Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Google is drawing from the work of the open-source community to offer its cloud customers a service to better manage their clusters of virtual servers. On Monday, the Google Cloud Platform started offering the commercial version of the open-source Mesos cluster management software, offered by Mesosphere.

With the Mesosphere software, "You can create a truly multitenant cluster, and that drives up utilization and simplifies operations," said Florian Leibert, co-founder and CEO of Mesosphere. Leibert was also the engineering lead at Twitter who introduced Mesos to the social media company…

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Shawn Drew.

This year’s edition of the Gartner Hype Cycle shows some big moves on the horizon for cloud computing and big data. Midsize businesses that need these technological advantages to stay competitive have to be ready to stay the course as these technologies are scrutinized.

Gartner Hype Cycle 2014

Gartner recently released the 2014 edition of its Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report, which looks at a range of technologies that are either in their infancy or in the process of changing the face of business technology, and analyzes how industry hype is affecting the perception of the technology that year. Once a technology makes it through the entire cycle, it either becomes obsolete or it becomes an accepted, trusted aspect of the overall technology landscape…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Bulter.

About a year ago there was a big hub-bub about cloud pricing wars. It seemed like every couple of weeks one vendor or another in the public cloud IaaS market was dropping their prices. When one company did it, others seemed to follow suit within days, and sometimes even hours. It’s been a back and forth, cat and mouse game. Who can keep the lowest prices?

Google has hit the road this summer to show off its cloud, and at the company’s recent event in Boston one of the members of the Google cloud platform team, Dan Belcher, made an interesting statement: He said that the price of hardware that powers the cloud is falling at a faster pace than the price of cloud computing services are dropping…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

GreenSQL, the leader in database security and compliance solutions for the cloud, today announced that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and to provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing. GreenSQL is a powerful “database firewall” and compliance solution that adds important security and auditing functionality to cloud-hosted and on-premises databases.

GreenSQL helps protect customers from SQL injection attacks and enables organizations to secure sensitive information (e.g., SSNs, credit card numbers, e-mails and passwords) from unauthorized database access, enforce separation-of-duties, mask sensitive data, monitor and audit data access and meet regulatory compliance requirements…

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…