Grazed from SysCon Media.  Author: Dana Gardner.

Over the past five years, the impetus for cloud adoption has been primarily about advancing the IT infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) fabric or utility model, and increasingly seeking both applications and discrete IT workload support services from Internet-based providers.  But as adoption of these models has unfolded, it’s become clear that the impacts and implications of cloud commerce are much broader and much more of a benefit to the business as a whole as an innovation engine, even across whole industries.

Recent research shows us that business leaders are now eager to move beyond cost and efficiency gains from cloud to reap far greater rewards, to in essence rewrite the rules of commerce.  Our latest BriefingsDirect discussion therefore explores the expanding impact that cloud computing is having as a strategic business revolution — and not just as an IT efficiency shift…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

IBM announced it has acquired CrossIdeas , a privately held provider of security software that governs user access to applications and data across on-premise and cloud environments. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Under the burden of more government regulations and increasing sophistication of security threats, business leaders are demanding that IT and security executives implement access governance policies and solutions that provide visibility into operational and IT risks. Based in Rome, Italy, CrossIdeas helps organizations seamlessly manage identities and application access by bridging the gap between compliance, business, and IT infrastructure to help reduce the risk of fraud, conflicts of duties, and human error in business processes…

Grazed from VMWare.  Author: Heidi Pate.

The linked infographic distills data behind what’s driving the demand for IT professionals with cloud-related skills and why the hunt is on for top talent. Scroll through the entire image for a final section of lucrative careers and top companies hiring…

To view the infographic and read more from the source visit:  http://blogs.vmware.com/cloudops/2014/08/skyrocketing-cloud-careers.html

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Jyoti Trehan.

Monitoring was the most important requirement when computers were just computers. What I mean by this statement are those times when there were barely any monitors or consoles attached to the computers, when printing was a costly affair and storing, backing up and restoring data was a big challenge! Monitoring was one of the main features that the mainframes provided to bridge the lack of transparently inherent in the erstwhile computer architectures.

The developers and users alike were inquisitive and actively looking for what was stored on the storage devices and how accurate and correct it was. It was hard for users to remember for a long time what exactly they punched on punch cards and how many cards really got read successfully by the card reader…

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…