Grazed from FinancialTimes. Author: Barney Jopson.

Amazon shares tumbled almost 10 per cent after big investments in cloud computing contributed to a larger-than-expected loss and led the company to forecast that it would stay in the red in the third quarter. The online retailer reported a net loss of $126m, or 27 cents per share for the quarter to June 30, against analysts’ expectations of a loss of 15 cents, prompting a fall of 9.8 per cent in its shares to $323.66.

Tom Szkutak, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said the loss partly reflected spending on Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing business, which is used by organisations ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency to Netflix. He said usage of AWS services was growing at more than 90 per cent and added: “With the great, strong usage growth rates we’re seeing we’re also investing in capex, in infrastructure to support that growth.”…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Vizard.

Given the proliferation of VMware across the enterprise extending the reach of that virtual machine platform into the cloud should be a no brainer. In reality, that process has been more arduous than most providers of managed services would have liked. The good news is that VMware is finally gaining enough cloud critical mass to make it worthwhile for MSPs to extend the reach of their VMware services.

While MSPs currently make a lot of money managing instances of VMware on premise, the number of options for deploying VMware in the cloud has been comparatively limited. Initially, VMware has sought to partner with cloud service providers to accomplish that goal. But many cloud service providers prefer open source virtual machines because they would rather not have to incur licensing fees for virtual machine software…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Alex Barinka.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) will supply cloud services to the government of California, letting more than 400 state and local agencies save money by pooling their computing resources. IBM will store data and software on remote servers in a service called CalCloud, available to all state and local government bodies, the company said today in a statement. The arrangement lets agencies pay only for the computing workload they need.

IBM is counting on cloud computing for growth after nine straight quarters of declining revenue, dragged down by weak demand for hardware and falling sales in markets like China. Cloud technology has been a conundrum for the Armonk, New York-based company because it can reduce demand for hardware, since companies rent computing power rather than assembling their own data centers…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

Amazon Web Services is unquestionably a disruptive technology force – prior to them essentially inventing cloud computing, organizations had to acquire and manage their own infrastructure and hence expend significant capital to grow. Since AWS and other cloud vendors popularized their model, infrastructure can be bought just like a utility. Like electricity or telecommunications, computing infrastructure costs can be closely matched to revenue.

One of the criticisms of AWS however, revolves around the fact that they have just so many different product offerings – I’ve never had the patience to count the individual SKUs that AWS offers but the number is massive. That’s great when it comes to choice, but difficult when it comes to getting a good handle on what total solutions might cost…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Cloud computing, new applications and a lot more user connectivity are all driving forces around the data center evolution. In fact, the data center has become the home of all modern technologies. Businesses are now building their entire organizational model around the capabilities of IT. Through it all, pressure continues to mount on data center operators to run high-efficiency environments capable of good power control.

Power consumption in the data center continues to be a rising trend. The need to provide redundant power systems with high reliability and availability of compute resources is a major driving force for the increase in power utilization. Some data centers use just as much power for non-compute or “overhead energy” like cooling, lighting and power conversions, as they do to power servers…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Maxwell Cooter.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and ActiveState have teamed up to offer enterprises the ability to get trained in a multitude of different cloud systems, without being tied to a particular vendor. The organisers of the IT Cloud Computing Conference (IC3) claim it will not only offer IT managers the chance to get hands-on experience of different cloud vendors, but also enable them to evaluate platforms and demonstrate proofs of concept for cloud implementations.

IC3, which will be held in San Francisco in October, will provide attendees with first-hand experience of products from Amazon, Google, Chef, Puppet and various others. A notable omission, however, is Microsoft, although ActiveState’s Bernard Golden, one of the conference trainers, said it was possible that Microsoft could still join…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Andy Greenberg.

Hackers have long used malware to enslave armies of unwitting PCs, but security researchers Rob Ragan and Oscar Salazar had a different thought: Why steal computing power from innocent victims when there’s so much free processing power out there for the taking? At the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas next month Ragan and Salazar plan to reveal how they built a botnet using only free trials and freemium accounts on online application-hosting services—the kind coders use for development and testing to avoid having to buy their own servers and storage.

The hacker duo used an automated process to generate unique email addresses and sign up for those free accounts en masse, assembling a cloud-based botnet of around a thousand computers. That online zombie horde was capable of launching coordinated cyberattacks, cracking passwords, or mining hundreds of dollars a day worth of cryptocurrency…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Curtis J. Franklin.

The cloud computing startup race shows no real sign of slowing. It seems that few weeks go by without news of a world-changing cloud or cloud service startup, and yet the world seems to roll along as before. In some cases, vendors are still trying to "cloudwash" older products and services by slapping a cloud or Something-as-a-Service label on them. With all the news and noise, how do you know which cloud service startups are worth watching? You can start with these 7 companies.

It’s important to note that "startup" can have a different meaning in the cloud world than it does in the land of bricks and mortar. Some of the companies listed here have been in existence for three or more years but have only begun to make their presence known in a big way in the last 18 months or so…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

My Digital Shield (MDS) today unveiled a new security solution that brings enterprise-level protection to small businesses. The Wilmington, Delaware-based security-as-a-service (SECaaS) provider also launched a certified channel partnership program that enables managed service providers (MSPs), solution providers and value-added resellers (VARs) to offer its new small business solution to customers.

Andrew Bagrin, MDS’s CEO, said he believes the new solution and program can provide partners with a consistent revenue stream. "The recurring revenue model is a simple upfront sell that leads to recurring revenue," he told Talkin’ Cloud. "You can have little and flat sales every month, but over time, the revenue will grow tremendously and become a consistent source of income."…

Grazed from CloudComputingInfo. Author: Editorial Staff.

OpenNebula has just released the Beta version of its OpenNebula 4.8, codename “Lemon Slice”, that finally introduces the long awaited support for public clouds providers others than Amazon AWS. Specifically we are talking about the support for Microsoft Azure, rumored for the first time in 2010 and officially announced yesterday at OSCON (O’Reilly Open Source Convention) and for IBM SoftLayer, announced in May and introduced in this release.

The support for multiple public cloud providers responds to a specific demand of many enterprises to have more freedom to choose different partners that could suite different location/performance needs according to the emerging trend of a more “open” hybrid cloud.