Grazed from Investors. Author: Reinhardt Krause.

Alibaba Group (NYSE:BABA) would face big challenges taking on U.S. cloud computing service giants, which have boosted capital spending to expand data centers globally, says Oppenheimer. A TechCrunch report speculated that Alibaba, which raised $25 billion in its initial public offering on Friday, could use its war chest to challenge Amazon Web Services, part of e-commerce leader Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN); Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).

Oppenheimer analyst Tim Horan says Alibaba would be playing catch-up. "We believe that the three dominant U.S. cloud providers are years ahead of any potential competition," Horan wrote in a report. "Alibaba would almost certainly need to build out a massive data center infrastructure within the U.S. to gain any sort of traction, since we doubt U.S. enterprises would be willing to store their proprietary data in China regardless of cost…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Editorial Staff.

Red Hat Inc. CEO Jim Whitehurst says the IT industry is undergoing a momentous shift from the client-server model to cloud-mobile, and the vendor of enterprise Linux and other open source software is pushing to come out the other end on top. In the blog post, "Only a Matter of Time, Cloud Winners Will Be Chosen Soon," Whitehurst yesterday outlined recent moves and successes of the company while letting everyone know that enterprise cloud vendor supremacy is the next target.

"Right now, we’re in the midst of a major shift from client-server to cloud-mobile," Whitehurst said. "It’s a once-every-20-years kind of change. As history has shown us, in the early days of those changes, winners emerge that set the standards for that era — think Wintel in the client-server arena…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Nigel Beighton, VP Technology, Rackspace, discusses the five most common cloud problems customers face, and how businesses can overcome these.

1. Support

The most common cloud services complaint is the lack of support and management that comes when businesses are embarking on any level of cloud migration. Businesses need to consider their wider approach to cloud operations first and ask themselves if they are going to run it internally, 24×7 or get someone else to do the hard work of scaling, automation controls and data recovery when needed. Businesses that have a trained staff-base can do this internally, but many don’t so an understanding and sympathetic support layer cannot be overvalued…

Grazed from ChinaTechNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Chinese technology company Lenovo announced a new cloud computing program during its enterprise business strategy and ThinkServer Gen5 launch meeting. The company also published its self-developed cloud platform management solution named ThinkCloud.

Gerry Smith, Lenovo Group’s executive vice president, head of enterprise and head of Lenovo’s North America operations, said that apart from PC, enterprise business is another major profit contributor for Lenovo. By acquiring IBM’s X86 server business, Lenovo aims at the top of the global server market…

Grazed from InsuranceNews. Author: PR Announcement.

In conjunction with its flagship event, Forecast 2014, the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) today announced a new organizational charter, formation of a Cloud Expert Network and new workgroup structure. The new charter provides focus on driving widespread adoption of enterprise cloud computing through best practice sharing and collaboration with the industry on availability of solution choice based on ODCA requirements.

With IT leaders pressured to drive new levels of organizational agility through cloud service delivery and private cloud expected to grow to a $130 billion industry by 2016, the demand for collaboration across enterprises accelerating cloud adoption is acute…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Noelle.

Information Technology’s great advances — mainframes, minicomputers, personal computers and even virtualization — all developed without significant support of standards. Yet standard APIs, operating systems and middleware seem essential today. Networking followed a similar path, with ad hoc TCP/IP defeating formal international standards like OSI, only to be challenged by software-defined and standards-based networking.

The cloud is the fusion of IT and networking, and it’s fair to ask what role standards will play in its evolution. The scope of cloud standards and the variety of cloud models, however, complicate the topic. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has published an excellent summary of cloud standards that are particularly applicable for the government sector but also valuable to enterprises…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ron Miller.

Amazon Web Services better watch its back. And while we’re at it, let’s issue a warning to Microsoft and Google and just about any cloud service you can think of, because there is a new player in town and they have a lot going for them including being based in China and oh, getting a record-setting IPO last Friday that resulted in raising a whopping $25B.

That kind of money gives you some serious clout, and let’s face it even before the IPO, Alibaba was beginning to flex its considerable muscles. We already know Alibaba is a big player in Chinese online shopping and we know it has set its sights on cloud computing. Just recently it opened up its fifth data center, this one in Shenzhen. Heck, it’s even got its fingers in banking. With $25B in additional funds, it can do just about whatever it wants…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) will release two new International Standards for cloud computing in the coming weeks:

• ISO/IEC 17788, Cloud Computing – Overview and Vocabulary
• ISO/IEC 17789, Cloud Computing – Reference Architecture

These standards were developed as a collaborative project between JTC 1 – ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Information Technology – and ITU-T – the International Telecommunication Union’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Is the physical data center an anachronism? Some industry leaders say there’s no longer a need for enterprises to have data centers at all — that everything they need is in the cloud. That’s the word from Matthew Finnie, CTO of Interoute, and a regular advisor to the European Commission on ICT research and innovation. In an interview conducted by TechRadar’s Desire Athow, Finnie says cloud computing is more than adequately filling the need data centers once fulfilled.

Of course, the "cloud" is not operating in a vacuum — it’s powered by multiple data centers. But Finnie’s point is that enterprises should not worry about all that underlying infrastructure. While Finnie’s business is running virtual data centers for clients, it’s interesting to get his take on how these opportunities are unfolding:…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/physical-data-centers-how-quaint-7000033941/

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Linthicum.

Cloud computing experts were called to arms following the iCloud hack that spurred an outcry regarding cloud security. Mainstream reporters sought out anyone with the ability to spell "cloud computing" for their hot take on the hack that publicized personal photos of mostly female celebrities. Most major news outlets across the globe are covering the security breach and, of course, questioning the safety of cloud computing against hacker attacks.

What’s interesting is the cloud case of perception versus reality. This was an attack on Apple’s iCloud, not through some major flaw in the security system. Many hackers likely researched publicly available personal information for these celebrities and figured out their user IDs and passwords. The cloud did not fail these victims — people did…

Read more from the source @ http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/Public-clouds-reputation-fends-off-cloud-hacker-attacks