Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

The beauty of Amazon Web Services is they’re easy to set up and run. The problem with those services is they’re easy to set up and run. Now Amazon is offering companies a better way — with a little prep work — to track those costs.

Amazon is making it easier for companies to track and price out the cloud services they’re deploying with a new cost allocation process.

The fact that Amazon Web Services are so inexpensive and easy to spin up is both a blessing and a curse for companies. A blessing because internal developers can try out new stuff fast and cheap; bad because it leads to cloud cost sprawl where companies find it difficult to track and monitor cloud usage and the costs of which — let’s face it — add up. Even cheap services cost money. A post on the Amazon Web Services blog outlines how corporate users can tag those services to make billing less of an, um, adventure…

Grazed from InformationWorld. Author: Doug Henschen.

It’s time to lay to rest two common myths of the cloud computing era. One is that configuring enterprise applications–whether deployed on-premises or accessed in the cloud–is easy, which is far from true even if it’s easier than customizing an application. The other myth is that you can’t customize cloud-based apps.

Unless we kill these myths, we expect too much, or too little, from our applications.

There is no doubt that IT shops are increasingly using software’s built-in configuration tools rather than coding their own customizations, and there are several reasons for the move toward configuration. For starters, IT teams have been complaining for years about the burden of maintaining their ERP, CRM, supply chain management, human capital management and other enterprise apps. More than half (54%) of the 338 business technology professionals who responded to our just-released InformationWeek 2012 Enterprise Applications Survey cite "changing, upgrading or optimizing existing applications" as their most time-consuming challenge…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: John Gallant.

When you think about the leading cloud computing companies, does the name Red Hat spring to mind? Jim Whitehurst hopes it does. In fact, the CEO of the rapidly growing, Raleigh, NC-based, open source company, is doing everything in his power to ensure that Red Hat has the widest possible portfolio of tools for your private and hybrid cloud — a collection of technologies that Whitehurst says is only rivaled by Microsoft (without the "walled garden" strategy, of course). In addition to Enterprise Linux — the flagship product — Red Hat’s growing cloud stack includes tools for server and storage virtualization, management, security, and an "enterprise-ready" version of OpenStack.

In this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Whitehurst talked with Chief Content Officer John Gallant about the changing competitive landscape in enterprise software and explained why VMware is now Red Hat’s closest rival. He also talked about how Microsoft’s transitions to the cloud and a new-generation operating system will benefit Red Hat. Whitehurst also explored why many IT leaders have a fundamentally flawed view of Red Hat’s strategy and how his time as an executive with Delta Airlines made him a better tech company CEO…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

You’re sitting around. You have some computing to do. Ten years ago, you would ask your boss to buy a rack or two of computers to churn through the data. Today, you just call up the cloud and rent the systems by the minute. This is the market that Google is now chasing by packaging up time on its racks of machines and calling it the Google Compute Engine.

Google took its sweet time [1] entering this corner of the cloud. While Amazon, Rackspace, and others started off with pay-as-you-go Linux boxes and other "infrastructure" services, Google began with the Google App Engine [2], a nice stack of Python that held your hand and did much of the work for you. Now Google is heading in the more general direction and renting raw machines too. The standard distro is Ubuntu 12.04, but CentOS instances are also available. And you can store away your own custom image once you configure it…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Xath Cruz.

OpenStack is currently riding high on a momentum built up by Rackspace’s recent decision to rebrand themselves around the open source cloud project, along with long-running auction site eBay coming out and admitting that they are using the technology, but it’s not completely smooth sailing for Openstack, as there are still a number of skepticism in the industry over their governance and development models.

Openstack itself is an odd technology. It is well-received by the majority as it provides IT vendors and end users with an open cloud ecosystem that is robust enough to compete with closed source and commercial offerings, yet it still generates a lot of criticisms from people who question their governance model, and from people who pan its lack of maturity when compared to industry leaders such as Amazon’s AWS and VMWare. So, what’s the reason for Openstack’s ability to be so divisive and polarizing?…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

Workday is expanding its cloud-based human resources and financial applications’ footprint with a new employee time-tracking module, the company announced Tuesday.

The new capabilities come as part of the SaaS (software as a service) vendor’s 17th release. Dubbed Workday Time Tracking, the module gives enterprises the ability to use "a single application to collect, process, and manage time and labor for their global workforce," Workday said in a statement.

It incorporates a calendar-style interface through which employees can submit information about their hours, as well as a "real-time calculation engine" that targets "critical data," such as overtime hours, Workday said…

Grazed from ITWire. Author: Beverley Head.

Established in the 1960s, ISACA (formerly known as the Information Systems Audit and Control Association) has released a guide to help organisations work out what the true return on investment will be from investments in the cloud.

According to the organisation there are hidden costs associated with cloud computing which need to be considered when assessing the benefits of cloud.

The guide which is available as a free download details a 12-step process that attempts to tackle the complexity of cloud computing and provide better insights regarding long-term costs and payback. It also makes the point that return on investment is not the only financial measure of success (or failure) and recommends organisations also consider calculating total cost of ownership, net present value and internal rate of return data before committing to a cloud investment…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higgenbotham.

Amazon has added a new cloud offering dubbed Glacier, where for less than a penny per gigabyte per month users can store files that aren’t accessed very often. The new product could put the hurt on backup and recovery offerings from other vendors.
glacier

In its never-ending quest to deliver new features to the Amazon Web Services product portfolio, the online retailer has added a new storage service designed for archival and backup storage. AWS Glacier is cheap, slow and Amazon hopes startups find it the prefect place to put files that aren’t accessed very often. And if it takes off it could become a problem for the existing backup and recovery business (which is often the first offering many smaller telco cloud providers launch to customers)…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Seth Bernstein.

Cloud computing is revolutionizing the companies’ infrastructures. More and more companies are spending their outsourcing budget on purchasing cloud services. This helps them avoid hiring more people and save a fair amount of funds from their budgets. Research firms (including Gartner Inc.) have published figures that demonstrate the trend of cloud computing services in the IT outsourcing market.

On August 7th, 2012, Gartner Inc. said that out of $251.7 billion of total market of IT outsourcing, cloud computing services are the fastest-growing segment, having increased from $3.4 (2011) to $5 (2012). Currently, this is still insignificant when compared with the $251.7 billion market, but we can hope to see them as the leading area of IT outsourcing because of their high growth rate. Let’s take a look at some of the factors that have made cloud computing services so popular in the IT outsourcing sector…