Grazed from EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet. Author: Joe Stanganelli.

This was the primary message at February’s Boston presentation of the invitation-only Oracle Cloud Roadshow, an eight-city tour of talks on Oracle Cloud developments particularly pertinent to software resellers, independent software vendors (ISVs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and other enterprises and SMEs. Speakers highlighted both the positive outcomes of increased cloud deployment and the new pain points that have arisen with the democratization of efficiency.

Jeff Kaplan, Managing Director of Massachusetts-based cloud computing consultancy THINKstrategies, delivered a keynote at the event with the running theme of a tale of two cloud cities, frequently referring to the present-day market climate as "the best of times and the worst of times."…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

One of the first casualties of the OpenStack world is Nebula, a company founded by a of the pioneer of the open source cloud computing movement. Nebula posted an announcement on its website yesterday announcing it is shutting down. Chris Kemp, the former CTO for IT at NASA where much of OpenStack’s code was initially developed, founded the company in 2011.

Analysts say the move is not indicative of larger problems within the OpenStack community, but rather reflects the difficulties startups will have in competing with large name-brand vendors who are able to commit the resources needed over a long period of time to this still maturing market…

Grazed from Mashable. Author: Stephanie Walden.

By now, you’ve heard about the cloud -– and you’ve also likely heard about the benefits of using cloud computing for your business or enterprise. But people outside the world of IT may not know that there are multiple types of cloud — and we’re not talking about cumulus versus cirrus. Have you heard of the "private cloud" or the "hybrid cloud"? Do you know the advantages of each?

While there isn’t a specific industry or workload that universally makes sense for each type of cloud, there are certain considerations enterprises should take into account when deciding upon the right fit: For example, does the company frequently handle sensitive customer information online? Do they have a highly secretive recipe or patented design that needs to be protected? In these cases, public cloud computing may be a riskier choice…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Jason Bystrak.

You don’t have to look too hard to find overwhelming evidence that cloud computing adoption is growing at a fast rate. IDC estimates the public cloud market, which reached nearly $46 billion in 2013, will continue growing at 23% CAGR through 2018. On the private cloud side, IDC estimates that worldwide spending on hosted private cloud services will surpass $24 billion by 2016.

For some value-added resellers (VARs), these statistics generate little more than an eye roll. After all, how much excitement can selling hosted Exchange subscriptions for $6 per mailbox with razor-thin margins generate, compared with the $10,000 on-premises Exchange server sales of the not-so-distant past?…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Delphix, the market leader in data as a service (DaaS), today announced the company has updated its award-winning DaaS Platform to support Amazon GovCloud, OpenStack, and KVM hypervisor environments for simple migration to both private and public clouds. With support for Amazon GovCloud, Delphix enables government agencies to achieve successful cloud migration to Amazon Web Services while increasing data security, gaining data agility, and lowering cost.

Cloud deployments are becoming not just feasible but essential for federal agencies. The cloud promises transformative gains in execution, increased service offerings, and lowered costs. The "Cloud First" mandate has spurred agencies to migrate many of their non-product applications to the cloud, however these agencies face several challenges, including the complexity of deployments, governance, and costs. Cloud computing opens many new opportunities for faster execution, increased service offerings, and lower infrastructure costs, but complexity and risk concerns often stall progress or limit the type of applications that agencies are comfortable migrating…

Grazed from CCI. Author: Nick Pollard.

The technology increases efficiency by removing the need for physical infrastructure, but cloud contracts can present significant practical obstacles to incident response (IR) strategies. When a security incident happens, the speed at which the breach is identified is integral. The faster the response, the more quickly infectious malware can be halted, access stopped, sensitive data protected, and the threat remediated.

This makes a significant difference in controlling risk, costs, and exposure. But in a cloud world, the challenge arises when a company wants access to the servers that infrastructure is based on. Often, data centre providers will not allow a business to get into these, making it impossible to know where the attack is coming from…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ross Momtahan.

One of the rare occasions that the subject of data centres has ended up in the mainstream news was fairly recently, when Facebook built a new data centre in Sweden. It was a precious moment when our industry – which despite being responsible for so much cool stuff in the world is not exactly considered to be the most glamorous to the average Joe – was seen on the likes of Gawker and the Mail Online.

Of course, the Facebook factor is a strong reason for this public interest – but there is something inherently… cool… about building a data centre in such a remote location (not to mention the green credentials). But Facebook isn’t doing this for the PR; it sees real potential for savings in this region…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.

Legacy security systems and practices are often not sufficient to protect companies’ expanding use of cloud and mobile technologies, according to a CompTIA study. Malware and hacking are still the top threats causing concern, with nearly half of all companies citing these as serious concerns.

"One of the most important things that small businesses can do is to form a policy around security," Seth Robinson, senior director, technology analysis, CompTIA, told eWEEK. "Only 44 percent of SMBs say that they have a comprehensive security policy in place. The key part in forming a policy is having discussions across an organization to ensure that everyone is on the same page."…

See more at: http://www.eweek.com/small-business/cloud-mobile-technology-complicating-it-security.html#sthash.Pt7aQWV1.dpuf

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Catherine Shu.

Cloud computing giant Salesforce has acquired Toopher, an Austin, Texas based security software startup. The news was announced on Toopher’s site and confirmed to TechCrunch by Salesforce. Terms of the deal were undisclosed. According to Toopher’s post, the company has stopped selling its products as its team prepares to join Salesforce.

“We are thrilled to join Salesforce, where we’ll work on delivering the Toopher vision on a much larger scale as part of the world’s #1 Cloud Platform. We can’t imagine a better team, technology and set of values with which to align,” wrote founders Josh Alexander and Evan Grim…

Read more from the source @ http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/01/toopher-salesforce/

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

A report from United Software Associates (USAIN) has found MongoDB to be top of the pile of NoSQL database providers in benchmark testing.  The research tested three leading products – Cassandra, CouchBase and MongoDB – through Yahoo!’s cloud standard benchmark, YCSB. USAIN wanted to assess the durability of each, going on the theory that most applications should prioritise durability over performance, not accepting data loss. The databases were put through the ringer on three types of performance metric; throughput optimised, durability optimised, and balanced.

In workload A of 50% read and 50% update with throughput optimised, under the YCSB benchmark MongoDB hit 160,719 operations per second, ahead of Cassandra (134,839) and Couchbase (106,638). With workload B’s 95% read and 5% update, MongoDB again came out on top with 196,498, ahead of Couchbase (187,798) and Cassandra (144,455)…