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

In a move up the proverbial stack, Amazon’s cloud now includes a Simple Workflow Service (SWF), or orchestration service, for building scalable, resilient, fault-tolerant, distributed applications that run both on-premise and/or in the cloud, blurring the distinction between them, a move that’s ultimately good for the cloud if it increases the enterprise’s comfort level with the cloud.

Amazon imagines it being used for media processing, web application back-ends, business process automation, data analytics batch processing and of course migration to the cloud…

Grazed from The New York Times.  Author: Quentin Hardy.

This was a milestone week for enterprise computing: The cloud won.

On Tuesday, Dell reported lower earnings, and said sales in the current quarter would fall 7 percent. On Wednesday, Hewlett-Packard, that other stalwart of enterprise hardware, also reported lower earnings, and also projected a lower outlook for both the quarter and the year.

Meg Whitman, H.P.’s chief executive, said a full transformation of H.P. might take as long as five years…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Darryl K. Taft.

In an aggressive move against its key competition, IBM announced new resources to help customers migrate from competing hardware platforms while also claiming Big Blue recorded nearly 2,400 competitive displacements in 2011 for its servers and storage systems.

IBM said nearly 40 percent of the 2,400 displacements came from HP and more than 25 percent came from Oracle/Sun. In addition, IBM said it gained 570 competitive displacements in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Meanwhile, IBM also announced new initiatives for its Migration Factory to continue helping clients quickly and securely migrate core applications and databases to a new IBM-based environment. New resources include workshops to facilitate the transition from competing servers to IBM systems, and migration to a cloud computing solution built on Power Systems. In addition, customers who want to migrate from HP or Oracle/Sun technologies to a Power Systems-based infrastructure are now eligible for new funding services for the migration process…

Grazed from Corporate Counsel.  Author: Brad Breckinridge.

Thousands of Americans export data overseas every day without U.S. government authorizations and don’t even know it. How? By using cloud-computing services, ranging from personal services like Gmail to large-scale enterprise data storage solutions. While cloud-based services have become a valuable tool for improving efficiency, outdated government regulation leaves cloud users exposed.

Here’s an example. Imagine you’re an engineer working for a small firm in Indiana that uses a cloud service for data storage. One day you realize the company’s aluminum valves, used only by U.S. customers, could be improved with a redesigned “butterfly” mechanism. You revise the design specifications on your desktop computer and click “save.” Your company’s cloud provider routes your document to its network’s least burdened location—which happens to be in India—for storage…

Grazed from Silicon Republic.  Author: Carmel Doyle.

The Minister for Jobs and Skills Ruairí Quinn TD is launching the Citrix Academy Network at IT Sligo this afternoon. The aim of the network is to equip students from computing programmes at IT Sligo with advanced technical skills so they can pursue IT careers in areas such as virtualisation or cloud computing.

IT Sligo is the first higher education institution in Ireland to join the network. The first 25 students have recently started the course at the institute, while an additional 55 students are expected to begin the accreditation process by the end of the year…

Grazed from CBSNews.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Computer maker Dell Inc. said Friday it bought AppAssure, a company that specializes in remote data storage and computing, as part of Dell’s strategy to press into the field of Internet-based systems known as cloud computing.

Dell did not disclose financial terms of the deal…

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

Teradata, once famous for massaging huge classical databases so Wal-Mart, say, could stock just so many navy blue whatevers, has teamed up with Hortonworks, the months-old Yahoo-spun off open source Apache Hadoop supporter, so they can push Hadoop-leveraging Big Data analytics together.

The old-line Big Data house already has an alliance with Cloudera, the first-to-market Hadoop commercializer, and if Teradata customers are absolutely positive they want Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution they can get it from Teradata…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Michael Vizard.

Grazed from InfoBoom.  Author: Douglas Bonderud.

User identity is the next big issue in cloud computing safety according to security firm Ping Identity, which recently announced their 2012 Cloud Security Summit in Vail, Colorado. New cloud technology is quickly making legacy security programs that rely on users connecting via hardwired devices increasingly obsolete, and new solutions are needed to not only protect virtual and cloud-stored data, but help redefine the role of business IT for the future…