Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Application performance continues to be a concern for organizations of all sizes, and according to a new report from Enterprise Management Associates and sponsored by New Relic, cloud-hosted application performance management is now the second most common use case for production software-as-a-service (SaaS), right after office productivity applications.

The report, "Public Cloud Comes of Age: Application Performance Management (APM) Strategies & Products for Production-Ready Cloud Ecosystems," noted several challenges enterprises are currently facing in migrating to and using cloud services and infrastructure. But since it’s also a sponsored report, it also provided significant detail on application performance management and monitoring vendor New Relic, so expect a touch of bias…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-research/12242014/report-cloud-hosted-apm-second-most-common-saas-use-case

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Jordan Novet.

My main hope for 2015 is that the industry can move on from the “What is the cloud, public clouds are good/bad, private clouds are good/bad” debate and essentially become more nuanced in our understanding. Generally the experience of 2014 is that most people like the model of consumption matching demand, but still have concerns on the nature and types of workloads that we can port.

2015 is the year when we stop talking about the cloud as a “What if?” choice and start talking about the different architectures and their suitability for your workloads. So unlike some commentators who have thrown the collective towel in on cloud computing focusing on purely public cloud over the Internet and calling it a “commodity” or the domain of a few, we are students of history and think we are merely in the Precambrian phase of cloud evolution and look toward the next more impactful stage…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Dan Newman.

Today, four of the most impactful streams of technology – social media, mobile, big data, and cloud are gradually converging into one powerful force that’s making way for a huge shift in the current business landscape. While the combination of these technologies will unlock new opportunities for businesses, it will also change the way we live and work. On the whole, convergence technology is the new innovation to watch. Sound interesting?

If your interest is piqued, then you might be intrigued to hear that convergence technology is going to be utterly indispensable for businesses as well. Let me explain. Businesses are leveraging the power of social, mobile, cloud, and big data already. To this point, these powers have been compartmented, more or less…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Patrick Harris.

We’re almost halfway into the decade that has redefined computing. Fifteen years ago, Marc Benioff and I thought there had to be a better way than floppy disks. So we set out to disrupt the industry with a new technology model, and it’s clear that our bet on the cloud was a good one.

Today, we’re entering a third wave of computing, where everyone and everything is connected. In the last two years alone, 90 percent of the world’s data was generated as a result of cloud, social, mobile, and connected technologies that transformed business models and consumer behavior. In 2015, successful companies will leverage these trends to capture and personalize every customer interaction in the cloud, transforming the way they connect with their customers…

Grazed from LATimes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Fresh Internet outages continued to plague North Korea on Tuesday, and speculation about the cause of the rogue country’s systemwide crash earlier in the day broadened to include a hacking group that hinted it was responsible. North Korea’s Internet connection went down about 2 a.m. Tuesday and wasn’t restored for more than 9 1/2 hours, prompting speculation that the U.S. government might have waged a cyberattack against Pyongyang in retaliation for the Nov. 24 hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The FBI has accused North Korea of committing the attack on the Los Angeles-area studios where the controversial film "The Interview" was made, portraying a fictional assassination plot against North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. North Korea’s online community consists of only about 1,000 Internet Protocol addresses, estimates the Dyn research firm that evaluates Internet performance worldwide…

Read more from the source @ http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-north-korea-internet-outages-20141223-story.html

Grazed from Diginomica. Author: Martin Banks.

If the natural and obvious `join’ between cloud services and mobile devices is to become not just possible but standard practice, then tools that accommodate those any and all of those devices as integral parts of cloud services have to become widely available. They are, at least. Now starting to appear.

Take, for example, the recently launched Toshiba Cloud Client Manager (TCCM) system, which first saw the light of day last year as a prototype plug in option for the company’s then new, on-premise Smart Client Manager. Since then it has been re-engineered as a stand-alone, modular, cloud-delivered system that will, as new modules appear, seek to provide a full systems and mobile data management (MDM) infrastructure to connect mobile clients to cloud services…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Platform9, a company with a fundamentally new approach to creating and managing private clouds, today announced that Computer Reseller News (CRN) has named it the coolest virtualization startup of 2014: "Virtualization has had a beneficial impact on data centers for years, changing the way organizations run and manage their servers, desktops and infrastructure management," said Kevin McLaughlin, Chief Investigative Reporter at CRN.

"It’s probably the single most important technology that makes cloud computing possible; without it, the data center wouldn’t be nearly as dynamic and flexible as it is today." "We’re honored to be named the coolest virtualization startup of 2014," said Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9. "Platform9’s mission is to transform the private cloud computing experience, and we’re thrilled with our early customer traction and market response."…

Grazed from CloudComputing.net. Author: Pedro Venda.

Encryption in the digital world is akin to a safe in the physical world. Data is locked away and can only be seen by those who have the correct key. Among other things, encryption is what provides an assurance of confidentiality in data security and it is fast gaining ground in the cloud. But is encrypted data therefore more secure? Not if your keys are transferred in the clear, duplicated or mismanaged.

Data that goes to the public cloud is usually transferred securely and files are not kept on public web servers, so the obvious security measures are there. But once it gets to the storage server, data is beyond the user’s reach or control. It may be stored unencrypted or not, it may be read by the service administrator or not…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Loraine Lawson.

Cloud integration is generally viewed as a pain point, but maybe it’s time to look at how the cloud can support new and exciting integration use cases. That’s the view that Don Rippert, IBM’s general manager of Cloud Strategy, promoted at IBM’s Insight 2014 conference. When we look at managing data in the cloud, it’s easy to focus on the problems or the applications, but Rippert focused on cloud computing’s utility for data integration, access and replication, reports a recent Dataversity article.

“Arguably the most essential aspect of the Cloud is its ability to provide an integration of nearly limitless numbers of data sources involving structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data,” Dataversity’s Jelani Harper writes. “Such integration spans geographic location and includes both on-premise and Cloud sources, and is frequently typified by a speed of access that comes in real time or close to real time.”…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: James Sanders.

In 2014, the landscape of cloud computing has changed significantly with the ongoing price wars between the three major vendors: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. New technology in cloud has led to more user convenience, as well as deploying systems with a smaller environmental footprint than traditional mainstream data centers. However, cloud providers face a stormy future amid litigation threatening the security of data stored by cloud users, as well as the liability cloud vendors face.

Price wars in enterprise cloud lead to savings for businesses

Undeniably, the big story of the year is the massive extent to which cloud prices have fallen. On March 25, 2014, Google slashed the prices of all of its cloud offerings, with Compute Engine prices cut 32%, data storage cut 68%, and BigQuery cut 85%. Further discounts can be had with sustained use discounts, cutting the reduced prices by a further 30%. Microsoft followed suit on September 25, 2014, announcing more modest price cuts to Azure cloud services…