Grazed from Talkin Cloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Snowflake Computing is coming out of stealth mode with a big name CEO, new venture capital financing, and a plan to reinvent the data warehouse for the cloud. Redpoint Ventures led the Series B funding round, with participation from Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. This round brings the company’s total financing to date to $26 million.

Snowflake said it plans to use the new financing to expand its engineering and sales organization, and scale the company by putting in place the right systems and teams. "We are working closely with partners in the data warehousing space, particularly companies that provide business intelligence and extract-transform load solutions to customers," said Bob Muglia, CEO at Snowflake…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most popular enterprise cloud service according to a report released today from Skyhigh Networks – but the research also fired a broadside at how companies are struggling to block consumer products. The reports, which are quarterly and based on data from more than 1.6 million users, noted a huge disparity in companies saying they block certain services and the amount of employees actually blocked.

Take file sharing provider Dropbox. It’s a very popular service to block, with 80% of firms surveyed saying they nix it. Yet only 21% of users are blocked. It gets worse the further you look. Half of companies claim to block iCloud, yet the actual block rate is only 9%. For Netflix (40% and 4%) and Instagram (48% and 4%), it’s a similar story. Only Facebook has a good hit rate – 50% of companies say they block it, and 31% of users are actually blocked…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Editorial Staff.

Google Inc. acquired Firebase Inc., a provider of software tools that let engineers store and synchronize data across mobile applications and websites. The San Francisco-based startup, which offers services for Apple Inc.’s iPhones and smartphones running Google Inc. Android software, also streamlines the process for building apps that can work offline. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, is boosting investments in cloud-related technology, which lets software developers access computing power via the Internet. Google, along with Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Rackspace Hosting Inc., offer cloud services in a market that was worth $45.7 billion last year, according to IDC Corp…

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Cloud computing isn’t merely changing the way much of the technology business works. Now it is changing itself, and putting even more computing power in more places. On Monday, Microsoft, which operates one of the biggest so-called “public clouds,” or large and flexible computing systems available for remote rental, announced several changes to its data storage and processing services that will make them more powerful.

Microsoft also announced a partnership with Dell to sell a kind of “cloud in a box,” or hardware and software that created a mini-version of Microsoft’s cloud, called Azure, inside a company. The idea is that a company could work with its own version of Azure, then easily move up to the giant version Microsoft has to handle big workloads. Hewlett-Packard may be after something similar with its effort to create a private-public cloud business based on the HP cloud, which uses a kind of open source software…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Robert Westervelt.

Zscaler is pushing past its SaaS-based Web filtering technology, extending its add-on services to include licenses for cloud-based antimalware, data loss prevention and secure Wi-Fi services and aiming at Websense customers eager to shed outdated on-premise appliances.

Partners say the San Jose, Calif.-based vendor has been a solid choice for companies that are ripping out legacy, on-premise secure Web gateways that primarily were used for URL filtering capabilities to gain end-user productivity improvements. By tweaking DNS settings to send traffic through Zscaler’s platform, companies gain the same Web filtering controls and protection against known malicious websites, said Mark Robinson, president of Findlay, Ohio-based solution provider CentraComm, which has partnered with Zscaler for about three years…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

It’s not a question of if, but of when: Most of enterprise computing will eventually be sucked up into the public cloud, kind of like the rapture in slow motion. This is not exactly a radical notion, but signs of a great skyward event keep multiplying. Last week, Salesforce sent up a flare with the announcement of Wave, its new cloud analytics platform.

Although it’s far from the first public cloud analytics play — Birst along with such startups as Adatao, Platfora, Tidemark, and many others rolled out first — the announcement of Wave is a seminal event. Wave’s introduction is important because it sets up shop atop repositories of existing customer data already stored in the public cloud by Salesforce customers. This is a sort of triple play:…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Frederic Paul.

Last month, I wrote about what Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst had to say about applications finally overshadowing infrastructure. But the rise of apps is only one of the big changes roiling the IT landscape. Cloud computing has had an equally dramatic effect. Has the cloud already won? Yes… and no

So I asked Whitehurst if the cloud had already won the war for IT infrastructure, but he gave me a more nuanced response than I expected: “I think there’s a new architecture combining computing and storage in an easily managed centralized data center,” he said. “Scaling out that architecture… That’s clearly winning.”…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) has released two new standards for cloud computing, in an attempt to “put some order in the chaos” for users. The generally accepted definition of cloud computing was put together by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with the final version hitting the stands in September 2011. In it, cloud computing is defined as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources…that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

Yet the new standards from the ISO give a largely similar definition, choosing to call cloud computing an “evolving paradigm.” The document’s assessment of cloud’s key concepts – including broad network access, measured service, multi-tenancy, on-demand self-service, rapid elasticity and scalability, and resource pooling – ring very true with the NIST ruling…

Grazed from Microsoft. Author: PR Announcement.

Microsoft on Monday announced it will provide free cloud-computing and research applications to medical researchers working on the Ebola virus. "One of the things tomorrow morning we’re going to do is make available Azure computer power to the research community," CEO Satya Nadella said at a presentation in San Francisco.

Azure is the name of Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, essentially a group of data centers that allow users to access large amounts of information and computing power remotely over the Internet. "In addition we have some tools that Microsoft researchers built to be able to do vaccine discovery, so we want to take all of that and make it available for the research community," said Nadella. Microsoft’s research division is soliciting cloud computing proposals for projects that are working toward “developing a better understanding of the spread and cure of the Ebola virus,” according to the company announcement. “Qualifying proposals will be awarded allocations of Microsoft Azure compute and storage resources.” Ebola has killed more than 4,500 people in West Africa.

Grazed from CSOOnline. Author: Pierluigi Paganini.

The rapid diffusion for the cloud computing paradigm and promised benefits for the adoption of cloud infrastructure are attracting a growing number of businesses and organizations. Of course, it is essential for organizations to maximize the benefits of migration to cloud architecture by reducing costs and minimizing risks.

Cloud computing represents a fundamental change in how companies use and provide their services. For many small and midsize businesses, it represents a choice to compete in a business environment with powerful competitors. IT managers are today inundated with countless business proposals. For this reason, I will give you some useful insights for moving workloads to the cloud…