Grazed from Cloudcomputing. Author: Arnal Dayaratna.

On March 26, Amazon announced two new storage plans for Amazon Cloud Drive that deliver enhanced options regarding the storage of files in the cloud. Both storage plans give customers the option of unlimited storage and take direct aim at cloud storage competitors such as Box, Dropbox and Google Drive.

The Unlimited Photos Plan from Amazon Web Services allows customers to store an unlimited number of photos for $11.99 per year while the Unlimited Everything Plan allows users to store an unlimited number of files, whether they be photos, videos or other files, for $59.99/year. Both plans feature a free three month trial and disrupt the cloud storage landscape by giving away photo storage for less than $1/month and file storage for less than $5/month…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bryan Campbell.

Cloud computing promises to drive down cost, drive up user/customer satisfaction and speed time to market/time to revenue. In a business climate driven by IT cost cutting, better alignment with business goal and greater value for each IT dollar spent; cloud computing is just what we need. The core of those benefits is directly linked to decreasing IT operational costs by way of automation of business processes.

This automation usually drives down the labor intensive aspects of IT service delivery and decreases the time interval from the genesis of innovation until it is actualized. With the current state of cloud computing, businesses are seeing benefits. The breadth and the depth of those benefits continue to evolve with great accrual of value over time…

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Outsource surveyed 150 senior IT and management decision-makers, 110 in Australia and 40 in New Zealand. Forty six percent of respondents said that cloud had CEO and board support.Respondents represented avariety of industries including banking and financial services, education, government, other professional services, retail, transport, insurance, utilities, resources, and entertainment.

However this board support has not so far lead to the same level of adoption. Only 13.3 percent of respondents’ organisations were using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) with full senior management approval…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Klaus Dieter Rennert.

A recent report from Chatham House, the international affairs think tank, noted the vital importance of cities to the global economy, calling them motors for growth. The report stated that cities produce innovation, and will increasingly do so with interconnected technologies coming to the fore.

However, they face enormous and increasingly common challenges – gridlock; insufficient housing; poor waste management; lack of clean water and safety. This chimed with new research we conducted with Frost & Sullivan on the topic of social innovation. In it, Frost & Sullivan defined social innovation as ‘the deployment of technology and new business models to bring positive change to the lives of individuals and societies.’…

Read more: http://www.itproportal.com/2015/03/29/social-innovation-action-collaboration-shared-value-new-business-model/#ixzz3VsaO9JVq

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Eric Auchard.

Britain’s Interoute, a high-capacity data network and corporate cloud services provider, is taking on new private equity investors to fund acquisitions across Europe and the United States, the company said on Monday. Aleph Capital Partners, a UK investment firm headed by former Goldman Sachs European private equity investment chief Hugues Lepic, and Crestview Partners, a U.S. private equity firm founded by ex-Goldman colleagues, have agreed to buy a 30 percent stake in London-based Interoute.

The value of the investment was undisclosed, but Aleph is chartered to make investments that range from 100 million to 400 million euros. The deal is expected to close in April, it said. The investment, Aleph’s first since it was set up two years ago, is a share purchase deal to buy out shareholder Emirates International Telecommunications (EIT), part of a conglomerate owned by the ruler of Dubai, which has been looking to pare debt. Privately held Interoute is majority-owned by Switzerland’s Sandoz Family Foundation…

Read more from the source @ http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/29/us-telecomunications-interoute-idUSKBN0MP0ZP20150329

Grazed from TechCheatSheet.  Author: Nathanael Arnold.

Earlier this week, Apple and several other major U.S. tech companies renewed their calls for the U.S. government to reform its controversial electronic surveillance programs. In an open letter addressed to President Barack Obama, NSA Director Admiral Rogers, Attorney General Eric Holder, and several prominent members of Congress, Apple and dozens of other signatories urged the government to end the bulk data collection practices that were authorized under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act.

As noted in the letter, Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act is used as the legal basis for the NSA’s bulk collection of electronic communications metadata. The letter also asked the government to institute “transparency and accountability mechanisms for both government and company reporting” for decisions made by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court…

Grazed from ScriptRock.  Author: Editorial Staff.

As a group of concepts, DevOps has converged on several prominent themes including continuous software delivery, automation, and configuration management (CM). These integral pieces often form the pillars of an organization’s DevOps efforts, even as other bigger pieces like overarching best practices and guidelines are still being tried and tested.

Being that DevOps is a relatively new paradigm – movement – methodology – [insert your own label here], standards around it have yet to be codified and set in stone. Organizations are left to identify tools and approaches most suitable for their use cases, and will either swear by or disparage them depending on their level of success…

Grazed from DailyHypervisor.  Author: Sid Smith.

If you have been looking into Openstack as a standardized api for your cloud infrastructure you have undoubtedly realized how complex it is to get an Openstack environment up and running.  VMware Integrated Openstack or VIO takes the deployment of Openstack and literally makes it brain dead simple.  I mean let’s face it, if I can deploy it then you know it’s simple 😉

About a year ago started down the path of deploying open stack into the MoaC lab.  The project was very short lived because I just didn’t have weeks to dedicate to getting it done.  Fortunately VIO has been released and I can not implement Openstack in the Moac is about an hour.  No that wasn’t one of my many typos you may find in my articles I did mean to say “an hour”…

Grazed from SysCon.  Author: Roger Strukhoff.

The stack is the hack, Jack. That’s my takeaway from several events I attended over the past few weeks in Silicon Valley and Southeast Asia.  I listened to and participated in discussions about everything from large datacenter management (think Facebook Open Compute) to enterprise-level cyberfraud (at a seminar in Manila attended by the US State Dept. and Philippine National Police) to the world of entrepreneurial startups, app deployment, and mobility (in a series of meetups and talks in both the US and Asia.)

I also attended the announcement of a very high-level report from the Asian Cloud Computing Association, Internet Society of Asia-Pacific, and TRPC Research on the topic of "Re-Thinking the Digital Economy," in which a presentation by a member of the Philippine Cabinet on bringing free WiFi to the masses was just one topic. This report will be discussed in several other meetings within the ASEAN community over the next weeks…

Grazed from GeekWire.  Author: John Cook.

Two former Amazon.com employees are merging their cloud computing startups, hoping to grab a bigger pool of clients that need help transitioning to cloud-based infrastructure.

Tacoma-based Options I/O — started by former Amazon Web Services sales executive Matthew Scott — and Santa Monica, California-based DualSpark — led by former AWS manager Simon Plant — are combining operations in a deal of undisclosed size that they say will “deliver world-class service, support and enablement to our clients and partners.”…