Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

After reportedly snubbing an acquisition bid from Citrix worth at least $700 million earlier this year, Box, the cloud storage start-up, is raising more money at the tune of a $1.2 billion valuation, the Wall Street Journal reports.

It supposedly has designs on going public next year at a $2 billion-$3 billion valuation.

The seven-year-old outfit that started in a college dorm has raised about $162 million so far from Mark Cuban, Salesforce.com, SAP, Andreessen Horowitz, Emergence Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates and DFJ Growth at a valuation of more than $600 million, the paper said…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

ZapThink, a Dovel Technologies Company, is now delivering version 2.0 of the Cloud Computing for Architects course at its headquarters in McLean, Virginia. The two-day Cloud Computing for Architects course is the only architect-focused course on Cloud Computing available on the market today.

ZapThink has successfully run version 1.0 of this course in London, Singapore, and India. The McLean course represents an updated version of the material and the first time ZapThink has presented this course in the United States. Cloud Computing for Architects will be offered September 27 – 28, 2012 in McLean, VA, and again on October 18 – 19, 2012 in London, in partnership with IRM UK…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Larry Carvalho.

Why is it that cloud computing is maturing but adoption is lagging? This transformational approach has huge potential but compared to the buzz surrounding it, enterprises are just taking baby steps towards widespread adoption. When invited by IBM to do a tweet chat on “Accelerating the Adoption of Cloud”, I liked the opportunity because of the widespread discussion around it as well as controversial enterprise adoption efforts made by “Shadow IT”, a common term used for folks who bypass corporate IT to start their own cloud initiatives.

Another aspect of this tweet chat was that it was centered about integrated systems, another transformational technology destined to change enterprise IT initiatives. Similar systems have been around since IBM made a big bet on the System 360 mainframe family in the 60’s.

What we’re seeing today is a higher level of integration that tightly links systems, storage and networking, bringing greater visibility across key aspects of an IT infrastructure Enterprise vendors now notice that iPods, iPads and iPhones, featuring a combined hardware and software stack with significant profit margins for Apple, and we are starting to this business model being applied to the enterprise space…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Just in time for the Olympics, there’s a Windows Azure outage in Europe.

A flag posted at 11:09 UTC on the Windows Azure dashboard:

“We are experiencing an availability issue in the West Europe sub-region, which impacts access to hosted services in this region. We are actively investigating this issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.”…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jamie Yap.

The maturing cloud computing trend has spurred more enterprise applications to be built for access via the cloud network, but one Hewlett-Packard executive argues that developers have yet evolved in tandem with regard to putting security at the forefront of their processes.

Matt Bertram, chief technologist of software at HP Asia-Pacific and Japan, pointed out that coding a secure app for enterprise use is both a challenge to overcome and a major pitfall to avoid for many IT departments. Developers of traditional enterprise software obviously have coding knowhow, but many may not be aware of security best practices for cloud-based applications and this may leave loopholes in the code that hackers may exploit, he said in an interview on Thursday.

Bertram noted that security is an oft-quoted concern among companies as to why they have no plans to migrate to the cloud. So this lack of awareness on cloud-based security on the developers’ end is all the more pressing, particularly with hackers seemingly moving from attacking corporate networks to targeting the applications itself, he explained…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Sarah Frier.

Akamai Technologies Inc. (AKAM), a company that helps businesses deliver data more quickly over the Internet, had its biggest gain in six years after demand for cloud computing bolstered sales and earnings.

Akamai jumped 20 percent to $33.89 at 9:56 a.m. in New York after rising as much as 21 percent, the biggest intraday gain since July 27, 2006. The shares had slipped 12 percent this year through yesterday.

Profit excluding some costs was 43 cents a share in the second quarter, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Akamai said yesterday in a statement. Analysts had estimated 37 cents on average, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Sales rose to $331.3 million, topping the $326.2 million predicted…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Six Degrees Group today announces it has raised GBP 8 million in new funding from Penta Capital and that it has completed the acquisition of Cloud Computing Centre (CCC), a Surrey-based managed cloud hosting expert established in 1999.

CCC focuses on the cloud market and brings over 100 mid-market hosting customers who spend an average of GBP 36,000 pa. The acquisition takes Six Degrees Group’s run-rate position to GBP 50m revenue and GBP 12m EBITDA. CCC’s cloud platform is highly complementary to the existing Six Degrees technology and they are also a Microsoft Gold Partner and Silver Hosting Partner, bringing incremental skillsets for Microsoft Hyper-V to the Group…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

For companies wanting to put their workloads on a public cloud without having to sweat the details, AppFog has a bold proposition.

AppFog’s platform as a service, available as of late Wednesday, abstracts out the tweaking and tuning of cloud servers, databases and storage. And, if you want to run your work on Amazon and then move it to, say, Rackspace, or Microsoft Windows Azure, or the HP Cloud, you can do so with the click of a button, according to AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson.

The Portland, Ore.-based company, which started out as a PHP-specific PaaS called PHPFog, has broadened and adjusted strategy in the past year, adding support for Java, .NET, and Node and other popular languages and deciding to restructure its foundation atop standard Cloud Foundry technology. That means it can run across the major public clouds, now supporting the aforementioned Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft and HP offerings with more to come. “We will be adding them like mad — we’ll have an all SSD cloud soon,” Carlson said…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Arthur Cole.

Familiarity with the cloud is on the rise, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t significant challenges ahead.

For one thing, the fact that the cloud provides a dynamic new infrastructure capable of propelling user and data productivity into the, well, stratosphere, is only half the picture. The other half is the process of migrating data and applications into that new infrastructure. And in that regard, the cloud holds all of the headaches that accompany the standard migrations that IT has come to love so well.

The upside is that most of the major cloud providers have a vested interest in making it as easy as possible to deploy new services, and some of them are willing to let you even choose an alternate cloud provider…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Heather Clancy.

It stands to reason that Microsoft would be extremely interested in SMB opinions about cloud privacy, given its big push into the cloud with Office 365 and its associated services, like Lync Onine.

That security and privacy would and will be a large part of cloud purchasing decisions is also pretty much a given. Whenever I write about this topic, it gets considerably more attention than other things. (An example here: "7 ways SMBs can make cloud storage and backup safer.")

But did you know that privacy policy is a make-or-break selection criteria for 59 percent of small businesses?…