Grazed from GeekWire. Author: Todd Bishop.

Google is seeking to formally intervene in a lawsuit filed by Amazon against a former Amazon Web Services employee who left the Seattle company and took a job with Google’s cloud computing division. The move by Google is revealed in a new filing in King County Superior Court in Seattle. By intervening in the case, Google says it wants to limit what it describes as an attempt by Amazon to use the legal discovery process to obtain “highly confidential information pertaining to Google’s cloud computing business.”

Amazon, in turn, says its own confidential information is at risk as a result of Google hiring the former Amazon Web Services strategic partnerships manager, Zoltan Szabadi, for a job with Google Cloud Platform. Amazon’s suit was filed against Szabadi in June, seeking to enforce the terms of his standard non-compete agreement with Amazon…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Microsoft has developed a document management add-on for Office 365 intended for lawyers, signaling a possible interest by the company in creating vertical-industry tools for the suite. Microsoft announced the product, called Matter Center for Office 365, Monday, saying it’s in limited preview and available via a beta program to which customers can apply.

The company provided few details about how the product works and what features it has, focusing instead on the fact that it is closely integrated with Office 365. Customers will be able to use Matter Center from within the suite’s interface and components, like the Word and Excel apps, the SharePoint Online collaboration server and the OneDrive for Business cloud storage service…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Lumen21, an award-winning global technology firm specializing in compliance and technology, today launched Lumen21 Compliant Cloud Computing, a comprehensive cloud computing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) that is built to be fully compliant with an organization’s specific regulatory requirements.

Lumen21 Compliant Cloud Computing follows the CSF (Common Security Framework) of HITRUST, which is a certifiable framework used by organizations. HITRUST CSF provides organizations with a comprehensive, flexible, efficient and certifiable approach to regulatory compliance and risk management…

Flexera Software, the leading provider of next-generation software licensing, compliance and installation solutions for application producers and enterprises, announced today the launch of InstallAnywhere 2014.  The new release simplifies deployment of multi-tier applications and adds support for the latest versions of Windows, Apple, Linux and virtual applications.

Agile development is increasing the frequency of software releases and, as a result, the time and effort around developing software installers.  InstallAnywhere 2014 is the only multi-platform installation solution capable of automatically detecting and removing previous versions of an application, and correctly upgrading a previous version on an existing customer’s PC. This new standard installation framework simplifies development and installation of upgrades for application producers.

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Jack Clark.

Key components of Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s Azure cloud-computing service are currently unavailable for users around the globe. The world’s biggest software maker said today that Azure, which lets businesses access computing resources and run programs via the Internet, is undergoing a service interruption in at least six of its major components in multiple data centers around the world.

Azure, which competes against rival businesses from Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., also experienced some outages in August. It’s unusual for cloud outages to affect more than one data center at once, and this is Microsoft’s most severe Azure interruption since some storage tools went offline in February 2013…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-18/microsoft-s-cloud-computing-service-azure-experiencing-outage.html

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: John Dixon.

Last week, Chris Ward and I hosted a breakout session at Cloudscape 2014, GreenPages’ annual customer Summit. We spoke about cloud service models today (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), as well as tomorrow’s models — loosely defined as XaaS, or Anything-as-a-Service. In this post, I’ll discuss XaaS: what it is and why you might want to consider using it.

First, what is XaaS? Is this just more marketing fluff? Why do we need to define yet another model to fully describe cloud services? I contest that XaaS is a legitimate term, and that it is useful to describe a new type of cloud services — those that make use of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS all neatly delivered in one package. Such packages are intended to fully displace the delivery of a commodity IT service…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider CloudSigma has signed on to Equinix Cloud Exchange to give a boost to its hybrid cloud solutions portfolio. CloudSigma is also hoping to expand its global cloud footprint and make it easier to access its services around the world.

This announcement follows up on the October 2013 news that CloudSigma had expanded its presence in the U.S. using Equinix’s DC6 International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Washington, D.C. The addition of a relationship with Equinix for its cloud interconnect solution expands CloudSigma’s footprint even more, providing it with the potential for accelerating adoption of its own cloud infrastructure services…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.

Google and Mesosphere today announced a partnership that brings support for Mesos clusters to Google’s Compute Engine platform. While the Mesos project and Mesosphere aren’t quite household names yet, they are quickly becoming important tools for companies that want to be able to easily scale their applications, no matter whether that’s in their own data centers, in a public cloud service, or as a hybrid deployment.

With this collaboration between Google and Mesosphere, Cloud Platform users will now be able to set up a Mesosphere cluster on Google’s servers in less than 10 minutes. Developers get to choose between two basic installs: a development cluster with four instances, eight virtual CPUs and 30GB of memory for prototyping their applications, or a production-ready install with 18 instances, 36 virtual CPUs and 136GB of memory. If those two options don’t fit, they can also create their own custom clusters…

Grazed from SooperArticles. Author: Lauren Ellis.

Cloud computing has enabled companies to operate at lower expenses and startup costs, and also advanced mobility and access factors. Despite all these advancements in the technology and capabilities, there are a multitude of risks that need to be assessed and addressed as appropriately as possible. Regarding the processes and protocols of privacy and security in the cloud, there seems to be a lingering haze of confusion and doubt. The latest spike in hacks only furthermore fuels this, with the increase in cybercriminals and other data breaches of large enterprises. Thankfully, nowadays, cutting edge security software is to block off unauthorized access and terrible data leaks.

Information technology professionals continually quote cloud security as one of their leading worries. The purpose following this is the massive amount of treasured possessions and information saved through cloud storage. As per statement of Insulation Partners principal analyst Marian Wright, "Given the latest progressions in cloud technology and acceptance, information tech professionals and chief information security officers are suggested to employ more advanced and more suitable tactics for cloud security defenses…

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is becoming mainstream and a familiar concept at all levels of society. A recent survey by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) estimated that approximately 55 percent of the adult population had heard of the term. However cloud computing has not yet reached the stage in Australia where mainstream newspapers devote entire supplements to the topic, as that august UK journal, The Times, did recently with the publication of its 25 page ‘Cloud for Business’ report.

It’s full of useful stuff. There’s a two page spread "Understanding the Cloud Ecosystem" that explains the distinctions and the interplay between public, private and hybrid cloud. Another looks at the role of the cloud integrator: an organisation that manages a business’ multiple private and public cloud services…