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?…

Grazed from Xconomy.  Author:  Curt Woodward.

What do you do with stuff that’s just too nerdy to discuss on Facebook? For some technical professionals, the answer still lies in sites that are very Web 1.0—long lists of links, few sharing functions, very basic design.

Doug Brown knows this well. Since 1999 he’s been running the site DABCC, which focuses on a niche audience of professionals interested in nitty-gritty developments in cloud computing and virtualization. Brown, a jack of several trades who previously worked at Citrix, has run DABCC as a business since 2004. It’s grown in popularity, now registering about 5 million unique visitors a year. But something was still lacking…

This is the continuation of my series of articles on Industry SaaS. This term ‘Industry SaaS’ can be used interchangeably with BpaaS (Business Process as a Service). However, the term ‘Industry SaaS’ means Software as a Service which focuses on a specific industry, and the term BpaaS has yet to mature with a clear definition.

Labor Contract Negotiations Management & Tracking

• Most large enterprises need to negotiate benefits to its employees with the labor contract unions
• These negotiations happen between the management and the respective labor unions…
  

Grazed from InformationWeek Government.  Author: Elizabeth Montalbano.

The U.S. Department of Treasury is leveraging cloud computing to make it easier for the department to handle Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, as well as for people to submit them.

The move is one of a host of efforts to expedite FOIA requests as agencies in the Obama administration try to make government information more accessible.

A new system at Treasury called goFOIA has three key features to improve the process of requesting and obtaining FOIA documents, according to a post on the CIO.gov blog by Treasury CIO Robyn East…

Grazed from CloudPro.  Author:  Brian Betts.