Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Bulter.

A group of companies that sell products to build private clouds has determined a price at which it claims it is less expensive to operate a private cloud compared to using Amazon Web Service’s IaaS public cloud. A report from the vendors – which include a collocation provider, a cloud management vendor and a network operator – attempts to address a question many organizations may be considering: When is it better to use a public cloud versus a managed hosting or collocation environment? The case study finds that if an organization is spending more than $7,644 in Amazon’s cloud each month, then it can be cheaper to operate a private cloud.

But analysts say it’s difficult to put an exact dollar figure on when a private cloud will be more cost effective than a public cloud; there are just too many factors to consider, says IDC analyst Melanie Posey. “It’s very hard to make sweeping statements,” she says in an email…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Loggly has secured $15 million in new venture funding from private equity firms, and it has also released a new solution that aims to reduce the time developers spend on identifying and troubleshooting problems. Headquartered in San Francisco, the cloud-based log management solutions provider on Tuesday said it plans to use the additional funding to "support its areas of differentiation," which include engineering, sales and marketing.

Harmony Partners led the Series C financing round, while existing investors Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, Cisco (CSCO), Data Collective and True Ventures all increased the size of their investments. This funding round brings the company’s total financing to date to $33.4 million. Loggly received $8 million in Series B funding from investors in September 2013…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-funding-and-finance/101414/loggly-secures-15-series-c-financing-releases-problem-solving-so

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Andrew Nusca.

IBM and SAP plan to announce on Tuesday that they will partner to offer cloud computing services to companies. Specifically, IBM will provide cloud infrastructure services to SAP, which will run its business applications—collectively dubbed the HANA Enterprise Cloud—on top of them.

For IBM, it’s the second megawatt deal of the year with a technology industry peer as it continues to stake ground through large cloud computing partnerships. In July, it announced it would partner with Apple AAPL -0.33% to sell phones and tablets (and related applications and services) to business customers…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Palo Alto Networks, the leader in enterprise security, today extended its leadership in security services for private, hybrid and public cloud with the latest release of its virtual firewall series (VM-Series). Enterprises are keen to take advantage of the agility, scalability and cost benefits of cloud-based virtual data centers (VDCs) by building their own private cloud, purchasing public cloud services from providers, or adopting a hybrid cloud approach. Most enterprises are ultimately aiming for the portability of both the application and security policies, regardless of where the application is deployed.

However, when it comes to security, most public cloud environments are based on inconsistent network architectures common in traditional data centers and still rely on legacy security technologies – such as stateful inspection and port-based firewalls – that aren’t capable of securing public cloud or hosted VDCs against sophisticated cyber threats…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Ann Bednarz.

There’s no easy path to the cloud for large companies with decades of legacy IT investments. Roughly 20 percent of Progressive Insurance’s business applications run in a SaaS model, while 80 percent run on the company’s own hardware. On the infrastructure side, Progressive uses IaaS, but mainly for experimentation.

It would be “a whole new ballgame” if Progressive were some medium-sized business that didn’t have an extensive data center footprint, says CIO Ray Voelker, but “we already have assets we own that we can leverage.” Chris Drumgoole, chief operating officer for cloud at General Electric, says legacy is “where it’s more interesting for us; we need to be more thoughtful there.”…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

The cloud undoubtedly has its many benefits. It’s accessible from many devices, it’s scalable, sharable, and supports dozens of apps that can be useful to you in your professional or personal life and offers almost infinite backup and storage. But it’s these very features that you find valuable that also put you at risk for a data breach. And that’s something that managed service providers (MSPs) who offer cloud-based file sharing services, must protect against.

A report by Ponemon Institute titled “Data Breach: The Cloud Multiplier Effect” addresses these concerns, and highlights the ways in which the risk of a data breach in the cloud is multiplying. It is therefore the job of MSPs to address and ease these justified worries. Through educating, making aware, and preparing your users, minimizing and mitigating security threats is very possible even as the Cloud expands. Here’s a look at how…

Grazed from CNNMoney. Author: Editorial Staff.

Today at VMworld® 2014 Europe, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) announced a wave of new cloud management offerings and capabilities including updates to VMware vRealize™ Suite 6, a cloud management platform purpose-built for the hybrid cloud. VMware today also unveiled a major update of VMware vRealize Operations™ (formerly VMware vCenter™ Operations Management Suite™), the new VMware vRealize Code Stream to enable DevOps teams to deliver frequent, reliable software releases, and the beta launch of VMware vRealize Air™ Compliance, a new addition to VMware’s family of cloud management software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

IT organizations today face a mix of conflicting priorities. IT must improve speed and agility to ensure success with new mobile, social, big data and web-scale applications. But also maintain control to ensure security, compliance and efficiency managing traditional IT systems. On top of that, IT is also tasked with managing both modern application architectures as well as traditional three-tier business applications that are both deployed on-premises or in the public cloud…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Jack Clark and Dina Bass.

EMC Corp. has agreed to acquire cloud-computing startup Cloudscaling Group Inc., pushing to make its storage products work better with a set of free software tools. The deal is for less than $50 million, according to people with knowledge of the situation, who asked not to be identified because the transaction isn’t public.

Cloudscaling helps companies manage large numbers of computers that are linked together by OpenStack, a free open-source technology developed by companies including EMC and Oracle Corp. Cloudscaling also designs technology to make it simple to connect computers running OpenStack to so-called public clouds, operated by providers like Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Cloud computing continues to steamroll ahead as more organizations adopt the platform, but to be clear, what we’re really seeing is an increase in how organizations are utilizing the Internet. Marketing terms aside, there are more resources out there, better underlying systems for support and a greater need to distribute data.

When cloud computing first emerged, we had some distinct models to work with. Hybrid became the more popular option among enterprises. But the challenge was connecting a public and private instance together to form a robust and secure cloud environment. Now, technology has come far enough where creating that link is much easier…

Grazed from Zacks. Author: Editorial Staff.

On Oct 10, 2014, we issued an updated research report on Citrix Systems, Inc. (CTXS – Analyst Report), a leading provider of virtualization, networking and cloud computing solutions in the U.S. Citrix is concentrating on three broad markets: Desktop virtualization, Cloud Infrastructure and networking, and Collaboration and sharing. As desktop virtualization has become a top priority for any IT set-up, Citrix is continuously introducing innovative products that will facilitate business flexibility, security and centralized management system.

We believe the global trend toward virtualization and cloud computing will facilitate Citrix to retain its momentum in the long term. Moreover, both its XenMobile and XenApps are gaining significant market traction in the highly lucrative enterprise mobility segment and Windows app virtualization…