Grazed from CRN.  Author: Rauline Ochs.

IPED recently completed a 2012 study assessing customer and partner opinion regarding the need for cloud brokers to consolidate services for the customer when cloud services deliver customer IT capabilities. Gartner positions and defines the cloud broker as follows: A successful cloud-computing strategy often involves customizing services from one or more vendors. One way to do this is through an intermediary service provider, a Cloud Services Brokerage.

Forty-two percent of customer respondents indicated a cloud broker is critical or important to their cloud services plans today. Another 13 percent believe a cloud broker is critical when the customer’s IT delivery model includes three to five or more cloud services. A customer cited cloud brokerage services as moderately important today but increasing in importance as they increased their usage of private cloud and introduced more public cloud services into their systems mix…

Grazed from MSN Money.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon (AMZN +0.74%) is the world’s largest online retailer and also runs the largest cloud-computing platform, called Amazon Web Services.

The platform has gained an amazing amount of traction in the last couple of years, but it still gets the cold shoulder from large companies. Those corporations understandably prefer to lock up data on their own servers where they can secure it…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: James Carlini.

Many organizations are starting to look at cloud computing as a universal solution, but there are many applications that cannot be considered unless the framework of cloud computing includes Timing as a Service (TaaS)© as part of its fabric. Mission-critical applications require security measures including encryption, monitoring, and redundancy/resiliency, but that is not enough.

If cloud computing is going to spread to more mission critical-type applications, it needs to get more exact and accurate when it comes to transaction-based applications. Trying to keep everything in a structured framework is going to require a more rigorous network infrastructure that includes timing down to milliseconds, if not nanoseconds.

Financial transactions that can already be generated by "robotic traders" are being sent across networks at a very rapid rate. When you have thousands upon thousands of transactions being generated in a few seconds, you need to be able to sort them out if something happens and you want to replicate (or re-construct) the event…

Grazed from Business Insider.  Author: Firas Raouf.

I cringe a little bit when I hear people describe cloud-based technology and services as revolutionary.

What’s really revolutionary about it? As Jerome Lecat wrote in this VentureBeat article last November, cloud computing services first came about almost 50 years ago, and continued to evolve in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s with ASP and SaaS models. The modern cloud, quite simply, is just another metamorphosis of those concepts.

So, really, if the cloud is anything today, it’s evolutionary  —not revolutionary. More specifically, it’s created a major change in the way consumers view technology and service, and how companies deliver those things…

Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Kevin Kelleher.

How great is it that high-definition video is now portable? Thanks to cloud computing, superfast 4G networks and tablets with high-resolution screens, we can watch thousands of movies and TV shows in lush, beautiful clarity wherever we go.

In a way, that is pretty great, as the millions of people who have bought the new iPad with retina display and LTE connections have already seen. But in another way, it’s going to quickly become not so great: As hi-def video – or rather, the data bandwidth to deliver it – becomes a commodity for more people, that commodity will start to become much more expensive. Not just for consumers, but for the companies that will increasingly need more wireless spectrum and wired infrastructure to handle the surge in data demand…

Grazed from PC World.  Author: Brandon Butler.

States are having a hard time keeping up with the cloud, especially when it comes to taxing it.  There have been a bevy of rulings by various states in the past few years related to how cloud services are taxed, but a recent ruling in Utah could be one of the furthest reaching decisions on the topic to date. And experts say it could begin a wave of more states looking to expand their policies of how taxes are collected on the fast-growing adoption of cloud services.

States are increasingly looking to tax the cloud for a simple reason: The rise in e-commerce and cloud computing services have eroded their traditional forms of tax collections they have relied on in the past, says Joel Waterfield, a senior manager at consultancy and accounting firm Grant Thornton. It’s amounted to what Waterfield calls a game of catch up by the states now. "When they’re losing multiple millions of dollars in transactions, they feel they need to recoup some of that tax revenue," he says…

Grazed from CRN.  Author: Rick Whiting.

Small and midsize businesses will be among the most eager adopters of cloud computing services over the next three years, and many of them will rely on local service providers to get those cloud services.

That’s according to a survey of more than 3,000 SMBs in 13 countries commissioned by Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) and conducted by Edge Strategies in December.

"Cloud computing is a game-changer because it gives SMBs access to enterprise-class IT infrastructure," said Gabriele Di Piazza, senior marketing director for Microsoft’s operator channels group, in an interview. That group manages Microsoft’s relationships with hosting companies, telecom operators and other IT service providers…

Grazed from MSPNews.  Author: Gary Kim.

Cloud computing was the fastest-growing category of infrastructure spending in 2011, with a 28.4 percent increase, according to the Telecommunications Industry Association. The TIA also expects cloud computing will continue to be the fastest-growing category of network and facilities investment during the next four years, averaging 20.3 percent compounded annually.

As new cloud-based end-user services emerge and as existing services expand, end user spending will more than double to $12.1 billion in 2015 from $5.8 billion in 2011, according to the TIA.   But some reasonable caution always is in order when looking at cloud computing revenue. For starters, there are multiple types of revenue, not all likely to be earned directly by service providers…

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Lauren Brousell.

Six out of 10 U.S. companies already have at least one application in the cloud, and 71% expect to increase spending on cloud services in the next 12 months, according to a recent IDG Enterprise survey of 554 IT professionals, including 357 heads of IT.

Most respondents (64%) agreed with the statement that cloud computing will mean higher costs in the short term, but will save money in the long term.

Barr Snyderwine, CIO of Hargrove, an events management company, says using the public cloud is his way of keeping costs down. The company is using an online collaboration tool for document sharing because "it’s so cheap I can’t say no," he says. "We are probably saving money in the long run on the [business] continuity side."…

Grazed from The Guardian.  Author: Charles Author.