Grazed from CIO. Author: J.D. Sartain.

For much of its 25-year history, catastrophe modeling and risk management firm RMS delivered its software using an on-premises model. The company’s modeling software is designed to help customers mitigate financial risk in advance of events such as earthquakes, hurricanes and even terrorist attacks.

Four years ago, RMS "started down a journey of taking our solution to the cloud," says Paris Georgallis, senior vice president of cloud platform operations. RMS started with Amazon Web Services, “which provided us with the runway we needed to get our development off the ground and to rewrite our product for a cloud platform."…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Simon Mitchell.

Before you start considering business Cloud storage, be clear on what you understand by “Cloud”. It’s used in various ways by different people to mean different things. When IT consultants talk about Cloud, they mean multi-server systems that are highly adaptable and often automated.

There is more to the business Cloud than storage. Data is not the only workload and it is not necessarily the thing you should move to a Cloud environmnet first. Think in terms of memory and CPU usage – both are expensive to provide in-house.
Cloud flexibility is ideal for variable workloads:…

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/moving-cloud-workloads-move-cloud-environment-01043268#d44qZl2gayBrqkcb.99

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.

Bracket Computing is a startup with a lofty mission: It’s daring to show enterprises how to virtualize the cloud—which, as we all know, is already quite virtualized. The 3-year-old Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company came out of stealth mode Oct. 22 to unveil something called the Bracket Computing Cell, what it describes as the world’s first cloud virtualization system.

We certainly know about virtualized servers, storage, networks and even I/O. Now, we’ve got virtualized clouds. Stay with us here. Companies that use this, Bracket claims, will obtain the reliable, high-performing enterprise-grade security and control that they require to run significant workloads on the public cloud…

Grazed from BSMInfo. Author: Editorial Staff.

The International Association of Cloud & Managed Service Providers (MSPAlliance) recently announced several significant enhancements to its Unified Certification Standard for Cloud & Managed Service Providers (UCS). New, unique addendums have been added to the existing UCS Standard, which will now help MSPs and Cloud Providers demonstrate their compliance with certain HIPAA and financial services regulations. The UCS is the oldest vendor agnostic, non-technical certification and audit, created in 2004, specifically for the managed services industry.

“Alongside the advancement in technology that are fulfilling the promise of mobile banking and telehealth, is a growing concern in regard to consumer and patient, which is at the forefront of cybersecurity initiatives,” said Charles Weaver, CEO and Founder of the MSPAlliance. “Headlines report of staggeringly large breaches almost everyday,” added Charles Weaver, and less than two months ago, the FBI warned that health care industry companies are being targeted by hackers, following an attack that resulted in the theft of millions of patient records…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

You can almost see it. An overweight IBM sits at the back of the cloud class while the teacher gives out prizes for cloud movement. OpenText gets a full set of gold stars … IBM a terse note saying it could do much better. If you hadn’t seen already, OpenText reported its financial results for the first fiscal quarter last night.

In a consistently difficult global economic situation, it has managed to double its revenues on the back of its cloud computing initiatives. Compare this with IBM’s dismal news earlier in the week. Despite the fact that it sees cloud computing as one of its future growth stimuli, IBM is not growing fast enough for investors…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/wakeup-ibm-opentext-offers-lessons-on-cloud-computing-026933.php

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Editorial Staff.

There’s no denying that cloud services, in particular Infrastructure-as-a-Service, has come of age. Its main gatekeepers are now playing a no-win game that limits the value you get from using their services. Businesses are getting smart to this game, but how did we end up here? More importantly, what’s next?

Feature-driven market

Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure built their lead in the IaaS market (and PaaS market in the case of early Azure) by adopting the exact same strategy: by broadening their offers through new features. And it was a winning strategy. Every time they launched a new feature, they essentially created a new market and cornered the demand. As long as they could show acceptable reliability, they had little concern for additional metrics like price or performance. It’s hard to blame them since there was no one for them to compare unfavorably to, and they were making major investments to get these new services lit up…

Grazed from CloudExpo.  Author: Bernard Golden.

Cloud computing in the form of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has revolutionized the expectations of IT. Infrastructure that used to take weeks to months to provision is now available in minutes.  Moreover, most of the traditional drawbacks associated with infrastructure have disappeared as IaaS has become more widely used.

The lengthy timeframes to add infrastructure resources to existing applications, which led to wildly over-provisioned environments, have disappeared. The heavy upfront capital investment that is required before using resources has also disappeared, supplanted by the pay-as-you-go model of IaaS cloud computing…

Grazed from SCDigest. Author: Dan Gilmore.

On-demand or Cloud-based software is coming on fast, and I continue to believe as I predicted several years ago that it will dominate the supply chain market very soon. I predicted that would occur by 2015 – that may be a year or two too soon, but it’s coming. There are a variety on terms of course, with the original term "hosted" also still out there in some cases, and "Software as a Service" (SaaS) still pretty popular along with on-demand and Cloud. Each of these terms has its own nuance, but I have found supply chain managers use them rather interchangeably to mean the same thing.

What they generally mean is a supply chain software application that is indeed hosted by the vendor or its third party (Amazon S3 is becoming increasingly popular), and that rather than the traditional model of an often large upfront license fee, the company pays based on some subscription/transaction fee arrangement with the provider…

Grazed from RackSpace. Author: PR Announcement.

Rackspace has created a business unit called Cloud Office which aims to unify its portfolio of Rackspace and Microsoft business productivity and collaboration tools. The suite of solutions available under Cloud Office at Rackspace includes hosted Microsoft Exchange and Rackspace Email, Microsoft Lync and Microsoft SharePoint collaboration tools and Jungle Disk backup services, all backed by Fanatical Support.

"We’ve combined the power and expertise of Rackers, who understand that each customer has unique needs in their work environment, with a broad selection of productivity tools to help customers manage and run their business in a way that meets their specific needs," said Bret Piatt, general manager of Cloud Office at Rackspace. "We are proud to deliver this IT productivity suite as a service to exciting new companies as well as established brand names including Star Network Services, Jordan Lawrence and 42 Inc." The announcement comes weeks after Rackspace announced it will be offering managed IT services for the full Google Apps for Work suite.

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Just how much bigger is Amazon Web Service’s cloud computing division compared to Microsoft and Google? It’s hard to make a complete apples-to-apples comparison because none of these companies are extraordinarily transparent when releasing information about the financial health of their operations.

But, a new report from New Hampshire-based firm Technology Business Research estimates Amazon’s cloud revenue at more than $4.7 billion this year. TBR pegs Microsoft’s public cloud IaaS revenue at $156 million and Google’s at $66 million. If those estimates are correct than Amazon’s cloud revenue is 30 times bigger than Microsoft’s. 30!…