Grazed from CFO. Author: Rob Livingstone.

In 10 Things You Just Gotta Have in Your Cloud Contract, I covered a range of things (10, as a matter of fact) that CFOs should think about when they sign a cloud contract.

But the subject is hardly exhausted, especially when it comes to software-as-a-service (SaaS), the most popular flavour of cloud computing, and (not coincidentally) the one with the lowest barrier to entry. The risks in cloud computing are more concentrated at the software layer than the platform and infrastructure layers (the other cloud computing flavours). The software layer contains all your application and business logic, which supports and runs your business…

Grazed from The Wall Street Transcript. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing remains the main secular trend driving investment spending in technology, and it is enabling more secular trends in mobility, analytics and social computing, both in the consumer and enterprise worlds, says Deborah L. Koch, a Co-Manager at the Northern Technology Fund (NTCHX) and Senior Vice President at Northern Trust Corporation.

“You don’t really have the data or the logic of the applications stored on your computer, you’re accessing it through the Internet. What we’re seeing today is a broader adoption of that, not only by consumers to access digital content of all forms but also in the enterprise,” Koch said…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: George Crump.

he primary objective of virtualization and cloud computing is to create a data center that is more responsive to the needs of the business, that enables technology to be a competitive weapon instead of a cost center. Storage has to play a key role in this evolution so it can support these Agile IT initiatives.

In our upcoming webinar 3 Ways To Use The Cloud To Eliminate Storage Headaches, we are going to discuss how to eliminate storage administrative headaches like provisioning, performance management, storage expansion, and data protection. The key to eliminating these headaches is to create a storage value infrastructure which has three steps: virtualize the storage, automate the storage, and cloud-extend the storage. This first column will be devoted to storage virtualization, and we’ll cover the other two steps in our next column…

“IT organizations are moving beyond simple virtual machine provisioning. Our clients are now considering how to orchestrate the delivery of multi-tier applications and assure committed service levels,” said Alessandro Perilli, research director at Gartner. “Automated infrastructure optimization, through dynamic resource allocation and intelligent workload placement, is critical to enable service assurance and scale operations in large private or public cloud environments”.

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Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

A global leader in avionics and software development, the General Electric Company (NYS: GE) has embarked on an 18-month project with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to help bring NextGen air traffic management (ATM) technology into "The Cloud." Cloud computing will enable airlines and air traffic controllers to perform their tasks by sharing not only real-time information but also data analysis and decision support tools to improve aircraft operations and airspace efficiency.
GE researchers are working with NASA to enable NextGen air traffic management to be operated through …

GE researchers are working with NASA to enable NextGen air traffic management to be operated through cloud computing to improve aircraft operations and airspace efficiency. The effort to bring cloud computing to air traffic management is part of GE’s efforts to build the Industrial Internet.

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson (NYSE: EMR) and a global leader in maximizing availability, capacity, and efficiency of critical infrastructure, today announced a strategic partnership with high-performance cloud infrastructure provider Joyent to transform and optimize how physical and logical data center resources are packaged and delivered for public and private clouds.

“We selected Emerson as our partner because the Trellis™ platform is the only DCIM solution available today that can provide holistic, real-time visibility from service processor to power grid and enable the dynamic optimization of data center physical resources,” said Jason Hoffman, founder and CTO of Joyent. “Our partnership will enable us to offer a unique, tightly integrated, modular, highly efficient solution that optimizes the entire infrastructure based on the energy consumption of application workloads.”…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Businesses typically don’t think too much about managing IT resources until they become too numerous and cumbersome to deal with on an ad hoc basis — a point many companies will soon hit in their adoption of cloud computing.

As enterprises continue to use IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) cloud services to solve pressing business problems, the number of cloud services used will continue to grow. Although dozens of services are relatively easy to track, many companies are quickly using hundreds or even thousands of services. This means they’re approaching a tipping point where the number of services used exceeds IT’s ability to manage them manually…