Grazed from Amber Corrin.

In line with broader Defense Department initiatives, the Army expects to soon release a new commercial cloud services provider policy that will outline service-specific acquisition requirements and provide further details about the Army’s growing use of the commercial cloud.

"Transitioning to cloud-based solutions and services advances the Army’s long-term objective to reduce our ownership, operation and sustainment of hardware and other commoditized information technology," Gary Wang, Army deputy CIO/G-6, wrote in an April 2 blog post. "Procuring these capabilities as services will allow the Army to focus resources more effectively to meet evolving mission needs."…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Barclay Ballard.

You could be forgiven for thinking that there’s nothing more to say on the subject of cloud computing. After all, the technology has been available and widely adopted for some years now, with businesses of varying sizes moving their data and infrastructure to the cloud. In fact, the recently published State of the Cloud report by RightScale found that 93 per cent of organisations are using the cloud in some capacity.

However, whether it’s a move towards a hybrid cloud approach or analysing why some businesses have not yet made the transition, there are still plenty of reasons to get excited about the cloud…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Charlie Cooper.

The trend lines are clear: Laptops began replacing desktops, and then tablets began replacing laptops. And at this rate, smartphones one day might replace them all. It’s hardly hyperbole: IDC expects mobile workers to number slightly more than 37 percent of the global workforce by the end of this year. Putting it another way, we’re talking about some 1.3 billion mobile workers.

That tectonic shift also underscores the changing landscape that CIOs are navigating, one in which increasingly mobile employees expect reliable and seamless access to their corporate networks, no matter what device they carry with them. This has major implications for the future of the cloud…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

HP has had an incredibly tortured history in the cloud. One of the backers of the OpenStack open source cloud platform, HP has re-branded and relaunched its own cloud offering several times. The product, now called Helion, is widely regarded as being little more than shelfware – actual customer usage is low to non-existent.

Last year HP made a big bet by acquiring another open source vendor, Eucalyptus. This was a strange sort of a deal considering that Eucalyptus sold itself as being AWS-compatible. AWS is, after all, OpenStack’s natural nemesis. At the time the saving grace in the deal was that HP got the services of Eucalyptus’ former CEO Marten Mickos…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

Looking to provide solution providers with a way to defray the costs associated with managing hybrid cloud computing environments, Egenera today unfurled a white-label cloud orchestration service for the channel. Based on management software that Egenera originally created to manage converged infrastructure, Egenera CEO Pete Manca said the Xterity cloud orchestration service is designed to enable solution providers across the channel to become provider of cloud management service without having to incur any capital costs.

While Egenera plans to continue to sell software for managing converged infrastructure on premise, Manca said that work that was initially done by one of the company’s partners in Ireland demonstrated how the company’s software could be applied to managing hybrid cloud computing environments…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization which promotes the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, today announced it will hold its third Hackathon at the RSA Conference 2015 in San Francisco, to continue to test the CSA Software Defined Perimeter Specification V.1. A top prize of $10,000 is available to the first participant to gain access to a password provided account.

The CSA’s Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) research project represents a breakthrough approach to security, and is a collaboration among more than 100 companies and U.S. government organizations. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Verizon Communications Inc., Mazda Motor Corp. and other members of the CSA are contributing to a new standard for perimeter security…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

Sao Paulo, Brazil has had trouble with both energy and water supplies as of late. Despite it is the rainy period. Unfortunately Sao Paulo is very dependent on its rain as a majority of its power is generated from large dams. No water, no energy. Difficult situation for a city of some 20 million people.

A friend living in Sao Paulo called and said – today we all had to leave work. Why I asked? There was not enough water in the building to flush toilets. About a hundred people did not go to work. Oh how we take some things for granted in every day “processes“. When they fail, we have instant trouble of a grand scale…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

While many companies would like to adopt cloud services, many still resist over concerns about data security. Here’s how managed service providers (MSPs) can overcome the two main objections to cloud computing and cloud-based file sharing in 2015. As a recent article from CloudWedge says, “The most cited barrier to entry for cloud into the enterprise continues to be the security concerns involved with an infrastructure overhaul.”

The problem with that lingering concern is that the enduring lack of education is hindering the market for MSPs. Yet, this knowledge also presents an opportunity. What these hesitant or resistant organizations really fear is the unknown. And, what they don’t know is what adopting the cloud will mean for their most valuable, most highly-protected data…

Read more from the source @ http://mspmentor.net/infocenter-cloud-based-file-sharing/040715/two-biggest-cloud-security-concerns-2015

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Louis Columbus.

Investments in emerging enterprise software companies increased 53% from Q3 to Q4, 2014 according to MoneyTree Report, a collaborative research initiative between PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. A graphic from the latest available data shows how software investments were 39% of all investments in Q4, 2014.

To determine which enterprise software startups have gained the greatest amount of funding since they were founded, Mattermark was used to rank order all enterprise start-ups. Mattermark uses a combination of artificial intelligence and data quality analysis to provide insights into over 1M companies, over 470K with employee data, and over 100,000 funding events…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2015/apr/07/the-top-100-cloud-based-enterprise-software-startups-of-2015/