Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Ed Zwim.

That there is growing company demand for cloud or software-as-a-service solutions should come as no surprise.

Finance and IT professionals, facing the need for greater computing power for everything from operational management to hedge accounting are understandably tempted by SaaS, given the cloud’s relatively low startup costs and the fact they may lack the skills needed to build their own analytic solutions.

And the corporate migration to the cloud is in fact proceeding apace, with nearly one-third of organizations polled in a Gartner research study responding that they either already use or plan to use cloud SaaS offerings to augment their core business intelligence functions…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Rick Blaisdell.

While technology seems to be the cost and time efficiency driver in many industries, cloud computing is the emerging solution for the financial service industry, especially capital markets. In order for their assets to be used optimally by multiple consumers, financial organizations require ad-hoc access to significant computing resources, virtual desktops, shared data information, cost transparency, and “What-If” capabilities.

I will list some of the most important cloud changing perspectives that can benefit large corporations and SMB’s:

    * Resource Management – enables organizations to build agile, responsive data center infrastructures;
    * Pay per Use – organizations pay only for the computing resources they are using and not more;…

Grazed from Federal Computer Week.  Author: Camille Tuutti.

Despite mandates that direct federal agencies to transition to cloud-based services, federal IT managers express reluctance in making the migration due to security concerns, a survey reveals.

The 2011 State of Cloud Services in the U.S. Federal Government poll from Ponemon Institute shows that more than one-third of the managers surveyed cited safety concerns as one of the reasons for not using cloud services. An even bigger number of respondents (42 percent) said lack of suitable applications or services prevent them from using a cloud approach.

But security emerged as the primary fear. Nearly half the respondents said they were “not confident” about the overall data protection and security features of their current or prospective cloud service providers. Twenty-six percent chose “confident,” while only 17 percent stated they were “very confident.”…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

The news hit this week: "As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion objects in Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times," blogged Amazon.com This represents an annual growth rate of 192 percent.

Pretty good for a cloud company still growing a retail business. The growth can be attributed to Amazon Web Services’ focus on building a successful cloud storage offering and the rapid adoption of AWS — including the S3 cloud storage service — as the cloud computing standard…

Grazed from Computer Business Review.  Author: Editorial Staff.

They will collaborate across other areas of the BMC Business Service Management platform

Business service management firm BMC Software and Virtual Computing Environment (VCE), a company formed by Cisco and EMC, have partnered to address the demand for converged infrastructures in cloud computing projects.  Under the partnership, BMC and VCE will enhance the interoperability and integration of their products and collaborate to promote and offer their offerings in the market.

The VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platform is integrated with BMC’s business-centric cloud management offerings to help joint customers for BMC and VCE automate their management of comprehensive cloud infrastructures…

Grazed from Business Insider.  Author: Mark Fidelman.

Can someone tell Capitol Records that the music has stopped?

If you haven’t been following events, Capitol Records (EMI) has sued Boston-based Redigi (a used digital music marketplace) for what amounts to copyright infringement. 

Today, Google decided to enter the fray as a third party, and filed an amicus curiae brief (friend of the court) to ask the court to allow their participation in some key disputes.  In Google’s estimation, Capitol Records is attempting to blur the established fair use, copyright legal lines…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Alex Barrett.

While the average enterprise IT shop remains firmly grounded in its virtualized data centers, cloud computing is the next phase of evolution. The problem is, companies don’t quite know how to get there with the tools that they have.

A number of new cloud management software offerings from vendors large and small promise to move virtual infrastructure to the vaunted private cloud and serve as a bridge to public clouds…

Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: Nancy Gohring.

Despite Microsoft’s stated commitment to Hyper-V in OpenStack, buggy code designed to support the hypervisor will be removed from the next version of the stack, developers decided on Wednesday.

An OpenStack developer wrote a patch that removes the Hyper-V support code, and two members of the core OpenStack team have approved the patch. That means the code will be removed when the next version of OpenStack, called Essex, is released in the second quarter. The code would have allowed a service provider to build an OpenStack cloud using Hyper-V…

Grazed from ITWire.  Author: Stuart Corner.

Cisco has announced the addition of 100GBE and 40GBE ethernet capabilities to its Nexus Switches and 40GE to its Catalyst switches in anticipation of surging data centre workloads driven by cloud computing.

Cisco’s first Global Cloud Index, released in November 2011 predicted that more than 50 percent of computing workloads in data centres will be cloud-based by 2014 and global cloud traffic will grow more than 12 times by 2015, to 1.6 zettabytes per year.

According to Cisco, "Data intensive applications such as cloud, ‘big data,’ video, virtual desktop solutions and virtualisation are accelerating the adoption of 10GE at the server level and network access/aggregation layers, introducing bandwidth bottlenecks in the core interconnects connecting the data centre to the campus to the service provider."…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Mark Brunelli.

A newly adopted and highly aggressive cloud computing strategy has led AAA Northern California, Nevada and Utah (AAA NCNU) to choose Dell Boomi cloud integration tools over IBM Cast Iron and Jitterbit, an IT official with the organization said.

The popular auto club, a $600 million company that provides roadside assistance, sales and membership services to about 4 million customers in the Western United States, said the decision to go with Dell resulted largely from financial considerations and a matter of multi-tenancy.

AAA NCNU wanted a “truly multi-tenant” cloud-based integration tool—a single version of the application that serves multiple clients—but IBM Cast Iron and Jitterbit didn’t fit the bill, according to Kirk Heughens, the auto club’s application integration leader…