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/

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Peak on Wednesday said it has raised $9 million in funding to assist channel partners with leveraging cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The Denver-based company enables resellers and agents to white-label Peak’s cloud services as their own. It delivers on-demand computing, network and storage resources to customers offering services.

The company said it expects to leverage the additional funds to accelerate demand for its cloud computing platform, and fuel product development and innovation. Existing investing partners Meritage Funds and Sweetwater Capital led the Series A round, with participation from new investor Ares Capital. Peak has raised a total of $16 million in financing since December 2013…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-funding-and-finance/111214/peak-raises-9m-funding-cloud-based-iaas-platform

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Chief financial officers (CFOs) are generally not the types to keep their heads in the clouds, metaphorically or technologically. Today, during the Cloud Business Summit here, some executives made a strong case for jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon. During a panel discussion at the event, Vinay Mehra, CFO at WGBH, described how digitization and the cloud have not only helped the company successfully adopt Internet streaming technologies, but also improve its operations and financial fortunes.

The Boston-based public broadcaster’s call letters are well-known to PBS viewers, and approximately 70 percent of the primetime programming on PBS is produced by WGBH, said Mehra. Today, viewers aren’t necessarily tuning in, at least with their TVs. Going digital "definitely opened up a lot more opportunities for us on the revenue side," said Mehra. Growth in WGBH’s digital business has "overtaken our traditional advertising and the traditional DVD business," he reported…

Read more from the source @ http://www.eweek.com/cloud/the-rise-of-the-cloud-financial-officer.html#sthash.nrV2b8Lf.dpuf

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Gareth Cartman.

When speculating about where the cloud is heading next, we often think about extra security layers and how hybrid models might grow in prevalence. However, collaboration on the cloud is becoming more of a consideration as files grow. Could the cloud’s next big step be from mostly storage to mostly processing?

Cloud computing or PaaS?

As always with commonly misunderstood areas such as the cloud, there are a host of phrases being bandied around which often mean the same thing to some people, and different things to others. When people talk of cloud computing, they could either be talking about ‘the cloud’ in general, or they could be talking about cloud processing – the act of actually collaborating on a file online, for example, through Google Docs (at its most simple). However, PaaS, a variation of SaaS, is closer to this definition…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Howard Baldwin.

For some CIOs, the idea of being able to offload their computer processing needs to third-party providers like Microsoft and Amazon and Google is heavenly. Their IT departments don’t have to procure, manage, or upgrade hardware. It’s all done magically in the cloud.

For other CIOs, the idea of sending mission-critical data off beyond the boundaries of their data center is like bungee-jumping for the perpetually queasy – something that makes their stomach do flip-flops just at the thought of it. So how can CIOs get that infrastructure-as-a-service agility without an IaaS vendor?…

Grazed from NuageNetworks. Author: PR Announcement.

Nuage Networks announced today that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named its Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) as a 2014 Cloud Computing Excellence Award winner. The Cloud Computing Excellence Award, presented by Cloud Computing magazine, recognizes companies that have most effectively leveraged cloud computing in their efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market.

“With the ever growing adoption of software-defined networking, we’re honored to be named a winner for the Cloud Computing Excellence Award,” said Sunil Khandekar, CEO of Nuage Networks. “It’s always been our mission at Nuage Networks to empower our customers to finally deliver on the true promise of the cloud and it’s exciting to see this become a reality.”…

Grazed from CMU.edu. Author: Grace Lewis.

Soldiers in battle or emergency workers responding to a disaster often find themselves in environments with limited computing resources, rapidly-changing mission requirements, high levels of stress, and limited connectivity, which are often referred to as “tactical edge environments.” These types of scenarios make it hard to use mobile software applications that would be of value to a soldier or emergency personnel, including speech and image recognition, natural language processing, and situational awareness, since these computation-intensive tasks take a heavy toll on a mobile device’s battery power and computing resources.

As part of the Advanced Mobile Systems Initiative at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), my research has focused on cyber foraging, which uses discoverable, forward-deployed servers to extend the capabilities of mobile devices by offloading expensive (battery draining) computations to more powerful resources that can be accessed in the cloud, or for staging data particular to a mission…