Grazed from BSMInfo. Author: Rick Delgado.

As cloud computing has gained in popularity over the years, many within the IT industry have been understandably excited and wary about what it would mean for them. Using more technology certainly opens up new opportunities for IT workers, but their roles and positions would likely change as the cloud was adopted by organizations around the world. Essentially, cloud computing brought about change and with change comes uncertainty on what the future holds. Now that the cloud has become mainstream and a common tool used by numerous businesses, we can get a better view of its overall impact on the IT industry. So far, the results have been promising, with cloud computing expanding the industry and opening up new opportunities for IT departments.

Of course, one of the overriding fears regarding the rise of the cloud was the effect it would have on IT jobs. With more organizations using cloud services, the worry was that they would need fewer IT workers on-premises, leading to reductions in IT staff. Luckily, that worst case scenario hasn’t happened. If anything, cloud computing has re-emphasized the need for IT experts on premises…

Grazed from ChannelPartnersOnline. Author: Jesse Frye.

IDC says that approximately $56.6 billion was spent globally on public cloud in 2014. By 2018, that figure will exceed $127 billion, representing a compound annual growth rate of approximately 23 percent — six times the CAGR of the overall IT landscape. According to Silicon Angle, throughout the next five years, we’ll see a 44 percent annual growth in workloads for the public cloud versus an 8.9 percent growth for “on-premises" computing workloads.

The size of the public cloud market means you can’t ignore it. Yet as Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft jockey for customers, price drops are becoming commonplace, ultimately making it difficult for channel partners to benefit financially from reselling public cloud to their customers. Google’s latest cuts mean services can be had for as little as $0.01 per core hour…

Grazed from CIO-Today. Author: Jeff Cozza.

CRM Relevant Products/Services giant Salesforce was named the top CRM company in 2014 by total revenue, according to research and advisory company Gartner Relevant Products/Services Inc. Salesforce led the pack with more than $4.2 billion in sales last year, according to Gartner’s report on worldwide CRM market share, titled “Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2014.”

In addition to taking the top spot in total revenues for the third year in a row, Gartner also named Salesforce number one in both revenue and market share growth. Salesforce also gained the most market share in the worldwide marketing software Relevant Products/Services category based on 2014 total software spend…

Grazed from TheServerSide. Author: Cameron McKenzie.

If you’re attending an OpenStack conference for the first time and don’t want to come across as a neophyte — either when talking to speakers about cloud computing, or to vendors about distributed storage and the pitfalls of using open source hypervisors while cruising the exhibitors’ hall — here are a few cloud computing terms you should become familiar with to create the impression you’re as knowledgeable as anyone else who’s pretending to know what they’re talking about.

OpenStack — This is the open source, cloud computing software everyone is talking about. If you’ve ever wanted to create your own private cloud, but knew that creating a scalable, distributed and easily managed product was just too much work, then OpenStack is for you. It should be noted that OpenStack is the only software piece that makes managing all the compute pools, networked servers, storage systems and centralized administration possible. However, the hardware on which this private cloud software is deployed is not associated with OpenStack…

Grazed from AFR. Author: Stewart Oldfield.

Larry Ellison’s Oracle is trying to transition from a mature data management software vendor into the world’s biggest play on cloud computing, a sector which could triple its revenues over the next five years. Off a relatively small base, Oracle’s cloud computing revenues are growing at 30 per cent a year, while the traditional on-premises software licence business on which the company was built is going backwards.

Given Oracle has a market capitalisation of US$190 billion ($233 billion) and a forward price-to-earnings multiple of more than 15, the market appears to be backing Ellison’s vision of becoming the global leader in cloud computing. To his credit Ellison, 70, was one of the first to see the threat/opportunity posed by the internet and cloud computing to big enterprises’ IT demands…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Ikoula and UShareSoft today announced Ikoula’s new Hybrid Cloud Toolbox, powered by UShareSoft’s UForge AppCenter, cloud application templating and migration services. The Toolbox enables Ikoula customers to easily onboard and migrate applications to Ikoula’s Public Cloud as well as to other public or private clouds. Drawing on UForge’s native hybrid cloud functionality, Ikoula’s Toolbox offers customers a fast, flexible way to take advantage of public cloud benefits with full reversibility and governance. Unlike many other public clouds, Ikoula customers will benefit from:

• Application Factory: the easy-to-use application templating and VM builder enable customers to quickly onboard new cloud-native applications to Ikoula’s cloud, as well as reusing application templates from the global catalog.

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

Does anybody even make hardware any more? You’d be forgiven for asking the question, even if it does sound slightly ridiculous. But thinking about it… apart from the device you’re reading this on and the hardware in the server racks in the cloud datacenter serving this website, is anyone even making that much hardware?

The ‘trouble’ is, the whole world has gone software-defined and that means some of what we used to do with hardware, we now do with software. F5 Networks CTO Karl Triebes says that 90 percent of his firm’s innovation and development time is devoted to software, with the remaining 10 percent still focused on the hardware products that his firm is perhaps better known for…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Richard Davies.

Modern IT infrastructure needs to be highly flexible as the strain on servers, sites and databases grows and shrinks throughout the day. Cloud infrastructure is meant to make scaling simple by effectively outsourcing and commoditising your computing capacity so that, in theory, you can turn it on and off like a tap.

However, most approaches to provisioning cloud servers are still based around the idea that you have fixed-size server “instances”, offering you infrastructure in large blocks that must each be provisioned and then configured to work together. This means your infrastructure scaling is less like having a handy tap and more like working out how many bottles of water you’ll need…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Is cloud making a difference in Big Data efforts? Can it deliver the agility and scalability required to handle petabytes and exabytes’ worth of data coming out of enterprises and the Internet of Things? The answer to both questions is “yes, but,” according to highly engaging panel that was part of last week’s Data Summit, held in New York. I had the opportunity to moderate the panel, joined by David Mariani, CEO of AtScale, Wendy Gradek, senior manager with EMC, and Andy Schroepfer, chief strategy officer at Hosting.

Interestingly, the appeal of cloud is not about the cost at all — it’s about the change in the way enterprises view technology solutions. “People are fine with paying as you go,”said Mariani. “And they’ll probably pay more at the end of the day than they would if they paid up front.” Scalability is a huge factor in the appeal of cloud, said Gradek….

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Hamish Barwick.

Cloud computing has become ubiquitous for many companies but keeping it secure can be a challenge. Cloud Security Alliance Asia Pacific executive council chairman Ken Low shared the alliance’s top nine threats to the cloud at a Trend Micro event in Sydney.

9: Shared technology vulnerabilities

“In 2014, we have seen some of the most critical vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed which affected OpenSSL. That allowed people access to encrypted data,” said Low. There was also the discovery of the Shellshock vulnerability which affected the Bash shell. “Cloud service providers can scale their services by sharing infrastructure default to applications but the lack of strong isolation properties in monitored environments make them vulnerable,” said Low. He said that virtual patching can stop shared technology vulnerabilities…

Read more from the source @ http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/575299/top-9-cloud-computing-threats/