Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

There’s a huge change going on in the tech industry that will create a whole new crop of winners and losers: cloud computing. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently declared that Microsoft was already in with the winners. "We absolutely caught the trend … it’s no longer up for debate, whether we get the cloud," he said. One reason he gave to back up his claim: Microsoft’s cloud business is on track to be a $4.5 billion business. But sources tell Business Insider that this $4.5 billion number isn’t as straightforward as it seems…

The Dirty Secret

The $4-billion-mark is a major milestone for cloud computing companies. Pure cloud company Salesforce.com just hit over $4 billion in revenues in its last fiscal year and expects to hit $5.3 billion at the end of its current fiscal year. It took it 15 years and a major acquisition, marketing automation company Exact Target…

Read more from the source @ http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-cloud-business-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-2014-11#ixzz3IzVGfPZ3

Grazed from ARS Technica. Author: Peter Bright.

At its AWS re:Invent cloud computing conference today, Amazon announced AWS Lambda, a way of performing computing in the cloud in response to events without the need for virtual machines, compute instances, or any kind of administration. The usual model when performing computation in cloud services is to create some kind of a persistent application, such as a Web server on a virtual machine.

Sometimes the developer manages everything on the VM. Sometimes aspects of this are abstracted away—Azure’s Web roles, for example, leave management of the base operating system and server up to Microsoft, letting developers focus solely on the Web content—but those persistent deployments, with their time-based billing, have become the basic model of cloud computing…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Dan Kobialka.

Avnet Technology Solutions (AVT) has unveiled a cloud toolset to help its American and Canadian managed service provider (MSP) and value-added reseller (VAR) partners "govern, consolidate, manage and track cloud accounts across multiple cloud providers." The Phoenix-based IT solutions distributor this week launched the Avnet Cloud Toolset (ACT) to help partners support their Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM SoftLayer customers.

Avnet said ACT gives its partners better visibility and usage data across various cloud platforms providing insights on how to optimize cloud resources. ACT provides Avnet partners with:…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

Now that it’s become fairly routine for IT organizations to manage smartphones and tablets via the cloud, starting this week Hewlett-Packard is looking to apply that concept more broadly via the new HP Touchpoint Manager service that can manage workstations, tablets, PCs and smartphones running Android, iOS or Windows.

Aimed at small to medium businesses, a subscription to the HP Touchpoint Manager service is available for free for the next six months to any organization that signs up for a basic server agreement. A professional version of the service with additional functionality is available for $5 per user, per month for the first six months…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Jordan Novet.

Amazon Web Services isn’t only announcing new services at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week. Of course, it’s adding new low-level instances — slices of physical servers — in its market-leading public cloud. “The new C4 instance is the highest-performance one that you can get,” Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, told the crowd at the conference.

And the instance results from a tight partnership with Intel, which is giving Amazon an exclusive on the new Xeon E5-2666 v3 chips, said Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel’s data center group. Here’s the lineup of the new C4 instances:…

Read more from the source @ http://venturebeat.com/2014/11/13/aws-c4/

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Jason Bystrak.

I recently read a success story about Computer Services Inc. (CSI), a financial services company worth $213 million that acquired a managed services practice two years ago, and is now reporting record revenue growth. What I found most intriguing about CSI’s story wasn’t the immediate success it experienced from selling managed services. It was the initial struggle it had selling cloud services.

What makes CSI’s experience particularly noteworthy is that the company had so many standout strengths: nearly 50 years in business, a staff of 1,100 employees and unmatched expertise in the financial services market. Many smaller IT service providers would assume that it’s these traits — which they don’t possess — that are the reasons why they’re not experiencing success selling cloud services…

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: Ben Sullivan.

Despite the boom in cloud computing adoption, 59% of IT businesses that are now on cloud felt challenged by the need to find the correct cloud business model for their needs. The stats, drawn from CompTIA research in the IT channel, show that more than 90% of IT firms feel themselves to be at a mature stage in their cloud solutions adoption. They do, however, still have to make structural changes to really transform their business.

"The channel’s thinking has clearly evolved from viewing the cloud as something to fear to embracing it as a catalyst for business transformation and new opportunities," said Carolyn April, senior director, industry analysis, CompTIA. "This is a positive development, but there’s is much more work to be done," April continued…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Amazon has added new capabilities to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing portfolio, including a new high performance MySQL engine for its database service, and enhanced encryption and configuration management support for enterprise users. Announced at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the updates deliver a number of enhancements to Amazon’s cloud computing platform.

Amazon Aurora, currently available as a technical preview, is a MySQL-compatible engine for the Amazon Relational Database Service intended to offer the performance of a high-end commercial database but at a significantly lower price. According to Amazon, Aurora can deliver five times the performance of a typical MySQL database, with availability to match that of the best high-end databases, but is offered as a scalable, on-demand service at a fraction of the cost of commercial database platforms…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing gives organizations the ability to run workloads and manage data anywhere without significant computing resources residing in the business. Cloud providers use multi-tenant infrastructures to maximize cost-effectiveness, so businesses must address data separation and geolocation issues within an increasingly complex international legal and political landscape.

Businesses need to consider two major factors for data separation in the public cloud: tenancy and geolocation. Cloud computing is based on underlying virtualization technology that shares computing resources. Cloud environments are always multi-tenant. And while multi-tenancy isn’t a concern for private cloud users, executives shudder at the thought of countless businesses or users sharing memory space, disk space and processor cycles on the same physical infrastructure…

Read more from the source @ http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/answer/What-is-data-separation-and-why-is-it-important-in-the-cloud

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Heather Clancy.

Amazon cloud strategy chief Andy Jassy opened his keynote address this week at its annual re:Invent conference on the offensive. “More and more companies are moving their computing workloads to Amazon Web Services,” the Amazon Web Services (AWS) senior vice president declared from the Las Vegas stage, pointing to fast-growing digital businesses such as Airbnb and Pinterest and venerable Fortune 500 companies like Bristol Myers Squibb BMY -1.18% , Johnson & Johnson JNJ 0.19% , and Merck MRK 0.64% .

Certainly, according to an oft-quoted “magic quadrant” evaluation cooked up by research firm Gartner, the sheer computing capacity in active use on AWS server and storage hardware is roughly five times what’s available in aggregate from its 14 closest cloud computing competitors. AWS services are used by more 1 million active monthly customers, Jassy estimated…

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/amazon-cloud/