Author: David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.

When the trappings of public cloud computing — security concerns, lack of control, long-term costs — hinder adoption, many IT teams turn their attention, dollars and deployment efforts to private cloud. Still, not everyone is convinced that private cloud computing is the answer.

Indeed, some people at IT organizations who have embarked on a traditional private cloud project are concerned that private cloud didn’t fix the problems it was supposed to solve, said Pat O’Day, CTO at BlueLock, a cloud provider based on VMware’s vCloud offering…

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board is a non-partisan, non-political agency created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It has two goals:

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Adam Riglian.

The task of selling the concept of cloud computing isn’t just for the marketers and executives at major tech companies. A little selling can also help rank-and-file IT employees and business users get the cloud tools they need without running afoul of company brass.

Shadow IT, which refers to the use of hardware or software — often cloud software — without the official permission of the IT department, is potentially harmful, according to Adobe Senior Cloud Engineer Tim Prendergast. Speaking at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent show, Prendergast outlined the best ways to garner support for cloud applications within a company without getting into trouble…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Alex Sherman.

Cox Communications Inc. is considering acquisitions of business-services companies with annual revenue of about $200 million and could announce a deal in the next six months. The third-largest U.S. cable company is targeting telecommunications-services and cloud-computing companies as it seeks to increase its potential revenue base by 10 percent in 2013, Phil Meeks, senior vice president of Cox Business, said in an interview.

Atlanta-based Cox is also looking at partnerships and acquisitions of smaller companies, he said. U.S. cable companies are counting on faster-growing business services to buoy growth as residential video customers decrease…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud computing may represent the beginning of a shift of control of business technology away from information technology departments and into the hands of managers and professionals from other parts of the business. While a third of executives responding to a recent survey (32%) agree that the IT department is currently the main driver of cloud adoption, another 45% report that individual business units are ultimately responsible for cloud adoption strategies.

These are some of the findings from a new survey of 460 IT leaders and senior business managers conducted by Capgemini. However, just because cloud computing is in more of the hands of the business doesn’t mean it’s run as effectively as possible. For example, the board of directors is seen as both a driver (29%) and a blocker (28%) of cloud initiatives. This suggests that in many cases, “benefiting from the cloud is still being hindered by a lack of appropriate senior level understanding and commitment,” the report states. “It is safe to conclude that by now the benefits of the cloud are clear and widely understood.”…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

AWS CTO Werner Vogels and I sat down at the AWS re:Invent conference yesterday to talk about whether large companies are actually using the cloud to innovate through new styles of applications. Vogels says they are, and has plenty of examples to prove his point. Maybe big businesses really do understand cloud computing after all.

When I sat down with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference on Wednesday, we began the discussion by talking about applications designed to take advantage of everything the cloud has to offer in terms of control, resiliency and programmability — what Vogels calls 21st-century architectures. It’s great in theory but, I asked, “Who’s actually building these apps?”…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: Caron Carlson.

Enterprises have been loud and clear about ongoing security concerns regarding cloud computing, but by and large, vendors haven’t responded with robust service level agreements or any other reassuring controls, experts say. Customers should be on the lookout for nine controls that could relieve their concerns, reports Brandon Butler at Network World. One of the most effective security provisions customers should ask for in a cloud contract is a certificate that shows data is deleted when the contract expires. This is not at all common, Butler notes, but it is legally defensible.

Other highly effective provisions would include a disaster recovery clause and a clause that establishes that the provider is responsible for the customer’s losses if a security breach occurs. Unfortunately, these provisions are also non-existent today…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

Cloud computing is rearranging the datacentre infrastructure market: large server makers are seeing their dominance wane as competition grows from low-cost Asian manufacturers that sell directly to the clouds of Google, Amazon and others. HP, Dell and IBM are all struggling to ship servers due to competition from low-cost and specialist vendors, figures from Gartner shows.

The latest report by the analyst company on the worldwide server market was released on Wednesday. It paints a grim picture of the global datacentre market, with the market’s overall revenues during the third quarter decreasing 2.8 percent year-on-year and overall shipments growing a measly 3.6 percent…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudStack Collaboration Conference — Cloudian today announced that it has extended its industry-leading Cloudian Cloud Storage Platform for easy integration with Apache CloudStack. The Cloudian solution enables cloud service providers and enterprises to seamlessly deploy S3-compatible cloud storage quickly and cost-effectively along with a state-of-the-art cloud computing platform under a common user interface and single provisioning and sign on.

"Storage is a critical element of cloud computing, and Cloudian’s object store is very complementary to Apache CloudStack," said Kevin Kluge, VP of Product Development for Citrix and Apache CloudStack Committer. "We are pleased to have the Cloudian Cloud Storage Platform support the Apache CloudStack cloud computing platform, giving users powerful storage via a simple, elegant deployment."…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

Retailing giant Amazon runs AWS as a subsidiary at arm’s length and in a somewhat stealthy manner at that. Having AWS be a little removed from Amazon is necessary because Amazon often competes with some of the companies that want to host applications on its cloud, and the stealth is just a way for AWS to preserve some mystique in terms of just how large the cloud computing unit is and how pervasive its use is.

As the first mover and undisputed leader in cloud computing, what we want to know is exactly the kind of data that Rackspace Hosting provides in its quarterly reports: server count, customer count, employee count, revenue per customer, and revenue by category for the collection of infrastructure and platform services that are known as the AWS cloud…