Grazed from MarkleyGroup.  Author: Paul Diamond.

For companies that haven’t yet dabbled in the cloud, the types and options seem endless and in some cases, intimidating. Where to even start when choosing what’s best for your company? What’s worse – if you’ve been keeping up with the IT industry buzz on the topic, you know that vendors, analysts and pundits have been touting the best cloud computing solutions and strategies for years.

The reasons for why specific solutions and strategies rise to become considered the “best” are for various motives and factors, and often times, pertain to specific infrastructure scenarios. Within industry coverage and articles that debate these cloud computing solutions and strategies, you will often read the comparison described as the “cloud war.”…

Grazed from CyberSecurity News.  Author: Lee Hazell.

Achieving secure data separation in cloud computing is a necessity for many companies wishing to utilise cloud services as a cost effective method for storage, processing and memory functions. Data separation in cloud computing describes the need to ensure that one consumer of a cloud service cannot interrupt, or compromise, the service or data of another.

As many cloud services rely on virtualisation technologies to offer compute power or storage to consumers, it is possible for a sophisticated attacker to compromise one virtual machine on the box and hop to others. This is an attack methodology that is being seen more and more in cloud computing and presents a real risk to companies that need to have some assurance that their data is safe should another consumer be compromised…

Grazed from Pinnacle.  Author: Editorial Staff.

As more businesses adopt cloud computing and storage practices, data governance and security issues are becoming more apparent. A U.S. judge recently ordered Microsoft to give data stored in Ireland data centers to U.S. law enforcement agencies, despite European data protection laws that make Europe-based subsidiaries of foreign companies abide by European law.

IBM is taking strides to change the way public and private cloud data is stored. According to an IBM press release, its inventors recently patented a technique that helps clients automatically analyze and manage the location where information resides. This enables businesses to comply with regulations governing where data can be stored in different countries and continents…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Linode Founder and CEO Chris Aker has no illusions about challenging Amazon Web Services in the cloud, but that doesn’t mean he cant build a quality cloud. As he explains in this Structure Show interview, quality infrastructure and simple billing can go a long way.

So many conversations about cloud computing focus on Amazon Web Services, Google and which is the biggest company that can drive down prices the most. But there’s a whole other group of people and companies not running webscale applications, people who just want a virtual server that’s inexpensive, runs well and, most importantly, they don’t have to manage…

Grazed from BitCoinMagazine.  Author: Cameron Gray.

The future of cloud storage is decentralization. Imagine being able to rent out your extra hard drive space through an autonomous network and getting paid for it in a cryptocurrency. This is being made possible thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto and platforms such as Storj, Maidsafe, Ethereum and others.  Now that we have the ability to tie P2P currency to resources such as storage space, bandwidth usage, and CPU power, services like Dropbox and Google Drive will be getting a run for their money.

Unlike other 2.0 platforms, Storj has decided to take a “baby steps” approach for developing their software. They want to build their system out in small, modular pieces first so that they can be used as working prototypes. The first of these pieces is a drag-and-drop file hosting web app called Metadisk, which recently had its whitepaper and video tutorial released…

Grazed from Jurist.org.  Author: Jason Kellam.

In a recent proceeding before the US Court, Microsoft was ordered to turn-over email belonging to a user of its hosted mail service. That email belonged to a user outside the US. The email itself was located on a server in a data center in Ireland—outside the US, which should be out of the reach of US authorities and subject to the requirements of the EU privacy laws. Microsoft challenged the order and lost.

They argued that the court lacked jurisdiction over this particular data as it was stored outside the US, and therefore it was not subject to disclosure. They were wrong.  On April 25, 2014, Magistrate Judge James C. Francis of the Southern District of New York issued a memorandum and order upholding a subpoena ordering Microsoft to turn-over information held on a server in a datacenter in Ireland…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

Measuring ROI for cloud usage is no doubt a difficult task, and when prospective clients are considering potential cloud-based MSPs, it may still be something they want to hear about. However each company is different and MSPs need to be able to modify their approaches accordingly. As this article from InformationWeek explains, there are big differences between a new, fast growing company like Airbnb and a monolithic, experienced company like GE, and how they use cloud services such as cloud-based file sharing.

You Merely Adopted the Cloud, We Were Born in It

The perception of the cloud is clearly very different to a company such as Airbnb versus a company like GE. Airbnb, a company that provides a platform where people can rent their apartments or vacation homes directly to strangers via the internet, has never even had its own data center. Six years ago the company launched via cloud services, and subsequently built all of their applications in the cloud…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Dan Heilman.

Treading lightly, Apple acknowledged that it has started to store the personal data Relevant Products/Services of some Chinese users on servers in China. Reuters initially reported that Apple’s success in China led to the first iCloud data center Relevant Products/Services to be located on mainland China. The center was built by Apple and a state-owned telecommunications company, China Telecom, the country’s third-largest wireless carrier.

Apple told Reuters in a statement that China Telecom was added to its list of data center providers in order to improve its iCloud service, which lets users store and access photos and other personal files from multiple devices. Apple said storing the data closer to the iCloud users gives them quicker and more reliable access to it…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Matt Asay.

Despite early marketing hype, public cloud computing has never been popular because it’s cheap. Ultimately, the real driver of public cloud computing services — like Amazon Web Services (AWS) — is convenience, but undergirding that convenience is profound, relentless innovation. While AWS has competition from Microsoft and Google now, no one yet has managed its ability to drive innovation at a frenetic pace.

Not so cheap after all?

Lately, AWS has come under attack from competitors like Google and Microsoft, who are willing to offer significant price discounts, and also from startups and others who believe that they can more cost efficiently run their own infrastructure. Leading this latter pack is investor Brad Feld, who argues:…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lou D’Adamo.

Can using the Cloud really save you money? According to the Huffington Post, Parallels, a software company that enables companies like GoDaddy and Sprint to offer cloud services to small and medium businesses, reported that the cloud services industry grew to $45 billion worldwide last year. Helping to drive that were 6 million small and medium businesses purchasing their first cloud service last year alone. And, the report projects that the market is expected to grow annually at a rate of 28 percent through 2015 to be a $95 billion industry.

A Cloud storage application that you might consider is Google Drive. Google Drive gives you the ability to securely save your important documents to the cloud. This means that your document isn’t physically stored on any one device, but rather, it’s stored on a secure internet server and is accessible from any Internet or data-enabled device…