch of its Converged Cloud platform earlier this year…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Rutrell Yasin.

Communication, data sharing and application development — particularly cloud computing and data analytics — will play a key role in the transformation of city government over the next five years, according to a new report from Pike Research.

Cumulative investment in smart government technology between 2011 and 2017 will be almost $4.8 billion, according to the report Smart Government Technologies. Annual investment in smart government technologies in North America alone will surpass $1 billion in 2017, and annual investment in cloud services for smart cities will reach nearly $1.4 billion worldwide by 2017, the report states…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Jack McCarthy.

The OpenStack Foundation has officially launched and is moving ahead with its mandate to foster open, interoperable cloud computing. In a board of directors meeting last week, the OpenStack Foundation opened for business and, among its first acts, accepted virtualization giant and one-time OpenStack rival VMware as a full-fledged board member, and it set an Oct. 15 release date for the launch of its Folsom cloud networking project.

Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack’s executive director, said that after a year of preparation, the foundation is ready to move ahead with a $10 million budget and lead the more than 150 companies that have joined…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Deni Conner.

DH2i announced on Monday a new DxConsole software module designed to end SQL Server sprawl and allow enterprise applications to move transparently between physical and virtual servers in heterogeneous cloud environments. DxConsole 2012R2, the latest version of DH2i’s flagship product, features DxSRM, an automated instance-level load balancer.

DxConsole virtualizes applications in VMware environments. At present, it is limited to use with SQL Server, but in the future it will support Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange, Oracle, SAP, and Citrix XenServer land Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization environments. DxConsole consist of four components: DxAdmin, DxShield, DxElastic, and DxMotion…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Jennifer Baker.

The European Cloud Computing Strategy, due to be announced on Friday, will seek to cut through the current jungle of standards in the European Union. The plans, put forward by the European Commission, will also try to establish guidelines for service level agreements in order to build public trust in cloud services.

The Commission admits that setting standards will not be easy. "Currently, individual vendors have an incentive to fight for dominance by locking in their customers, inhibiting standardized, industry-wide approaches," according to Commission’s strategy document. The standards that the Commission wants would be voluntary but would apply to all cloud providers, not just to deals with public administrations…