Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Fay Humphries.

A successful shift to cloud computing involves, among other considerations, identifying the current business and IT issues that need to be addressed, understanding the risks and making the right infrastructure decisions for the business. Moving to the cloud can reduce costs, while meeting the need for the improved computing resources required to drive business, says Jon Tullett, senior editor: news analysis at ITWeb.

"Among the primary reasons CIOs implement cloud computing strategies, which has been borne out by several research houses, is to improve their business agility," he says. "And, while there are companies who haven’t seen any significant advantages and who may in fact have disrupted their business operations by adopting the cloud, there is an increasing number who have increased their competitive edge and seen real benefits."…

Grazed from CloudComputingNews. Author: David Linthicum.

Private cloud was popular in the early days of cloud computing when enterprises struggled with security and control issues. These days, public cloud dominates, as revealed in the recent “State of the Cloud Study” from RightScale. The reasons for the growth of public clouds are pretty clear, including low operating costs, instant scalability, and the ability to better support changing businesses. However, the private cloud still has a place in IT, and understanding what’s about to emerge in the private cloud space will give you a better focus on this pattern of cloud architecture.

Private clouds are being leveraged as points-of-control or interfaces into public clouds. These emerging hybrid clouds or multi-cloud architectures use a tiered approach where the private cloud (tier 1) links to public cloud services (tier 2), and those looking to access cloud services do so using the private cloud services as the primary interface. Then, as needed, the private cloud leverages the public cloud services…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Rick Delgato.

We are in a new technological phase spurring innovation and job creation. One job, the big data architect, offers IT pros great prospects in the growing field of big data analytics. In 2013, 65 percent of IT buyers indicated cloud computing as a top area of investment for 2013. In addition, it’s predicted that by 2015, 60 percent of information workers will access their content via mobile devices.

Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud-computing company Box, described the rapid adoption of mobile and cloud computing as the next phase in technology. For those in the IT space or just the business world in general, technological phases are nothing new. As first mainframes and then PCs were adopted, companies learned to adapt. They adapt their IT infrastructure they run their business off of. They change the way they interact with the consumer, and of course, new technology requires new skills and expertise introducing new job positions in the IT industry…

To view infographic and read more from the source, visit: http://smartdatacollective.com/rick-delgado/223076/latest-technological-phase-and-what-it-pros-should-do-about-it

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Ram Lakshminarayanan.

As far as open source pedigree goes, OpenStack is of a pretty high calibre. Born out of a joint initiative between NASA and Rackspace in July 2010, its main goal was to simplify the management of both private and public cloud computing services deployed on traditional computer hardware. Since then it has attracted the support of many high-profile corporate partners such as Intel, IBM, HP, Cisco, Dell, EMC and Red Hat. Under the guidance of the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity formed in September 2012, the platform has steadily matured into a fully-featured cloud-building platform. OpenStack’s current stable version (codenamed "Icehouse") is the ninth release to date.

Integrating OpenStack into a corporate IT strategy can provide several key benefits. By removing the complexity behind managing and deploying on-demand infrastructure, the platform can dramatically reduce the time required to build applications and bring new products to market…

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud. Author: Francesco Pedulla.

At a recent social media workshop on cloud, we discussed the effect of cloud computing on employment and decided to write a joint blog post addressing this topic. A few months ago, one of us read “Race Against the Machine” by Brynjolfsson and McAfee. The authors argue that digital innovation has “changed how the economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and see their wages and prospects shrink.” Their statement is not an opinion. It is the conclusion of a long, thorough study of empirical data. For the sake of discussion, we will assume it is correct.

Since Brynjolfsson and McAfee talk about innovative technologies that enable machines to replace human workers, the first question we asked ourselves was: can we apply that result to the ongoing cloud revolution? After all, the cloud is a matter of optimization through consolidation, not of replacing workers with machines. Still, the net effect of the consolidation is replacing workers with automated mechanisms. So, the real question is: if the results do apply to the cloud, then would the balance between created and destroyed IT jobs make it so that few people would lose their jobs, if any?…

Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Aaron Ricadela.

SAP SE’s software chief may have one of the toughest jobs in the technology industry: dragging the IT operations of 45,000 businesses into the era of cloud computing. Bernd Leukert, a 20-year company veteran, was promoted to the executive board after the sudden departure of chief technology officer Vishal Sikka in May. Now Leukert is breaking with his predecessor’s focus on fighting Oracle Corp. (ORCL:US) in the database market, and is responding to customers of its market-leading enterprise software who want a clear path for moving their applications to cloud-based systems.

“There is confusion,” Leukert, 47, said in an interview at SAP’s headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. “There’s no debate anymore in the IT industry that the cloud will be the preferred consumption model,” he said, referring to the shift toward delivering software via the Internet instead of installed on clients’ servers. “A road map is something we owe the market.”…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Wolfgang Gentzsch.

Stuttgart HPC Center (HLRS) director Michael Resch will present the ISC Cloud keynote on “HPC & Simulation in the Cloud – How Academia & Industry Can Benefit,” at the conference this September. ISC Cloud, the fifth in the series, will take place September 29 and 30 in Heidelberg, Germany.

As an HPC cloud skeptic in 2011, Resch characterized cloud computing as hype and predicted it would eventually go away. In the following interview with Wolfgang Gentzsch, Chairman of the ISC Cloud Conference and President of the UberCloud, Resch explains why he has come to think much more favorably of HPC cloud over the last three years…

Grazed from CSC. Author: Dr. James Serack.

When I think of the quaint phrase “horseless carriage,” it conjures up for me an image, in black and white, of startled men in bowler hats pointing to a newly invented passing motor car. There was a time when carriages were drawn by horses so the adjective “horseless” was required to communicate the new invention from what was then the norm. But within a decade those motorized vehicles had become the new norm, and the phrase became obsolete. Now we of course just call them cars, and almost everyone owns one.

Recently while in California, waiting for the walk light to cross a busy urban intersection, I felt a bit like those men in the hats. When the traffic light changed to green, ALL the lead cars moved silently forward for several meters – and I found myself surprised by the prevalence of “hybrid cars” on the road. I did not yet expect them to be so common. Maybe soon we also won’t need the “hybrid” adjective as they become the norm on roadways. And significantly, while we get used to the idea, those who live in places where hybrids are common are already taking the next steps to develop new habits and practices for getting the best performance from the next generation of “plug in” hybrids…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Spanning Cloud Apps wants to help Salesforce.com (CRM) administrators with protecting Salesforce1 customers from data loss. The Austin, Texas-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) backup company on Wednesday unveiled Spanning Backup for Salesforce1 Mobile, a new mobile app for Salesforce administrators looking to manage and monitor automated backups and restore activities within the Salesforce platform.

The company said the new product offering allows Salesforce administrators to monitor the statuses of backups; track activities; and receive proactive udates for backup and recovery activities. "Salesforce is investing heavily in mobile, and Spanning wants to be an integral part of the Salesforce ecosystem," Spanning CEO Jeff Erramouspe told Talkin’ Cloud in an interview…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Joseph Tsidulko.

Almost two-thirds of America’s corporate leaders who participated in a recent study believe adoption of cloud computing is good for business. That’s according to The Path to Value in the Cloud survey conducted by Oxford Economics, an international advisory firm, and released by telecom provider Windstream.

Oxford Economics queried 350 executives from across the United States. One-third of the respondents were CEOs, CTOs or COOs; the rest held other executive positions at their companies. The results shed light on how business leaders view the changing IT landscape and shift to virtual infrastructure — insights that solution providers can leverage to sell products and services…

To view slideshow and read more from the source, visit http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/cloud/300073609/corporate-america-agrees-cloud-is-good-for-business.htm