Grazed from NonProfitQuarterly. Author: John Hoffman.

Today marks the kickoff of Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference, which the company bills as “the cloud computing industry event of the year.” Cloud computing, or the use of the Internet to run applications and store data, emerged in the early 2000’s. After the dot.com bubble burst, surviving and newer companies, like Salesforce, Google, Amazon and others, moved from using the Internet as a medium to place orders or communicate with customers and instead developed online platforms that leveraged Internet connectivity as a crucial part of their services. Today, cloud computing has become so ubiquitous that many people are unaware they are even using it.

TechSoup Global recently released a report that surveyed more than 10,000 NGO’s across 88 countries to measure their adoption of cloud computing. “People often don’t know whether or not the technology they are using is cloud computing” says Marnie Webb, Co-CEO of TechSoup Global. “It’s only when we asked respondents about specific technologies that we discovered that they were, in fact, using cloud computing.”…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Security is often a showstopper for cloud computing proposals, but at least one survey suggests that applications and data may be somewhat more secure out in the cloud than within on-premises systems.

In fact, cloud-based applications are less likely to be attacked than on-premises environments, a new study of 70,000 security breaches for a 12-month period across 1,600 companies, released by by Alert Logic, a security vendor, concludes…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

The new OpenStack Foundation is taking shape as a potentially potent force in cloud computing. Its governing board has been elected, and working groups are accelerating development in eight technical areas. Perhaps more important, it has organized itself on a self-sustaining basis and now has $10 million in the bank to pursue its goals.

That could have made it a more formidable competitor to VMware, which has also been active in establishing the vSphere and vCloud product portfolio adopted by many of its customers. At VMworld, outgoing CEO Paul Maritz said VMware has 8,500 service providers offering a VMware-compatible virtualization environment, many of them small co-location and regional data center operators…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Newtek Business Services, NASDAQ: NEWT, The Small Business Authority, with a portfolio of over 100,000 business accounts, announced today the findings of its SB Authority Market Sentiment Survey, a monthly window into the concerns of independent business owners.

Based on a poll of over 2,100 respondents, one of the key findings from the August survey is 67% of business owners do not currently run business applications on a smartphone or tablet. Additionally, only 14% think they will replace their PC with a smartphone or tablet in the future…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Gregory Msungu.

In the last decade, cloud computing has grown immensely. Private companies, individuals, and non-profit organizations have adopted various cloud solutions in equal measure. The most common among these have been the hosting-based applications. More and more companies host their applications in the cloud. Similarly, there has been an increasing demand coming in from mobile users. The relationship between mobile apps use and cloud computing is direct, but the reasons for this fantastic development may not be that obvious.

Immense growth in the mobile sector

The results of a recent survey show that, since 2009, there are more mobile phone users in the world than at any other time. This is especially true about powerful mobile phones that support app use and installation, such as smartphones and iPhones, which sell like hot cakes today. The number of people who are using the apps is huge. But how does this relate to increased cloud computing use?…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

For enterprises, traditional desktop computing is nearly extinct. Most workers now carry laptop computers to and from their desks, and the 21st century trend towards a mobilised workforce means many workers no longer have desks at all. Traditional desktop computing consumes excessive time and resources.

Virtualised servers and desktops hold the key to more efficient IT management. Although virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has historically been deemed too expensive, the recent surge of cloud computing offers a cost-effective, managed platform for VDI that stands to revolutionise the structure of enterprise IT. Visiongain has determined that the value of the global cloud-based VDI market will reach $11.2 billion in 2012…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

The OpenStack Foundation is official as of Wednesday with a new 24-person board, $10 million in funding, 5,600 members, and a mandate to promote flexible open-source cloud infrastructure. Question: Will the foundation echo the success of Eclipse or the failure of OpenOffice?

After a sometimes contentious incubation period, the OpenStack Foundation is now official, with a new 24-member board chaired by SUSE exec and Linux Foundation director Alan Clark; 5,600 members; and $10 million in backer’s funding. Rackspace’s Jonathan Bryce, who did a lot of the heavy lifting moving OpenStack along, is executive director. The news comes after a few weeks of dramatic back-and-forth discussion (surfacing on Twitter) about who should be voted in and how public that process should be…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

No company in any industry can afford to ignore cloud computing, a recent report out of Accenture comments, but its impact will be strongly felt within the financial services sector. The report, which was authored by Emmanuel Sardet of Accenture Financial Services, and Emmanuel Viale of Accenture Technology Labs observes that banks in mature markets “can use cloud computing to enter and scale up in emerging markets more quickly and at lower cost and risk. And banks in emerging markets will use cloud computing to reach their unbanked populations by leapfrogging physical branch networks and moving straight to electronic and mobile banking.”

As banks adapt to changes in their competitive and technological environments, cloud computing will play a major role. Cloud’s combination of low cost and high scalability, effectively unlimited processing power and storage, unprecedented agility and speed to market, and variable pay-per-use cost structures all support the qualities that banks will need to compete and win in the future…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is reaching the stage of maturity. Across any vertical market and at varying degrees of uptake organisations are taking off to the cloud, whether for test and development, email, collaboration, sales automation, HR or more bespoke applications.

Just last week the Business IT Hub discussed the importance of CIOs addressing the customer end user experience when using a mobile device to procure from your organisation, cloud computing too must have a strong focus on end user experience in its implementation by CIO…

Grazed from Samsung. Author: PR Announcement.

Samsung Electronics introduced its next-generation cloud computing solution products, highlighted by the B Series Cloud Base Station, the C Series Cloud Monitor, and the new X Series Cloud Box. Created in response to increasing customer demand, the new cloud computing solutions aim to further expand the company’s lineup of virtual desktop solutions.

The latest cloud computing devices from Samsung allow users to securely store and access data on one centralized server or network, thereby consolidating servers and eliminating the fear of stolen or misplaced data. By simplifying system management and improving productivity, Samsung’s new cloud solutions can connect to a user’s central server, thereby providing users direct access to the operating system (OS) and the applications they need. Such capabilities are accompanied by unparalleled performance whose versatility can accommodate a wide spectrum of customer needs…