Author: David

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

After spending the past two years beefing up its cloud storage and file sharing app for use in large enterprises, Box has turned its attention back to small and medium businesses with a new subscription plan. The company today introduced its Starter tier, priced at $5 per user per month for teams of as many as 10 people. It includes pooled storage of 100GB and an individual file size limit of 2GB.

The new Starter tier is sandwiched between the existing Personal plan, which is free for individual users, and the Business plan, which costs $15 per user per month and includes basic IT administration and security features…

Grazed from Lexology. Author: Editorial Staff.

As companies struggle with how to develop cloud strategies that are both cost effective and protect sensitive consumer and corporate data, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) can provide hands-on information to the private sector to help implement a reasonable cloud computing solution. Though NIST provides guidelines to the U.S. Government, the private sector can learn, too. Recently, NIST has stressed that the three major challenge areas for adoption of cloud computing are security, portability and interoperability.

In June, NIST released draft Special Publication (SP 500-299) as part of its ongoing obligation to develop technical and security standards for federal agencies as they adopt cloud computing solutions. This draft has been undergoing further comment and review. While these standards will establish protocol for procurement of cloud services by the federal government, they are likely to impact the use of cloud services and contractual terms in the private sector…

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Tony Bradley.

Wow. No sooner did I finish writing about how the Google and Microsoft outages were not a reason to lose confidence in the cloud, than Amazon went down. The online retail site—and its associated cloud services—were down for just under half an hour Monday afternoon. I stand by my assertion that the sky is not falling, but there’s more to using the cloud than just availability. Amazon.com was the third major cloud service to suffer an outage in the last week.

Over on WindowsITPro.com, Paul Thurrott summed up the hysteria over cloud outages nicely. “And of course, the cloud computing doubters—who, like global warming doubters are increasingly at odds with reality—will argue that such outages prove that our move away from on-premises hardware and local storage is nothing but a temporary trend.”Let’s start with some perspective, breaking down the math like I did yesterday for Google and Microsoft. Amazon was down for about 25 minutes (although I’ve seen reports from 15 minutes to 40 minutes)…

Grazed from UBM Tech.  Author: Event Announcement.

Having grown for four years in a row, the premium CDN World Summit has secured itself as THE world’s leading CDN event in the market.   The CDN World Summit will be held in London on October 1-3, 2013.

In 2012 the event attracted over 350 senior decision maker attendees from all over the world. 33% of the total audience were Board level, CxO level or Director level and boasted a 47% Service Provider attendance!

The CDN World Summit is entering a new chapter in its cycle and is reinforcing its position as an event where the latest strategies and technologies about media and other data delivery will be discussed, but also looking at delivery channels for OTT services in multiscreen environments, convergence between CDNs, Cloud and other content delivery challenges in the future to create a better playing field for telecom/network owners, content providers, datacentres and CDNs alike…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

RiverMeadow Software™ Inc., developer of the world’s only automated server migration solution developed specifically for carrier and service provider clouds, will be participating at VMworld® 2013, August 25-29 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. Now in its 10th year, VMworld has emerged as the leading source for the knowledge and connections businesses need to leverage virtualization and cloud computing technologies.

Many companies face similar challenges when migrating to a cloud environment. With data center demands continuously evolving, businesses are looking for a streamlined and automated way to migrate their first server workloads into the cloud. In a session titled Migrating Server Workloads into vCloud Environments, it’s Never Been Easier, Jay Workman, director, Service Provider Marketing, VMware, and Scott Colgan, Vice President of Marketing at RiverMeadow, will provide an overview of how VMware, working with RiverMeadow, is making it fast, easy and affordable for partners to migrate virtually any server workload into their vCloud® environment — from a competitive cloud or private cloud. The session will be held on Monday, August 26, at 3:30 p.m. (PT)…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Jeff MacMillan.

Despite offering tremendous benefits in convenience, elasticity, transparency, and economy, cloud computing faces a major stumbling block: security. Because cloud computing is well established, many assume that all critical aspects of cloud security are already in place. With 54 percent of U.S.-based organizations using the cloud and more enterprises migrating their data to the cloud, it might be surprising to some that the management of the keys to access encrypted cloud-based data — an important part of cloud security — is hardly up to snuff.

Several cloud providers offer encryption capabilities, directly or indirectly, that can be applied to the cloud. However, today’s approach to key management comes with an inherent security risk, that of key ownership and storage. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) recommends a separation of “lock and key” in the cloud and various compliance regulations are likewise beginning to address this fundamental cloud security issue…

Grazed from PR Newswire. Author: PR Announcement.

Altair today announced the release of CFDCalc, an on-demand and affordable computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application, built on top of Altair’s industry-leading CFD solver, AcuSolve™. Leveraging the reliability, efficiency and near-instant availability of Amazon Web Services (AWS), this innovative cloud application serves as both a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application and as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) application. With this, users can access high-end CFD technology as an online, cloud-based service, and industry experts can take advantage of the vertical framework and easily develop their own vertical CFD applications.

CFDCalc comes with two pre-packaged, special-purpose vertical applications that are developed to solve two common yet challenging CFD problems: fluid mixing in the industrial and consumer mixing industry, and thermal cooling in the electronics industry. Altair will offer additional vertical applications while promoting experts and developers globally to use the framework to develop new applications, further enhancing the portfolio of solutions…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

NaviSite, Inc., a Time Warner Cable Company, today announced thelaunch of NaviCloud Director — a VMware vCloud(R) Powered IaaSplatform that uses VMware vCloud Director(R) 5.1, and is designed toprovide cloud-based businesses a more flexible, customizable,enterprise class, production-oriented hybrid cloud environment.

NaviCloud Director further enhances NaviSite’s public cloud portfolioby offering businesses an IaaS platform designed for trulyvirtualized applications. To build the new platform, NaviSite tookinto account its extensive experience in cloud services in additionto industry needs, upcoming trends and feedback from its customersand partners…

Grazed from FCW.com. Author: Frank Konkel.

In its lawsuit against the federal government filed in July, Amazon Web Services claims IBM’s protest of its $600 million cloud computing contract with the CIA was "untimely" and "meritless," and that’s just a snapshot of a 79-page document sitting before U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Thomas Wheeler.

The lawsuit, unsealed Aug. 20, blasted the Government Accountability Office’s June decision to uphold portions of bid protests filed by Big Blue as irrational and against federal contracting law — a "flawed" decision that AWS argues is based on a technicality and contends would not have changed the CIA’s decision…

Grazed from DZone. Author: Brian Prince.

I just stumbled upon an industry report by Cloud Spectator (www.cloudspectator.com). It ran a test on the top IaaS providers, looking for who had the best performance for the buck. As far as I know, Windows Azure and Microsoft had nothing to do with this report.

The abstract of the report:

With a lack of standardization in the IaaS industry, providers freely use unique terminology to describe their VM resource allocations. How do you compare an ECU to an HPCCU to a vCPU? This report examines the performance and pricing of 5 of the world’s largest IaaS providers over a 5-day period, and provides a process to clearly determine the price-performance value of a cloud provider, addressing the issue of standardization in the marketplace…