Grazed from NewYork Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Within a few years, Amazon.com’s creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company’s larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing power.

Every day, a start-up called the Climate Corporation performs over 10,000 simulations of the next two years’ weather for more than one million locations in the United States. It then combines that with data on root structure and soil porosity to write crop insurance for thousands of farmers…

Grazed from PCAdvisor. Author: Brandon Butler.

While cloud computing and virtualization, along with a focus on small and midsize businesses, are expected to be major trends at this year’s VMworld show, the virtual desktop infrastructure players are looking to make some news this week as well.

Three big players – Citrix, Dell and HP – each made announcements last week regarding virtual desktop offerings, including new software from Citrix and new hardware components from Dell and HP. At least one analyst says the preparation for VMworld shows the growing importance of VDI technology in an increasingly cloud and mobile world…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

IBM plans to boost its enterprise social line of software by acquiring Kenexa, a maker of cloud-based human resources applications, the companies said on Monday.

IBM has agreed to pay $46 per share for Kenexa in a cash transaction worth about $1.3 billion. Kenexa shares closed at $32.39 on Friday, so IBM is offering a premium of 42 percent for the company.

Kenexa, based in Wayne, Pennsylvania, has almost 9,000 customers, including more than half of the Fortune 500. It has about 2,800 employees and operations in 21 countries…

Grazed from ITPro. Author: Jason Bovberg.

A study last year by TheInfoPro found that most (52 percent) midsized to large businesses are fearful of moving to cloud-based solutions. An expert from Avanade was quoted as saying, “You can’t ignore the fact that change creates fear in people’s minds. The truth of the matter is that cloud computing is frightening to people because of the changes in integration, security, and access.”

All that may be true, but—as I state in my more consumer-minded article, “Why Are We Afraid of the Cloud?”—I think a large part of the wariness comes from an inability to really grasp what the cloud actually is. A lot of people are troubled by the cloud, which—thanks in large part to the mysterious connotations of its name—comes across as ephemeral, fleeting, and baffling. I can’t help but think that had the name evolved into something like “offsite vault computing,” then perhaps it would have more supporters today…

Grazed from Business Insider. Author: Julie Bort.

VMware has a strange sort of problem: It’s been so successful in pushing its technological revolution that it risks making itself obsolete. But VMware is not about to let that happen, says VMware executive Jerry Chen.

VMware does about $4 billion a year in revenue. Most of that comes from its flagship product, server virtualization software, which lets data centers run more efficiently. This has helped spur the cloud-computing phenomenon that’s transforming the enterprise IT market…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Sandra Gittlen.

Poke your head into most data centers today and you’re bound to notice a distinct gender gap. While women still represent only a fraction of IT workers today, some experts believe that cloud computing will offer the wedge in the door that women need to equalize staffing numbers.

“Cloud computing presents an opportunity for women who are not as heavily focused on the architectural design, and how bits and bytes move through the organization,” says JJ DiGeronimo, a veteran of IT and director of global cloud solutions at VMware. “We’ll still need women who are technical, but cloud provides the chance to also champion ideas and work cross-functionally to define how IT is delivered to business.” Skills, she believes, are a strong suit of many women…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Paul Korzeniowski.

Moving enterprise applications to the cloud requires close monitoring to ensure performance doesn’t suffer. Several vendors have developed cloud monitoring tools that set benchmarks and pinpoint potential bottlenecks. Whether these tools give enterprises a full picture of what’s going on in the cloud is still up for debate.

"Cloud application monitoring tools can be helpful, but they often are not as full-featured as longer established performance monitoring solutions," said Lori MacVittie, principal analyst at Rishidot Research LLC…

Grazed from Adotas. Author: Kristi Carter.

Just about everyone has seen advertisements for cloud computing services and most people can even recognize the blue cloud-shaped symbol that symbolizes it. However, not many people understand how it works. In a nutshell, cloud computing is a complicated infrastructure that allows end-users to sync and organize their personal data (movies, contacts, emails, etc.) with multiple devices.

In essence, your personal cloud (a computing service model that is protected by a firewall and only available to a select number of users in an organization) connects to a public cloud (a computing service model that provides service to the general public or anyone on the web). Companies like Azaleos, a managed service company, realize that these connections can be vulnerable to attacks and have developed systems to secure private clouds so no one can gain access without your permission…

Grazed from Broadcast Newsroom. Author: PR Announcement.

In order to gain the flexibility and efficiency of virtual environments, organizations are migrating IT operations from on-premise, hardware-defined application silos to virtual, software-defined cloud computing platforms. Today, however, IT departments are struggling to manage the scope, scale and complexity of inflexible storage infrastructures in data-driven enterprise. The migration to the cloud, and its agility, elasticity and reliability can best be achieved through software that abstracts out hardware resources, pools it into aggregate capacity, and enables automation to allocate resources as needed by applications.

For almost a decade, NetApp and VMware have aligned their storage and virtualization technology roadmaps to accelerate the customer journey to the cloud. Today NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) unveils integration between VMware® vSphere® 5.1 and NetApp® Data ONTAP® 8 software operating in Cluster-Mode to enable organizations to not only securely manage and deploy infinite storage pools, but to deliver nondisruptive migration of data among hundreds of virtual machines at a time…

Grazed from Dark Reading. Author: Editorial Staff.

Efficiency, automation, and availability are some of the key benefits of cloud computing. However, many organizations may not be able to take advantage of these benefits due to concerns with regulatory compliance and security risks such as provider access to tenant data.

As more data moves to private or public clouds, the number of super-users with access to an organization’s data multiplies, the risk of VMs being copied without the owner knowing increases, the possibility of temporary file trails rises, and the organization’s data is more vulnerable to being compromised. To address the data security issues and deliver control and governance of data in the cloud, SafeNet, a global leader in data protection introduces ProtectV, an encryption solution that has achieved VMware Ready™ status…