Grazed from eWeek. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Cisco first got involved with the open-source OpenStack cloud platform in 2011 with the Bexar release and initially was focused mostly on networking. Over the last several years, Cisco’s OpenStack involvement and product portfolio have grown beyond just networking.

In a video interview with eWEEK, Lew Tucker, vice president and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, detailed his firm’s OpenStack platform efforts. Tucker commented that Cisco has been expanding its OpenStack efforts a lot more outside of networking as the adoption of OpenStack within Cisco has grown…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

HP’s earnings came out this week, and while it was a mixed bag of good news and bad news revenue-wise, at least one analyst is optimistic that the split of the company in two will help the newly-formed HP Enterprise focus on what could be an important area of growth for the company: cloud computing.

New Hampshire-based Technology Business Review Inc. reports that HP’s $7.6 billion in Services revenue in 3Q14 was down 5.9% from the year-ago quarter and 0.8% sequentially. Enterprise Services declined 6% year over year. One area of growth was the company’s Strategic Enterprise Services segment which includes cloud, security, mobility and analytics, and reportedly grew by double-digits from the year-ago quarter, TBR said…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Danvers Baillieu, chief operating officer at VPN provider hidemyass, says he can’t understand companies who are reluctant to move to the cloud because it’s so easy to set up “your mother could do it.” Baillieu spoke to CloudTech after research from Reconnix earlier this month found the majority of UK businesses weren’t ready to move to the cloud, citing a lack of in-house skills as the problem.

“I assume nobody is saying they can’t move over to Gmail apps because it’s so easy to set up that your mother could do it,” he says. “The whole point of a lot of those services [is] it requires no IT skills. “I think actually the resistance from the IT department comes because they see themselves being done out of a job when half of these things get implemented,” he adds…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

New research indicates that cloud computing applications are proving to be a challenge for IT professionals. Part of the problem, it turns out, is that employees are overriding IT policies and bypassing the IT app approval process.

Keeping Up With the Growth

According to a recent report by GigaOM and CipherCloud featured in The Whir, cloud usage is predicted to grow 126.5 percent this year. Software as a Service (SaaS) in particular is predicted to grow at almost 200 percent. Yet IT professionals who have put an approval process in place are finding that 38 percent of employees are bypassing their security efforts, and 81 percent are using unauthorized SaaS applications. As a result, keeping track of cloud apps is a challenge…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Reliability, in the cloud technology era, can be defined as the likelihood that a system will provide uninterrupted fault-free services, as it is expected to, within the constraints of the environment in which it operates. According to the Information Technology Laboratories (ITL) bulletin published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on cloud computing, reliability in cloud environments is composed of the following:

• The hardware and software services offered by the cloud service provider
• The provider’s and consumers’ personnel
• The connectivity to the services…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Global cloud computing is changing the future of the mega data center. Firms that aim to benefit from cloud computing will be a part of this future, according to new research.

Growth and Interconnection

A new report from Research and Markets featured in BusinessWire reveals that mega data centers will grow heavier in data loads thanks to the deluge of data that will continue to be transferred to them. According to the report, the growing global cloud computing market will provide the integration of both software and IT infrastructure. The data center landscape will be changed because firms can expand network capacity at a faster pace by moving their collaboration and computing applications via cloud computing…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

Almost by definition solution providers are going to be regularly dealing with hybrid cloud computing environments that typically expose different application programing interfaces (APIs) that need to be mastered. In fact, a recent study from CompTIA suggests that customers are already moving workloads not only in an out of clouds, but also between them at a fairly rapid rate.

To facilitate that process, many solution providers already rely on open source software such as the Dasein Cloud project to create an abstraction layer written in Java that enables developers to write applications that work on multiple clouds using a common layer of metadata…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/11262014/abstraction-layers-simplify-hybrid-cloud-computing

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Colombus.

IT spending for security technologies will increase 46% in 2015, with cloud computing increasing 42% and business analytics investments up 38%. . Enterprise investments in storage will increase 36%, and for wireless & mobile, 35%. Cloud computing initiatives are the most important project for the majority of IT departments today (16%) and are expected to cause the most disruption in the future.

IDG predicts the majority of cloud computing’s disruption will be focused on improving service and generating new revenue streams. These and other key take-aways are from recent IDG Enterprise research titled Computerworld Forecast Study 2015. The goal of the study was to determine IT priorities for 2015 in areas such as spending, staffing and technology. Computerworld spoke with 194 respondents, 55% of which are from the executive IT roles…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Editorial Staff.

As the public-cloud market enters its adolescence, the pervasive concept of a “race to zero” has created an impression that only the established leviathans can compete in the space. On their path to dominance the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure gobble up nascent software-as-a-service startups and lesser infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service providers as they aggressively drive down costs and make it seem unattractive for customers to not be in the cloud. Google’s latest round of price cuts on an array of services and applications have reaffirmed this popularly held belief.

Yet, now that last week’s re:Invent conference has left AWS fanboys and girls satiated by new features, I couldn’t help but notice the conspicuous absence of the familiar price reduction announcements that have consistently generated juicy headlines. I’m not the only one. What does this mean for the race to zero? Is the cloud price war effectively over with only Google and Microsoft left playing a game of “how-low-can-you-go” chicken?…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Keith Tilley.

Cloud computing has been touted as an IT game-changer for over 10 years, but it’s only now that businesses have become comfortable enough with the model that we’re starting to see real innovation in the market. Cloud computing has opened up a whole world of possible industry disruptions – allowing start-ups and SMEs to compete successfully with long-established enterprises. For as long as entrepreneurs can re-invent business models the capacity of the cloud will continue to surprise us.

Netflix is often, and deservedly so, cited as one of the best examples of using the cloud to disrupt the industry. While competitors such as Blockbuster and HMV poured time and effort into working out the best way to sell DVDs via the internet, Netflix rewrote the question, asking ‘how can we use the internet to help people watch movies?’…