Grazed from FCW. Author: Matthew Weigelt.

The General Services Administration had so much response to its request for information on a possible cloud brokerage services that it has extended the deadline for responses.

Officials initially planned to close the window for responses on Aug. 17. The new deadline is Sept. 7.

GSA had more than 160 industry participants at the Cloud Brokerage Industry Day Aug. 2, and the wait list was large enough that officials could not accommodate everyone who wanted to take part, said Stan Kaczmarczyk, director of cloud computing service at the Federal Acquisition Services’ Information Technology Services Office…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

Application testing has never received the level of attention it should have. But with the advent of mobile computing application development, it quickly becomes apparent who put in the quality control time in and who didn’t.

As a result of the wave of mobile applications being built today that face external customers, IT organizations are under more pressure than ever to make sure those applications are fully vetted. Realistically, however, most IT organizations don’t have the infrastructure in place that is needed to test mobile applications at scale. As a result, the spike in application testing taking place in the cloud using services such as SOASTA is mainly driven by the need make sure mobile applications meet end-user expectations in terms of both performance and quality…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Kevin Fogarty.

The past couple of years have been tough for those defending the security of cloud computing and those trying to establish secure cloud infrastructures for themselves. For the most part, there have been DDOS attacks or defacements designed to embarrass or punish site owners.

However, even considering only websites or services from which hackers actually took over accounts, stole data or money or planted malware to help steal data or money from others, the list of security failures is long and distinguished: Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Hotmail, Global Payments (credit-card clearinghouse for Visa, MasterCard and others), Federal Express, Zappos, a host of local bank and police agencies and the China Software Developer Network (which, all by itself, lost personal information on 6 million users to a single hacker named Zeng)…

Grazed from CBS News. Author: Chenda Ngak.

Cloud computing has been in the news a lot in recent weeks – starting from the launch of Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion, which heavily integrates with iCloud, to the alleged hacking of a technology journalist’s online accounts. Most people use a form of cloud computing everyday, but the term has yet to become engrained in the mainstream lexicon.

So what the heck is cloud computing?

Think of the cloud as a disk drive that is owned by a company like Google or Apple, which stores all of your files in a remote location – typically at a server farm. The cloud makes it possible to access photos, videos or documents from any computer with an Internet connection…

Grazed from Channelnomics. Author: Chris Gonsolves.

There isn’t much doubt or debate: Cloud computing and the “-as-a-service” models of information technology are the most important and disruptive enterprise technologies to surface in decades. cloud security stormAlso true: The cloud is one major security snafu or data breach away from collapsing before its complete value is ever realized.

Such a catastrophe appears to be inching closer to reality, as evidenced by a new survey making the rounds from the Ponemon Institute and Thales e-Security. On the surface, the report purports to show how cloud acceptance is continuing unabated, driven by ever-increasing zeal for new services at lower costs. But beyond the heady adoption numbers, there’s a chilling disregard for basic security. Even organizations that should know better, the survey shows, are playing fast and loose with their data in the cloud and fumbling even the most fundamental tenets of data integrity with poor encryption practices…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Stephen Lawson.

Cloud storage provider Livedrive introduced an app for Google’s Chromebook on Thursday that is designed to give Livedrive customers access to their files stored online, which can total as much as 5TB.

The Chromebook is designed for online use only and comes with just a 16GB SSD (solid-state disk) plus an SD card slot for additional storage. Livedrive is offering the free ChromeOS app in order to let its customers with Chromebooks expand the device’s virtual storage capacity…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Linda Tucci.

Just how green is cloud computing? Is cloud computing more or less energy-consuming compared with the typical local data center a company owns and operates for its own use? How about compared with a co-location facility, sited for maximum energy efficiency? Or in contrast to a managed hosting data center, where the average power usage effectiveness, or PUE, is an ideal 1.0? What’s the green differential in buying services from a bevy of cloud computing providers versus consolidating the enterprise’s servers and applications in a private cloud maintained behind the corporate firewall?

Most CIOs can’t answer these questions because the energy efficiency of cloud is not their problem but the cloud owner’s problem. That kind of punting may be a lost opportunity for CIOs wishing to make the case that cloud computing is in the plus column for green…

Grazed from TheStreet. Author: James Rogers.

Only three years ago, companies were nervous about the potential security and management risks of sending critical data and services into the "cloud." Today, the cloud-computing industry has developed so rapidly that Rackspace(RAX) has put its faith in open-source cloud technology.

Rackspace developed OpenStack, an open-source cloud operating system in 2010, and is now cranking up its efforts around the technology. Earlier this month the San Antonio, Texas-based firm announced OpenStack-powered versions of its flagship Cloud Server offering. Rackspace also unveiled a Cloud Databases offering and a Control Panel product for managing the services, both built on OpenStack.

"We’re working hard to build an open-cloud company," Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier said during an interview. Rackspace, he added, will launch additional open-cloud services during its third and fourth fiscal quarters…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Sourya Biswas.

With so many cloud options in hand, convergence is the need of the day. This was the focus of HP’s big recent push into cloud computing (See: “Waiting for Cloud Standards Is Like Waiting for Godot” ). Now, Indian IT consulting major Infosys has announced the launch of the Infosys Cloud Ecosystem Hub as an integration mechanism to bring all cloud services under one roof. It promises to enable “enterprises to create, adopt and govern cloud services across the ecosystem.”

It features a “smart brokerage feature” that claims to provide “an enterprise-wide decision support mechanism to select, compare and deploy cloud services from across providers. Decisions can be based on evaluation of over 20 parameters such as quality of service, technology compatibility, regulatory compliance needs and total cost of ownership of application workloads.” I had covered the concept of cloud brokering earlier (See: How The Cloud Broker Can Help Your Business)…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

For many in enterprise IT, cloud computing seems like a dream come true: There’s no need to spend your days negotiating with hardware and software vendors, and you don’t have to worry about running out of space in the data center.

However, as a new technology, cloud computing is missing pieces, and you must take them into account as you move forward, or not, with your cloud implementations. Right now, I see three large holes that need to be filled; let’s examine each.

Service governance addresses the management of cloud computing services. These mechanisms need to allocate services to authorized users, provide service discovery, and enforce pre-determined policies…