Amazon.com formally added three new capabilities to its cloud computing portfolio with the introduction of Direct Connect and the updates to the Virtual Private Cloud and Identity and Access Management services. These offerings are targeted at organizations looking to construct hybrid or private clouds on the Amazon Web Services platform…

In spite of the hype that a Cloud system or application will never fail, we are still seeing cases of cloud system failures. The recent ones being Lightining strikes in Dublin taking the Amazon, Microsoft Clouds down for a while. While this may cause some Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt on Cloud, the underlying fact remains that transforming an application to Cloud means not just setting a switch for the enterprises, but there needs to be lot more planning and the best practices that are proven in the traditional data center are still valid. The following are some of the best practices in prevent the Cloud outages. These are beyond the basic disaster recovery provisions given by the most cloud providers…

Motorola will supercharge Android, says Google. It is about 17,000 patents that will protect Android from frivolous lawsuits. However, we aren’t so sure, since Motorola has also the potential to turn Google into the first fully integrated empire for the cloud computing age…

Global IT solutions specialist Logicalis is the latest company to adopt a modular data center model, deploying its enterprise cloud computing platform in an i/o Any where module at the i/o Phoenix data center, the company said today. UK-based  Logicalis provides IT outsourcing solutions from HP, IBM, Microsoft and Cisco, and said it chose the modular approach for its deployment speed and ease of expansion…

Most of the experts agree: cloud computing will, in fact, transform the way appliances are developed, deployed and maintained.

While the hype rages around cloud computing, most cloud implementations go the way of the private cloud and avoid the public clouds for now.  Private clouds are exactly what they sound like.  Your own instance of SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS that exists in your own data center, all tucked away, protected and cozy.  You own the hardware, you can hug your server…

Having open-sourced Node.js and seen the positive reception to Facebook’s Open Compute platform, Joyent is continuing in the open source tradition and releasing the source code of SmartOS, the operating system behind its cloud computing offerings.

Joyent developed SmartOS as a new complete cloud software stack. Today, it has ported KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) to its SmartOS operating system and open sourced the code, making it freely available via download and launching a community that will continue the collaboration on the project…

The Internet has removed the middleman in many ways. It’s a natural tool for disintermediation, allowing passengers to book their own plane tickets, readers to create their own clipping services or candidates to find their own job openings. But just as public cloud computing has brought the power of the Internet to large businesses, it has also created the need for a new type of middleman – what Gartner has called a cloud services brokerage…

The democratisation or consumerisation of IT

Some IT industry commentators and analysts have been drawing analogies between cloud computing and technologies such as electric power for a number of years.

Nicholas Carr predicted the consumerisation of IT and the emergence of utility style computing services as early as 2004…

MWEB’s introduction of truly uncapped ADSL has led to tumbling connectivity costs and bandwidth constraints rapidly becoming a distant memory. The playing field has been levelled and South African businesses of all sizes are now free to explore the many benefits cloud computing has to offer.

So says Andre Joubert, GM of MWEB Business, who points out that in regions like North American and Europe, where abundant bandwidth has been a way of life for many years, cloud computing is rapidly becoming mainstream…