Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tom Coughlin.

Many folks, particularly in the open source community, have been pushing for some time to move to commodity hardware with more sophisticated software to control that hardware rather than proprietary systems. This is true of servers, networking and also digital storage systems. Organizations such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and other hyperscale data center companies take this approach to a huge scale. In many of these environments functions, such as virtualization, are often installed directly into a storage system rather than within a host operating system (referred to as a bare metal environment).

Companies such as Mirantis and SwiftStack, are open source software companies that recently raised $100 M and $16 M to increase their penetration in the cloud computing and cloud storage markets. Other companies, such as Storient offer low cost private cloud storage capabilities that they say can scale to Exabyte storage environments…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

In a wide-ranging interview with Bill Hilf, HP’s VP of Helion cloud product and services, Network World editor in chief John Dix and I asked him among other things about competition with Amazon Web Services – the leading public IaaS cloud computing vendor. Hilf says he found it amusing when he saw reports that AWS hired a head of enterprise strategy.

“I kind of laughed at that,” Hilf said, noting that HP’s heritage is selling to enterprise customers. “We don’t need one of those,” he added. “That’s all we do. We don’t have a special enterprise guy.” AWS reportedly hired former Dow Jones & Co. CIO Stephen Orban as the company’s new head of enterprise strategy and brought on Douglas Menefee, the former Schumacher Group CIO in March. Both are expected to act as evangelists to promote the company’s cloud platform…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/article/2841457/cloud-computing/hp-exec-unlike-amazon-we-dont-have-to-hire-enterprise-sales-experts.html

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Justin Stoltzfus.

Midsize companies with finite IT budgets are increasingly moving workloads to the cloud using specialized vendor cloud services, and that means developing strategies. This can require substantial communication and development of carefully thought-out goals, but when it comes to the adoption itself, putting the cloud into action often comes down to a few core principles.

Four-Part Adoption

A CSO Online report details some of the best practices for cloud migration, from working this move into a business plan to considering service-level agreements (SLAs), provider choices and public or private options. The report also highlights four fundamental elements of adoption that are important for choosing the right cloud provider: service levels, support, security and compliance…

Grazed from ComputerReview.  Author: Editorial Staff.

70% find more difficult to handle privacy and data protection regulations in cloud.  Only 38% of global organisations have defined roles and accountability for preserving confidential or sensitive data in the cloud, a new survey of IT professionals has found.  According to the latest Ponemon Institute study commissioned by SafeNet, about 44% of corporate data stored in cloud environments is not supervised or controlled by the IT department.

About 70% of respondents find it more difficult to handle privacy and data protection regulations in a cloud environment, while about three-quarters of them consider cloud as very vital now, and three quarters of them deem it will be vital over the next two years…

Grazed from Cloud-law.eu.  Author: PR Announcement.

The inaugural Cloud Law event taking place in London November 25th with participating enterprise general counsel and professional advisors is set to address the regulatory complexity confronting cloud computing in Europe. With an extensive panel of experts, the event aims to navigate enterprises through the complex regulatory and legal issues arising from outsourcing and untangling the European Data Protection Directive.

“The long term interests of all stakeholders in the development of cloud computing are only served if those with shared values come together and agree clearer rules of the road than is currently the case,” commented Dervish Tayyip, Assistant General Counsel of Microsoft who will be speaking at the conference. “It is a solvable problem and in the interests of all those stakeholders that we start now. The event will throw a spotlight on the privacy and security concerns of capital markets seeking to outsource critical-business information in the cloud. It will also assess how cloud computing which could deliver significant cost efficiency and innovation for the healthcare system, nevertheless raises issues for compliance with patient confidentiality…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Ubuntu Linux has already enjoyed the distinction of being the most popular platform for hostingOpenStack clouds. But now, Canonical has taken its commitment to OpenStack a step further with the announcement of its own OpenStack distribution.

Called the Canonical Distribution for Ubuntu OpenStack, the platform is the company’s newest enterprise computing product and is available starting now in public beta form. Canonical is pitching it as the OpenStack solution that offers "the widest range of commercially supported vendor options for storage, software-defined networking and hypervisor from Canonical and its OpenStack partners."…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Joab Jackson.

Hoping to enlarge its pool of corporate customers to include the enterprise market, startup BitYota will soon offer its data warehouse service on the Microsoft Azure cloud, thanks to a partnership between the two companies.  "Microsoft is truly partnering with us, not just providing a compute infrastructure," said Graham Summers, BitYota chief operating officer. "There are so many parts of the organization we can tap into."

Although BitYota’s early customer base has largely been small businesses and startups, traditional enterprises are increasingly considering the service for new projects, Summers said. They could use the cloud service to analyze marketing or operational data, without the need to set up all the hardware and software infrastructure to maintain a data warehouse in-house…

Grazed from CIO-Today.  Author: Shirley Siluk.

Before Salesforce kicks off its Dreamforce event in San Francisco on October 13, it’s inviting developers to compete for $1 million in cash prizes by building innovative new mobile apps for sales, service and other uses. The $1 Million Hackathon is set to start at 6 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday, and will continue through noon Sunday.

Hackers will compete for prizes in three categories: Force.com mobile apps, Heroku mobile apps, and Force.com with Heroku mobile apps. The first-place hacker or hacker team in each category will win $100,000, with the three first-place winners then competing for an additional grand prize of $150,000…

Grazed from Net-Security.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A majority of IT organizations are kept in the dark when it comes to protecting corporate data in the cloud, putting confidential and sensitive information at risk. This is just one of the findings of a recent Ponemon Institute study commissioned by SafeNet. The study, titled "The Challenges of Cloud Information Governance: A Global Data Security Study," surveyed more than 1800 IT and IT security professionals worldwide.

The research indicates that while organizations are increasingly using cloud computing resources, IT staff is having trouble controlling the management and security of data in the cloud...

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Microsoft is gathering more believers of its Cloud OS vision. Cloud OS is a consistent cloud computing platform that encompasses infrastructure, apps and data, and spans the data centers of hosting service providers, customers and Microsoft’s cloud. A year after its launch, the Microsoft Cloud OS Network is reaching new heights. In its December 2013 debut, Microsoft’s Cloud OS Network got off the ground in 90 markets and 425 data centers.

Twenty-five partners joined during the program’s launch, including Capgemini, CGI, iWeb and Lenovo. "Here at Microsoft, we think we’re the best bet for customers because we alone provide a consistent, enterprise-grade platform that is hybrid by design, and one that is based on our experience delivering more than 200 cloud services to billions of people," said Microsoft’s Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of Cloud and Enterprise Marketing, at the time…

Read more from the source @  http://www.eweek.com/cloud/microsoft-grows-its-cloud-os-partner-network.html#sthash.QPrpIHJ1.dpuf