June 13, 2012 Off

Salesforce: concept of private cloud is fundamentally flawed

By David
Grazed from TechWorld.  Author: Sophie Curtis.

Saleforce.com’s chief scientist has slammed the concept of private cloud, claiming that the whole point of cloud computing is that resources, costs and risk are shared between multiple parties.

Speaking at the Cloud Computing World forum in London today, JP Rangaswami said that cloud provides the scalability and flexibility that organisations need to survive in the modern age. However, organisations that choose to adopt private rather than public cloud will miss out on the benefits.

“Whenever anyone uses that phrase to you, just ask them who are you sharing costs with. If all the costs you’re sharing are just with you, you’re just kidding yourself, it ain’t a cloud” said Rangaswami…

June 13, 2012 Off

Trust lawyers, not techies, when it comes to the cloud – Minefield of privacy and data laws – so tread carefully

By David
Grazed from The Register.  Author: Joe Fay.

CIOs thinking of shifting to the cloud or kicking off a flagship big data project would be better off talking to their lawyers than their techies before starting to leaf through glossy corporate presentations.

Mark Webber, partner and head of technology at law firm Osborne Clarke, speaking at the Cloud Computing World Forum today, said that while the cloud and big data are the buzzwords du jour, CIOs’ plans are still governed by UK and EU data law passed in the mid-1990s. Personal data will be covered by whatever "promises" were made at the time it was collected.

"Sometimes the simplification of technology can complicate the legal analysis and cause more legal problems than with a traditional solution," he said…

June 13, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Amazon taps MapR for high-powered Elastic MapReduce

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Amazon Web Services already has a winner with its Elastic MapReduce Hadoop service, and now it’s turning up the heat by adding MapR’s Hadoop distribution as an option. Just over a year after launching, MapR has made a name for itself in the Hadoop space by offering proprietary storage that it says can outperform Apache’s Hadoop Distributed File System by up to 20 times. A lot of cloud computing users running or considering running Hadoop workloads on Amazon’s platform might soon be a lot happier.

To be clear, this isn’t Amazon just supporting MapR on Elastic MapReduce, but actually offering MapR as a managed service. Instances running MapR’s M3 edition will be available at no additional cost (like the standard Amazon instance) while instances running MapR’s “enterprise-grade” M5 edition will come with what MapR VP of Marketing Jack Norris described to me as a “nominal” hourly cost…

June 13, 2012 Off

RightScale Survey Reveals Hybrid Cloud Driving Multi-Cloud Strategy

By David

 

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Companies of all sizes view cloud computing as a strategic business opportunity. With the increase in the number of cloud infrastructure providers, businesses are now able to choose from a variety of options to align their cloud strategy with their specific business needs. RightScale(R) Inc., the leader in cloud management, today announced results of a new market study of over 600 companies to uncover how businesses are approaching cloud computing and what priorities they set for implementing their cloud strategies.

"Cloud infrastructure now dominates as the architecture for ‘the new IT’ — and companies big and small enjoy an unprecedented variety of options for deploying the best cloud solution to meet their business needs," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. "No one-size-fits-all approach will work for everyone, which is why it’s important to choose a platform that will allow you freedom of choice now and into the future as you decide where and how to leverage infrastructure-as-a-service cloud providers."…

June 13, 2012 Off

CloudLock aims to bring PCI compliance to Google Drive

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

CloudLock, the Waltham, Mass.-based startup specializing in cloud security, says it’s bringing PCI compliance to Google Drive storage with a service that scans data as it flows into and out of the data repository.

The growing popularity of cloud-based storage services such as Google Drive worries IT professionals. Their concern is not only about the security of the storage repository itself but about the sort of information employees put in it. Obviously, credit card numbers and personally identifiable information (PII) top the list of the types of sensitive data they don’t want flowing into and out of the public cloud. PCI is the standard for handling credit card transactions securely.

CloudLock CEO Gil Zimmermann says the company’s new scan, available as a service, uses its own pattern recognition engine to help put these fears to rest…

June 13, 2012 Off

Tiggzi: Making Mobile App Building Easy

By David

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Bryan Cain-Jackson.

You know what they say about cloud-based applications – the sky is the limit.

A fairly new application is on the scene and promises to raise the bar on the uses of a technology called REST APIs.

Tiggzi is a cloud-based builder for HTML5 that allows the everyday Joe Citizen to build a mobile app with ease. Currently, the mobile app development is restricted to iOS and Android mobile applications. It will soon include Windows based phones and on the Blackberry. The created app would then be able to be accessed by all of Tiggzi’s supported mobile platforms, including the option to create a webpage that is mobile browser friendly…

June 13, 2012 Off

Microsoft’s Strategy In The Private-Cloud Computing World

By David
Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Harris Smith.

The private-cloud computing world has been bombarded with a barrage of service providers. In the thick of this barrage, Microsoft has emerged with innovative and accessible ideas. To start off, Microsoft’s private-cloud platform includes the general purpose windows server and the system center, which is optimized for top management.

The thing which makes Microsoft different from other private-cloud service providers is that they have come up with a fourfold strategy that easily surpasses any other competitor in the market. The first fundamental of their strategy revolves around the notion that all the infrastructure that a company deploys will be impactful only if the business is productively able to run applications on top of it. Bound to simplify the entire application life cycle, Microsoft gives visibility to the internals of the application and simultaneously gives rich diagnostics to the operator…

June 13, 2012 Off

Top Financial Risks of Doing Business in the Cloud

By David
Grazed from SmartData Collective.  Author: Paul Barsch.

Cloud computing definitely has upside as adopters can speed delivery of analytics, gain flexibility in deployments and costs, and transfer IT headaches to another company. However, with all the advantages of cloud, it’s important to keep in mind there are financial risks to cloud computing including potential costs from lawsuits and reputational damage from cloud provider security/privacy data breaches, and possible revenue losses from cloud provider downtime/outages.

For any type of business decision, there are various risks that should be considered– strategic, operational, financial, compliance and reputational (brand).  These risks should also be criteria for any decision to move workloads to cloud computing. However, for sake of discussion, let’s focus on financial risk…

June 13, 2012 Off

Amazon pitches MySQL in the cloud for $19 a month

By David

 

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Amazon Web Services has introduced a micro version of its cloud-based database service RDS running MySQL and priced from $19 a month, the company said on Monday.

Just like Amazon’s other cloud services, RDS (Relational Database Service) takes care of set-up, operations and scaling. For example, the service automatically patches the database software and backs up data.

Code, applications, and tools that IT staff already use with their existing on-premise databases can also be used with RDS, according to Amazon…

June 13, 2012 Off

Open Cloud Consortium Offers Clouds for Science

By David
Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) has been providing cloud infrastructure for researchers with big data needs since 2009. The OCC is pleased to announce that it is introducing a new resource: its OCC-Y Cluster. The OCC-Y Cluster is a 4 rack 928 core cluster running Apache Hadoop with 1 PB of storage available.

The OCC-Y Cluster was donated by Yahoo!

The OCC manages and operates the Open Science Data Cloud, which is a multi-petabyte distributed cloud-based infrastructure for managing, analyzing, integrating and sharing scientific data. The OCC also operates and manages Project Matsu, which is a cloud-based environment for analyzing data from NASA’s EO-1 satellite…