July 20, 2015 Off

In Cloud Computing, It Pays To Commit

By David

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Paul Miller.

451 Research recently released the latest update to their Cloud Price Index. The basic cost of renting from one of the big public cloud providers* has fallen just over 2% since the Index began in October 2014. For those who are willing to commit to buying cloud-based resources for months or years at a time, prices fall dramatically: 451 Research reports a 44% saving over the on-demand price, in the best case.

At a time when commentators have cited recently announced increases to Microsoft’s pricing in some regions, 451 Research’s numbers indicate that — overall — the downward trend in cloud pricing continues. A 2% fall in 10 months is hardly a ‘race to the bottom,’ but the direction appears inexorably downward. This is not a surprise…

July 19, 2015 Off

Public, Private, Hybrid? Which Cloud is Right for your Agency?

By David

 Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Caron Beesley.

Should your agency move data or applications to the private or public cloud or a hybrid combination of the two? But those aren’t the only options. Other choices include a community cloud, a multi-tenant infrastructure that is shared among several organizations from a specific group with common computing concerns.  Then there’s the hybrid cloud which composes two or more of the above (private, public or community)
 
In our eBook, we suggest that choosing public over private (or any combination thereof) really comes down to risk management and is very dependent on your specific workload, your use case, and your security profile.  DISA’s CIO, David Bennett agrees. “You have to understand the risk and the data you’re dealing with,” said Bennett at a recent Nextgov event…
July 19, 2015 Off

US Air Force Takes To The Cloud With Office 365

By David

Grazed from TechAeris.  Author: John Vincent.

The United States Air Force. Cloud computing. The pun-filled headlines virtually write themselves. However we’ll try to refrain from being too punny.  Last week, the Air Force, in partnership with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), announced that it awarded more than 100,000 seats of a Department of Defense dedicated version of Microsoft Office 365 to Microsoft, Dell and General Dynamics.
 
As part of the deployment, which will begin in the next government fiscal year, the Air Force will have access to secure e-mail, calendaring, Office Web Applications, Skype for Business, and other important collaboration tools, helping the agency communicate more easily across active, civilian, and reserve personnel and move toward a consolidated mobile and messaging platform. Just as important, the Air Force anticipates that the migration will help it realign critical resources to better support its mission in a trusted cloud environment…
July 19, 2015 Off

Cloud Computing: 5 Reasons Why Docker Is A Billion Dollar Company

By David

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Mike Kavis.

I have seen a lot of billion dollar valuations lately that have left me scratching my head. Many of those are in the B2C or social media space where companies are measured more on “eyeballs” (the number of active users) and less on things like revenue or business models.  So after Docker cracked the billion dollar club with a $95M round I decided to research exactly what it is about containers that could drive this type of valuation.
 

I have been covering Docker since the company, then called dotCloud, was toying around with the idea of pulling the Docker technology out of their core product and releasing it as an open source project. I saw the value of containers very early on. What I did not see coming was the vision that CTO Solomon Hykes laid out before our eyes at Docker Con in San Francisco last month…

July 19, 2015 Off

Are cloud price hikes a harbinger of the future?

By David

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Bernard Golden.

Last week, blogger Aidan Finn posted an excerpt from a Microsoft email announcing 13 percent price hikes in the European region. Reaction from the trade press was immediate, predicting that this action presaged ongoing price hikes.
 
Barb Darrow of Fortune, in her piece titled “Surprise! The cost of cloud is about to rise” said “Companies spoiled by round after round of price cuts on cloud computing services over the past year or so had better gird themselves for change.” David Linthicum, SVP at Cloud Technology Partners, in his blog titled “The era of ever-cheaper cloud services is over” went on to say:..
July 19, 2015 Off

Google Joins OpenStack Foundation To Create Better Cloud Computing Solution

By David

 Grazed from Yibada.  Author: Yen Palec.

Tech giant Google recently announced that it is joining the OpenStack Foundation in its plan to upgrade its own cloud computing platform.  OpenStack Foundation is the governing body that supervises the use of OpenStack, a free cloud-based program that counts some of the biggest names in technology as its member including Intel, HP and IBM.
 
Google’s decision to join OpenStack will save the company millions of dollars since it does not need to invest into its own data centers now that it is part of one of the biggest cloud computing server in the world.  According to Fortune, Google is joining OpenStack as a corporate sponsor and not the conventional mid-tier Gold or top-tier Platinum level…
July 19, 2015 Off

Cloud Computing Is Popular, But Not Ready For Prime Time, Survey Finds

By David

Grazed from Forbes.   Author: Joe McKendrick.

I’ve never liked the term “As a Service,” not only because it sounds awkward when associated with various offerings (Software as a Service, Database as a Service, Business Processes as s Service, and so on), but also because it attempts to pigeonhole discrete functions that often overlap or are fuzzily defined.
 
Monikers aside, it appears most organizations have only been plodding along on the road to the “As-a-Service” wonderland anyway. Sure, there are some highly visible business success stories in the market — Amazon Web Services for servers and storage, Salesforce for customer relationship management, NetSuite for enterprise resource planning, Google for email and collaboration, Microsoft 365 for office productivity applications, and so forth…
July 19, 2015 Off

How to avoid security issues in cloud computing

By David

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Steve Weissman.

A recent piece I wrote on the outsourcing considerations for software as a service (SaaS) and cloud services has sparked some interesting conversation, especially in the realm of security issues in cloud computing. Yet, most of this discussion hasn’t touched what I see to be one of the biggest areas of possible vulnerability: avoidable gaps that open as departmental initiatives weaken the enterprise imperative.

Sure, access control, encryption and policy ramifications and the like are all critical — but what happens when business units are given (or assume) the right and ability to do their own thing? Nothing good, I can tell you…

July 17, 2015 Off

Delivering Network Services via the Cloud

By David

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Mike Vizard.

One of the unfortunate tendencies when it comes to the cloud is trying to replicate the way everything that was done on premise within a public cloud computing environment. Rather than looking to consolidate layers of computing that over the years have emerged inside the data center, IT organizations often just wind up shifting the mess.

For that reason solution providers should be looking for new ways to deliver IT services via the cloud that actually transform how they are delivered. Case in point is Appcito, which this week announced that it is making its application delivery controller (ADC) available on the Microsoft Azure cloud…

July 17, 2015 Off

Analysing cloud as the target for disaster recovery

By David

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: David Auslander.

If we think about the basic functionality that we take advantage of in the cloud, a whole set of possibilities open up for how we plan for disaster recovery (DR).  Until recently, disaster recovery was an expensive, process intensive service, reserved for only the most critical of corporate services. In most cases DR has been about large servers in two geographically distributed location and large data sets being replicated on a timed basis.

Many smaller or less critical services were relegated to a backup and restore DR solution although in many cases as these applications “grew up”, organisations realised that they too needed better protection. Unfortunately, the cost of standing up a legacy style DR environment remained prohibitive for all but the largest and most critical services…