Grazed from Reuters. Author: Teppei Kasai.

Silicon Valley-based VMware Inc said it will form a cloud computing partnership with China Telecom Corp, expanding in China at a time when many U.S. technology firms’ businesses there are experiencing fallout from a cyber security squabble. VMware said on Tuesday it will work with China Telecom to build a hybrid cloud service to be operated by the state-owned company, China’s biggest cloud service provider.

Hybrid services can be used to combine private infrastructure such as on-premises data centers with public cloud services. U.S. equipment and software providers such as IBM Corp and Cisco Systems Inc have seen their China sales drop after last year’s revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of U.S. spying…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: John Riberio.

Amazon Web Services is offering on its Marketplace annual subscriptions to over 90 software products, which could help customers cut software costs by over 40 percent, the Amazon.com unit said. Customers can purchase AWS Marketplace products on an annual subscription basis and have unlimited use of the software for that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance for the next 12 months, wrote Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for Amazon Web Services, in a blog post on Monday.

Users can apply one annual subscription to a Marketplace software product to one EC2 instance, Amazon said in its help section. The products on offer under the annual subscription program include those from software vendors such as Alert Logic, Barracuda Networks, Citrix Systems, Fortinet, Riverbed Technology and Sophos…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

The benefits of OpenStack, a free and open-source software cloud computing platform, from an end-user perspective are clear. Transitioning to a cloud computing environment promises many benefits, including greater economies of scale and greater flexibility to adopt new application workloads.

With these benefits, however, come new challenges – such as the need to control and re-configure this hyper-dynamic environment as application workloads move in, out, and around the networking infrastructure. Many organisations are turning to cloud orchestration solutions to overcome these issues…

Grazed from Livemint. Author: Dina Bass.

Microsoft Corp. is planning its biggest round of job cuts in five years, as the software maker looks to slim down and integrate Nokia Oyj’s handset unit, people with knowledge of the company’s plans said. “The reductions, which may be unveiled as soon as this week, will probably be in areas such as Nokia and the parts of Microsoft that overlap with that business, as well as marketing and engineering,” said the people who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public.

“The restructuring may end up being the biggest in Microsoft history, topping the 5,800 jobs cut in 2009,” two of the people said. “Some details are still being worked out,” two of the people said. The announcement would come one week after chief executive officer Satya Nadella issued his first company mission statement, calling for greater emphasis on mobile devices, cloud-computing and productivity software…

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Rachel Lerman.

Amazon announced last week that it plans to roll out a new sharing service for businesses through Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing division. Amazon Zocalo, which the company describes as a “secure enterprise storage and sharing service,” will compete directly with Microsoft’s SharePoint Online, Dropbox and Box.

Already reaching into every corner of the web, Amazon Web Services has been making a big push into enterprise cloud services. Amazon’s latest service helps the Puget Sound region, or “Cloud City” as we could call it, brand itself as the place where the world’s most innovative cloud companies are located…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Esker, a worldwide leader in document process automation solutions, announced today that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named Esker on Demand as a 2014 Cloud Computing Excellence Award winner. “As our preeminent product offering, it’s rewarding to see Esker on Demand be recognized for its achievements both nationally and globally.”

The Cloud Computing Excellence Award, presented by Cloud Computing magazine, recognizes companies that have most effectively leveraged cloud computing in their efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market. “Receiving this prestigious award is a great honor for our organization, and helps confirm our continued investment and development in the dynamic market of cloud-based document process automation,” said Steve Smith, U.S. Chief Operating Officer at Esker. “As our preeminent product offering, it’s rewarding to see Esker on Demand be recognized for its achievements both nationally and globally.”…

Grazed from GovTech. Author: Todd Newcombe.

Last month, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revealed that Lois Lerner, the tax agency official under investigation for allegedly mistreating Tea Party groups seeking tax exemptions, had lost copies of her emails when her hard drive crashed. But why was she was backing up email on a desktop computer in the first place?

It turns out that Lerner and other IRS officials were supposed to be following a policy of backing up emails on paper. But because the policy was unclear about how an email meets the standard of an official record, it doesn’t appear to have been followed or enforced. When all records were paper-based, retention policies led to the storage of vast amounts of government records in warehouses…

Grazed from TheNation. Author: Nathakom Potejanasaja.

Information technology is being transformed by four powerful trends – mobile, cloud computing, big data and social networking. The first trend is mobile – that is, the use of smartphones, tablet computers and new form-factor personal computers to access applications and information from anywhere.

Second, cloud computing is transforming how organisations think about their IT infrastructure. Customers are transforming their data centres into fully virtualised and automated private clouds while also running some applications in a public cloud. The combination of these two environments is called "hybrid cloud" computing. Increasingly, these hybrid clouds will be "software-defined" – fully automated and policy-driven – delivering new levels of efficiency, agility and choice for IT departments…

Grazed from BSMinfo. Author: Neal Bradbury.

The IT channel exists because businesses — especially SMBs — have a difficult time keeping up with the demands of IT. Yet with the growing adoption of cloud computing, some industry pundits are questioning where the channel fits. To successfully ride this shifting IT environment, channel companies must move their focus from technology provider to service provider. In this way, channel companies can remain relevant and become even more valuable to their overloaded SMB customers.

Take a look at what happens when end users disregard the channel’s value and try to go to the cloud alone. A study conducted by the IT Process Institute (ITPI), for example, revealed that 37 percent of IT projects fail. When the same group honed in on cloud-specific projects, they discovered the failure rate to be much higher, with 76 percent of companies reporting only low to medium success — nearly twice the failure rate of general IT projects. The reason given is the higher degree of automation and new skills required to manage cloud projects…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bsminfo.com/doc/is-cloud-profitability-an-oxymoron-0001

Grazed from DarkReading. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Your cloud, datacenter, and infrastructure all contain flexible and agile components. Your security model should be the same. Cloud computing has become a much more defined platform. There are more use cases, and many more organizations are actively looking at cloud models today than ever before. We have better infrastructure, more resources, and a much more connected user. All of this is fueling tremendous growth in cloud adoption. For example, the latest Cisco Global Cloud Index report predicts that:

• Annual global cloud IP traffic will reach 5.3 zettabytes by the end of 2017. By 2017, global cloud IP traffic will reach 443 exabytes per month (up from 98 exabytes per month in 2012).
• Global cloud IP traffic will increase nearly 4.5-fold over the next five years. Overall, cloud IP traffic will grow at a CAGR of 35 percent from 2012 to 2017.
• Global cloud IP traffic will account for more than two-thirds of total datacenter traffic by 2017…