Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author:  Ian Truscott.

While there are many benefits to cloud computing, one group particularly well served by this technology are marketers. When it comes to engaging with audiences over the web, there are a number of attributes of cloud-based services that make them a natural fit for the technical marketers’ arsenal.

Marketing campaigns are very often short term, seasonal or opportunist. The ability to create something quickly and easily and then tear it down is key. Deploying to the cloud can provide an easy route versus attempting to grow a fixed IT asset…

Grazed from Formtek.  Author: Dick Weisinger.

The first waves of cloud computing have hit the shore and the impact has rattled many in IT.  Vendor strategies and business plans are hastily being rewritten as a result of the change.  But the implications of cloud computing appear far more reaching than just mid-course adjustments of corporate plans.   IT workers are expected to be strongly impacted by the cloud.

James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said that initially cloud computing could create new jobs.  The move to cloud applications may mean that there will be work in migrating data or integrating together new systems…

Grazed from The Carrier Cloud.  Author:  Neil Mcevoy.

Alcatel-Lucent has announced their Cloud strategy, targetting telcos to help them integrate their core WAN (Wide Area Network) services with data-centre Clouds and offer this combination as the essential mix needed for the enterprise market.

Their ‘CloudBand‘ product set is intended as a holistic platform that encompasses the network layer as well as the computing one.

As described in the accompanying white paper ‘The Carrier Cloud‘ Alcatel intend this platform to bring the faster-time-to-market benefits of virtualization to the full suite of network, CPE and application hardware that spans across their customers as well as their own IT estates, fundamentally enabling business model innovation…

Grazed from VirtualStrategy Magazine.  Author: Don MacVittie.

Cloud computing has opened new avenues for application deployment that allow a savvy IT manager with experienced staff to place applications in the location that makes the most sense for the application. Architects can choose between a primary data center deployment, or cloud deployment to suit the needs of the application in question.

But there is still a lot about cloud that is… cloudy, and this causes some issues when deploying applications wholly or partially to a cloud environment. If the cloud in question is a public cloud, there are a variety of issues to consider, from firewalling the applications to secure connections back to the datacenter. Most of these are eliminated if your cloud is private, simply because it can sit behind your firewall and will have a secure connection – secured on both ends…

Cloudorado is a free online service that helps organizations to compare cloud providers and select the most suitable one for individual needs. Currently a beta version compares costs of IaaS providers by price calculation of individually set server requirements. "But price is just our first step. We want to become a center of information needed when choosing a cloud provider, making the selection process quick and easy" says Marcin Okraszewski, founder of the service. Moreover the service is planned to extend to Platform as a Service (PaaS) as well…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Julius Neudorfer.

I hear the sound of tectonic plates shifting in the computing world. In the last few weeks, we have seen some interesting alliances being formed. Imagine vendor-based groups forming alliances with customer-based organizations. Can you picture mavericks from social media collaborating with the belt-and-suspenders big-business crowd? What’s next — cloud computing everywhere, yet the actual computing hardware never to be seen again by mere mortals? All hardware to be hidden away in far away hyperscale data centers, whose operators will also become carbon credit arbitrage traders?

As we move from “traditional” computing (a shifting term in itself) to virtualized and cloud computing, the old rules and norms seem to be dissolving rapidly. ..

Grazed from Internet.com.  Author:  Stuart J. Johnston.

Use of online services to let customers build applications without investing in all the hardware and software necessary to build it in their own data centers is clearly on the rise — proof that saving money can be a strong motivator.

However, while more visible categories of services get the limelight today, that may be changing.

So-called platform-as-a-service (PaaS) revenues are likely to reach $707.4 million this calendar year, a big jump from $512.4 million last year, according to a leading researcher’s latest report…

Grazed from Computer Technology Review.  Author:  Andrew L. Goldstein.

Many companies are familiar with ‘e-discovery’ and have data retention, storage and destruction policies in place that apply in the event of litigation. If a cloud customer is sued, or there is the threat of litigation, the customer may have to initiate a ‘litigation hold’ to preserve documents, including electronic documents and any metadata in the documents. This could present a challenge in the cloud if the customer’s data is commingled with that of other clients or if the customer’s data is stored on parallel servers. Cloud customers should determine the vendor’s ability to prevent the destruction, alteration or mutilation of customer data in the vendor’s possession, as well as the vendor’s search capabilities for the data. Cloud customers should also make sure that their corporate policies and procedures account for any data in the cloud. Do the data retention and destruction policies of the cloud vendor align with those of the customer?…