Grazed from Microsoft.  Author: PR Announcement.

Starting from today customers are able to buy Microsoft Azure usage credits through Open Licensing programs.
Open License is Microsoft’s volume licensing option intended for corporate, academic, charitable, or government organizations that wants to pay as you go.  The Open License agreement requires a minimum initial purchase of five software licenses, but then you can acquire additional licensed products through Open License in any quantity at any time during the two-year agreement term.

Azure credits could be bought in blocks of $100 and the total amount purchased is summed in a single OSA key and last for 12 months.  This new purchasing option fits between the large Enterprise Agreements and the nearly-unmanageable (at least for a mid-size company) credit card payment method, it allows to create a budget and consequentely buy upfront as needed.

Grazed from CloudComputing Today.  Author: Arnal Dayaratna.

ActiveState today announced the release of Stackato 3.4, the polyglot platform as a service based on Cloud Foundry. Key features of the release include advanced version control functionality that allows customers to roll-back an infrastructure to a previous version with zero downtime. Version 3.4 also features enhanced audit controls that give administrators streamlined visibility regarding user access to the platform.

Today’s release also contains enhancements to Stackato’s quota usage dashboard in conjunction with more granular application monitoring and management functionality. Moreover, Stackato 3.4 contains notable upgrades to its system upgrade functionality that facilitate upgrades from one version of the platform to another…

Grazed from RSA Conference.  Author: Robert Moskowitz.

As popular as cloud computing has become, and as fast as it continues to grow, it brings with it a whole new set of data security concerns. Without a robust cloud strategy for ensuring security capabilities, cloud computing has little strategic value, particularly since a single data breach can cost an organization far more than it has gained from the advantages of cloud-based data storage.

Even without the reality of lost or compromised data, the mere possibility of compromise gives administrators of public, private, and hybrid clouds nightmares. The very nature of cloud computing is in fact problematic, as organizations contract with third-party providers for a variety of cloud services but are frequently reluctant to permit them access to sensitive cloud-based data…

Grazed from MSPMentor.  Author: Michael Brown.

That may not be something that YOU (as an managed service provider) are saying at this point, but it is likely still something that clients or potential clients are saying. Or more accurately, not saying, but thinking. In this funny and lighthearted (but very accurate) article at news.com.au, the cloud is broken down into a much more approachable subject. This is an important way for MSPs to understand the cloud, if their goal is to persuade less cloud-educated decision makers that the cloud is a great solution for their business.

National Institute of Standards and Technology – Fairly Unhelpful

People shouldn’t feel bad if they still haven’t wrapped their heads around the cloud. “Cloud Computing” has been mentioned more than 48 million times on the internet, and ultimately the US Government decided that is should be accurately defined. By the National Institute of Standards and Technology, no less.

“It came up with this: ‘cloud computing can and does mean different things to different people.’”…

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Frank Konkel.

The Central Intelligence Agency is now officially an Amazon Web Services cloud consumer. Less than 10 months after a U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge ended a public battle between AWS and IBM for the CIA’s commercial cloud contract valued at up to $600 million, the AWS-built cloud for the intelligence community went online last week for the first time, according to a source familiar with the deal.

The cloud — best thought of as a public cloud computing environment built on private premises — is yet far from its peak operational capabilities when it will provide all 17 intelligence agencies unprecedented access to an untold number of computers for various on-demand computing, analytic, storage, collaboration and other services…

Grazed from WallStreetTech. Author: Andrew Waxman.

With firms increasingly dependent on mobile computing platforms for everything from customer apps to enterprise process management, there’s been an upswing in software development and management activity taking place in the cloud. Jumping on the mobile trend also means that potential for exposure to hackers, malware, and plain old code errors is higher than before. Yet the ever-increasing importance of speed-to-market makes it more and more likely that data security and data privacy will be neglected. With firms focused on critical state-of-the-art trading and payment apps, how to make sure they are not?

Few research studies have been completed on the success rate of major cloud implementations. However, it should not be a complete surprise that while companies will publicly assert confidence in their cloud implementations, in private they may have more doubts and issues to deal with. This is not surprising. First, like any other project, implementations of cloud-based applications are subject to execution failure…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Sachin Shridhar.

In the evolving world of IT where the only constant is change, students and professionals alike are always looking out for IT trends, and skills they need to update themselves with in order to stay relevant. According to Forrester, the global cloud computing market is set to explode from US$40.7 billion in 2011 to US$241 billion by 2020.

CIOs everywhere are dedicating increasingly larger budgets to cloud computing, indicating the growing importance of clouds in many organizations’ IT strategies. This comes as no surprise, considering the task and cost efficiency of cloud for daily business operations. Higher cloud adoption will come with increasing demands for people who can operate them. IT professionals who also become cloud experts are likely to find their expertise highly valued by many organizations preparing for this impending cloud explosion…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

MSD Capital has made a "multi-million dollar" capital investment in Eagle Eye Networks, an Austin, Texas-based cloud surveillance security company. Announced on Thursday, the Series B funds will be used to further expand the Eagle Eye Security Camera Video Management System (VMS) to "meet the rapidly growing" demand from its customers, the company said.

Austin Ventures and Enrique Salem, former CEO of Symantec (SYMC) and current board Member at FireEye, a Milpitas, California-based network security company, also participated in the financing round. "Cloud technology is transforming the video surveillance industry, with broad applications spanning both security and business operations," MSD Capital founder Michael Dell said in a statement…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-funding-and-finance/michael-dell-invests-cloud-video-surveillance

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Do you know how much cloud computing is really going on in your organization? If you’re like IT management in most companies and government agencies, you don’t have a clue. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t know how many cloud computing contracts it has or how secure they are, according to a recent audit by the agency’s inspector general, in a report released last week.

In at least one instance, the EPA may not have had access to a subcontractor’s cloud for investigative purposes. Worse, that same subcontractor was not compliant with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which sets security standards for cloud providers. Most IT leaders don’t have a real understanding of how many cloud computing (or other technology) resources are being used — and to what extent — right under their noses. It’s called "shadow IT" for a reason: Those technologies are in the shadows…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Jeramiah Dooley.

Public cloud services have put huge pressures on enterprise IT to compete in a more agile way. When it can take days or even weeks for IT departments to procure and manually set-up necessary networking and storage hardware to support new applications, why wouldn’t employees turn to providers who can meet their needs within minutes?

To meet these demands, the hardware infrastructure needs to be more than fast; it needs to be flexible and scalable with rapid automation to meet the needs of its users. Storage has a key role to play here, with a sophisticated management layer that can separate performance and capacity – independently controlling access speeds and available drive space on an app-by-app basis – it has now become possible to virtualise performance independent of capacity…