Grazed from CIO. Author: Chris Carroll.

The proportion of cloud services purchased through cloud brokers is growing, and Gartner predicts it will soon make up a substantial portion of cloud purchases. The appeal of a cloud broker is obvious: It allows the enterprise to leverage specialized expertise to provision expensive and complicated services. But what is a cloud services broker (CSB), and why do so many companies need one? What’s the impact of CSBs on IT, and should brokering the cloud be done externally or can it be as an internal IT function?

The Role of a Cloud Services Broker

As organizations continue to turn to cloud computing, the demand for specialized expertise to provision the optimal cloud offerings for enterprise business and technical requirements is rapidly increasing. This has led to the swift emergence of CSBs, who help the enterprise with all things cloud: from evaluating cloud service providers to negotiating contracts and documenting cloud vendor deliverables…

Grazed from Gigaom. Author: Derrick Harris.

It’s no secret that the cloud has the potential to be a hacker’s paradise, chock-full of all the password-cracking computing power a trove of stolen credit cards can buy. Surely, though, this type of bad behavior can’t be carried out without any direct financial investment. After all, the free tiers on most cloud computing services are pretty minimal — a single core (probably fairly weak) and maybe a few gigabytes of storage. What can anyone do with that? A whole lot, if they’re clever.

At the Black Hat security conference this week, a pair of professional penetration testers, Rob Ragan and Oscar Salazar of Bishop Fox, showed how they built a functional 1,000-node botnet by stringing together resources from a variety of services. They used it to mine some Litecoin and could have done a whole lot more if they weren’t trying to minimize harm to other cloud users (by being noisy neighbors) or cloud providers (by driving up power bills)…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Jason Hannula.

Even if a business and its leadership embrace cloud computing, and its IT resources no longer spend all of their time maintaining operational systems and fielding business-user password reset requests, it does not mean that IT’s duties in a cloud services relationship have ended. According to Barb Darrow’s article on Gigaom, treating cloud services as an option that can be purchased and promptly forgotten about creates the potential for the next generation of wasteful shelfware.

Instead of a storeroom of unused, shrink-wrapped license software, cloud resources are prone to over-provisioning, wasteful idle capacity or orphaned resources from past projects. Without active usage monitoring, resource rationalization and cleanup of idle instances, long-term savings or cost reductions are at risk…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Koblalka.

Data center services provider QTS Realty Trust (QTS) has added hybrid connectivity features to its Enterprise Cloud service. QTS Hybrid Network Connectivity provides high-performance networking options that allow customers to integrate seamlessly with a variety of IT architectures, according to the company.

"Connectivity continues to be a key component in our customers’ business strategy, and by utilizing QTS Hybrid Network Connectivity, enterprises can easily manage their public and private cloud as a single environment, creating higher performance at a lower cost," Jim Reinhart, chief operating officer for QTS’s development and operations, said in a prepared statement…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/hybrid-cloud-computing/qts-now-offers-hybrid-connectivity-enterprise-cloud-solution

Grazed from EUKHost. Author: Asher Ross.

Cloud computing and IT demands are directly proportional to each other. To deliver consistency with security in cloud many service providers have started a different experiment with connected network servers to improve demand and deployment model in Cloud computing. Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) are the platforms on which businesses with cloud models needs improvement in storage capacity and service waterfall model.

In Cloud computing connected network of servers is grouped together to manage and maintain resources of a website in any critical traffic situation. The storage needs of IT industry have increased from 39% to 64% from last year, but a need for more advanced technology for storing large databases was required. Before block storage in the cloud invented businesses with large database capacity used additional servers to store data online and paid for huge server instances…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Mike Kavis.

Last week I wrote about Rackspace’s pivot from a pure play IaaS vendor to a managed service provider. In the article I questioned how the smaller, niche IaaS providers could compete with the “big three” IaaS companies and whether playing the price war game was a losing choice. I spent this week researching the answer to that question and here is what I found out.

Thoughts on Rackspace

I interviewed top executives from CloudSigma, DigitalOcean, and ProfitBricks and asked them about their thoughts on Rackspace’s announcement. Not one of the three companies was surprised with Rackspace’s move to managed services. In fact, Rackspace started out as an MSP before going head to head with the large IaaS providers and this area has always been their strength…

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Federal Trade Commission wants to upgrade its computer networks and software, and the key focus is the cloud — something the Securities and Exchange Commission has used for years, according to Federal News Radio. Federal Trade Commission CIO Bajinder Paul said the agency is interested in how cloud computing can swiftly bring operational capabilities to employees, create a path for innovation and aggregate acquisition initiatives across the agency, according to the report.

Paul said the agency wants better cloud-based data analytics tools to take advantage of enterprise applications that bring in more data. SEC CIO Thomas Bayer said his agency already uses 50 cloud-based applications.

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

San Jose, California-based data storage provider Quantum (QTM) has acquired Symform’s cloud storage services platform. Quantum said it plans to leverage Symform’s technology to expand its cloud software capabilities and service offerings in data protection and scale-out storage.

"We will be integrating Symform software and our platforms to create simple, very cost-effective cloud service options," Quantum CEO Jon Gacek said in a prepared statement. Quantum also will hire Symform’s development team, including co-founder Bassam Tabbara, to help create and launch new cloud services…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Are your sales reps as aggressive as they could be when it comes to selling cloud services to customers? Is it time for the channel to get over it and embrace the cloud? Cloud Guru CEO Terry Hedden at ChannelCon this week held several sessions on how channel partners can make more money selling cloud services. He revealed several approaches and strategies he’s used in the past to close these kinds of deals. Most of his advice revolved around what channel partners should look for in their salespeople, and how they can spot trustworthy salespeople. Does your sales team (if you even have one) need help? Here are five ways your salespeople can close more cloud deals.

1. Dress to impress. While this first tip might seem elementary to you, it’s one that frequently gets overlooked. Don’t go into a meeting dressing like a sterotypical IT guy (meaning a golf shirt and khakis). "A lot of what you say is on your face, and the clothes that you wear," Hedden says. You want them to treat you like a salesperson, not an IT guy…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Paul Steiner.

With Gartner predicting that half of all enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by 2017, its obvious that cloud technology is permeating all levels of organisations. What this also means is that nothing is black and white with cloud computing. Enterprises are deploying different forms of cloud solutions in ways that best support their business needs and organisational infrastructure.

There is no silver bullet that will give companies the best possible outcomes with cloud computing – each organisation needs to determine what data and departments will best benefit from cloud solutions, and positively impact the bottom line. The trend I see growing the fastest in the cloud computing space is that of customisation, as enterprises build out cloud infrastructures and solutions that work best for them…