Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Steve Ranger.

In the early days of the cloud computing it was routine for tech executives to admit that they had little idea of, or control over, the use of the technology within their organisations; developers would cheerfully pay for cloud storage or processing power using their credit cards, forcing CIOs to turn detective to work out what was being used, when, and by who.

But it seems that the IT department has now caught up and is reasserting its control over cloud spending, with either excellent or disastrous timing.  Over 80 percent of cloud spend is now managed by the IT department, and 62 percent of that has the direct involvement of the CIO, according to research by Verizon…

Grazed from Virtual Instruments.  Author: PR Announcement.

Infrastructure Performance Management provider Virtual Instruments has updated its VirtualWisdom solution, offering customers new analytics tools.  Now dubbed VirtualWisdom4.1, the update was announced at Powering the Cloud in Frankfurt. It features an applied analytics module which the firm claims to offer ‘enhanced user-interface, reporting, and analytics tools’.

Skip Bacon, CTO at Virtual Instruments, said: "The advanced applied analytics tools are able to execute tasks in just a few seconds, tasks which prior to VirtualWisdom4, would have taken hours or even days…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: Kimberly Gress.

As technology vendors respond to a changing marketplace by creating Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, their relationship to their customers must change. Satisfying customers by creating a great product that garners positive reviews, and soliciting customer feedback for future upgrades simply isn’t enough.

When a company hands over control of its mission-critical software environment to a SaaS provider, the SaaS customer support organization essentially functions as an extension of the customer’s IT department. To take this step, a customer must trust that they will receive the constant, professional and hands-on support they need. Generating this trust requires that the Customer Support team be transparent and always available. The following best practices will ensure that the support organization does both:…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

The HP Helion portfolio is expanding with the launch of commercially available infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings based on OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, respectively. The official launch of the cloud services follows up on several announcements Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has been making since it debuted the Helion portfolio in the spring.

Stephen Spector, social strategist for the HP Cloud portfolio, noted in a blog post that the IaaS and PaaS offerings were designed to seamessly work together and provide cloud computing offerings that are both highly available and developer-friendly. "Customers can deploy HP Helion OpenStack to gain the advantages of an open source distributed computing platform that provides predictable scalability, high availability, durability and significantly reduced operational costs…

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…