Grazed from Network World.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Gartner IaaS Research Director Kyle Hilgendorf says one of the most common questions he gets from enterprise customers looking to go to the cloud is: AWS or Azure?  Amazon Web Services has been anointed the public IaaS cloud leader by Gartner and many others, but over the past year or so Satya Nadella’s Microsoft has made significant advancements to its public cloud platform. AWS now has competition.

AWS clearly has a lead, and a pretty sizeable one, Hilgendorf says. But, it’s a marathon, not a sprint: “The race has just begun, and it’s a very long race,” Hilgendorf said during a presentation at AWS re:Invent comparing the two providers…

Grazed from TheChannelCompany.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Channel Company today announced The NexGen Cloud Conference & Expo, the only independent, multivendor business and technology conference and exposition designed specifically for cloud integrators, developers, vendors and providers. Conference attendees will gain actionable advice, share best practices with peers, and discover hundreds of cloud solutions and new revenue streams. 

The inaugural event, themed “All Roads Lead to the Cloud,” will be held December 3-5, 2014, at the San Diego Convention Center and aligns with The Channel Company’s focus of enabling technology partnerships by helping solution providers and vendors to drive incremental revenue. For more information or to register for the event, visit www.nexgencloudcon.com…

Grazed from TechRepublic.  Author: Judith Myerson.

Risk management provides a framework to help you select security controls to protect an information system anywhere in the development life cycle on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) — it doesn’t matter whether it’s an engineering, procurement, or personnel system.

The security controls are implemented after the risks are identified, assessed, and reduced to a low level. The implementation criteria include cost effectiveness, technological efficiency, and regulation compliance. You must document the criteria in a security plan…

Grazed from Virtacore.  Author: Editorial Staff.

An Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) plan can give organizations access to holistic infrastructure resources to meet their diverse operational needs. A good cloud infrastructure strategy will alleviate your day-to-day management burden. But you also need to keep your data safe. Here are 10 tips to help you protect data when subscribing to IaaS plans:

1. Know what you control
IaaS plans give vendors a great deal of responsibility, but you still have plenty to control. Knowing the nuances of your service plan, the infrastructure configuration and how users will access various resources plays a key role in figuring out how you can protect data…

Grazed from ITWire.  Author: Graeme Philipson.

Important new international research shows that most enterprises are now comfortable trusting mission-critical applications to the cloud.  Giant Indian based software and services company Infosys has released the findings of a survey that revealed that cloud is being widely adopted for mission critical business applications.

Grazed from EconomicTimes.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft Corp’s Azure cloud-computing service, which hosts websites and lets customers store and manage data remotely, suffered serious outages on Tuesday taking its popular MSN web portal offline. 



According to Microsoft’s Azure status page, the problems started around 5pm Pacific time and have still not been fully solved. "We are experiencing a connectivity issue across multiple Azure Services," the page said.   "Microsoft is investigating an issue affecting access to some Micr .. 

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author:  Amy Reichert.

The similarities between Web services and cloud services have become an age-old concern. The short answer is, "no," they are not the same. However, they are increasingly dependent on each other if users want the full speed and ease of use effect that such services offer. Technically, organizations can have a Web service without a cloud service or vice versa, but one gets greater business efficiency when the services are combined.

Web servicesare the tools that allow users to interact with software over the Internet.Cloud services are the servers that store the data, security and other infrastructure pieces needed to allow Web services to provide unique value as Web-accessible applications. The two services are currently mingling, intertwining and becoming nearly inseparable…

Grazed from Nasdaq.  Author: Editorial Staff.

If you were to ask anyone what Amazon.com ‘s core business was, I’d wager that 10 out of 10 times the answer would be "e-commerce." That’s undoubtedly true today, but it might not be true forever.  It turns out that the company’s Amazon Web Services division, which is currently the No. 1 cloud computing vendor by a healthy margin, could very well become Amazon’s most important business.

It depends on how you define "largest"

To be clear, Amazon will most certainly always be an e-commerce heavyweight; but at a recent media event in Las Vegas, AWS chief Andy Jassy outlined Amazon’s future plans for its cloud computing business. Amazon wants to take over the cloud world…

Read more from the source @ http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/11/18/amazoncom-wont-rely-on-e-commerce-forever.aspx#ixzz3JTzV5uLA

Grazed from FedScoop.  Author: Billy Mitchell.

The emergence of cloud computing as a high-demand IT solution hasn’t been the clearest in terms of procurement. But now that it appears the technology is here to stay, the General Services Administration wants to create a cloud category in the federal government’s largest acquisition vehicle to make it easier to find and buy.

GSA hosted an onsite industry day Tuesday soliciting feedback from vendors on its proposed addition of a special item number (SIN) for cloud computing to its IT Schedule 70 acquisition vehicle…

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Alan Shimel.

There is no denying that the cloud and cloud computing have changed the way many of us are doing business. You only had to attend last week’s sold out AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to see the cloud out in force.

But as the cloud matures, we are seeing another layer of cloud computing that promises to shake the foundation of our IT infrastructure to its core – the advent of IT-as-a-Service, which will be perhaps the cloud’s highest calling…