Author: David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mark Eisenberg.

What’s wrong with Windows Azure? In a word: marketing. From the beginning, Microsoft’s efforts to explain Windows Azure to the world fell under the assumption that potential customers understood cloud computing. After all, if they know what a nail is used for, then you only need to explain the features and benefits of a hammer.

First, consider how cloud computing looked three years ago. It was generally accepted that everyone had their own definition of cloud. When Windows Azure entered the market, vendors and customers were free to define the cloud to suit their needs or, more often, their desires. The architects of Windows Azure created a Platform as a Service (PaaS) implementation that closely matched NIST’s definition of cloud computing. Microsoft went with it — it didn’t have to create and defend its own definition; a generally respected standards organization had already done the legwork…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

With its OpenStack-based cloud coming online, Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier says the company can take on Amazon Web Services for the biggest of big accounts, provided those accounts want the sort of value-add service Rackspace provides.

OpenStack gives Rackspace the scale it needs to attack the biggest of big public and private cloud customers, according to CEO Lanham Napier. Now it just needs to snag a few of those customers…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

The cloud computing wave and the goodwill and technical expertise that Rackspace Hosting has attained through its founding of the OpenStack cloud control freak, more than two years ago, are helping to puff up the company’s finances. Both revenues were up 27 percent and net income was up 36 per cent in the third quarter, to $336m and $27.2m, respectively.

If there is a jittery economy, Rackspace is benefitting from it. And perhaps, now that it has shifted its compute cloud to OpenStack and is now operating the largest public cloud based on that control freak in the world as well as helping to code it, it is also benefitting from some migrations off Amazon Web Services, which has had a number of challenges with outages this summer and fall…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Walter Bailey.

Superstorm Sandy has been the center of global news through October/November, 2012. It has caused massive damage to property, loss of income, and lives. In fact, the storm has become more relevant than this last weeks US presidential race. To businesses, the storm has elucidated another debate as far as sustainability in aftermath of the disasters.

How safe is our data? How important are data backups to business recovery? How will we bounce back after the storm? How sustainable is our cloud computing policy as far as disasters are concerned? These are some of the questions policy and decision makers in businesses are grappling with in the aftermath of the raging storm. According to experts, business and corporate leaders have to rethink how they treat disaster recovery in cloud computing terms. This article looks at the role of cloud computing in disaster recovery…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jamie Yap.

Companies in Singapore are the most confident of their knowledge about cloud computing across the Asia-Pacific region, thanks to the strong push and lead by the government for enterprise cloud adoption and national efforts to attract service providers to make datacenter investments in the country. According to the VMware Cloud Index 2012 report, 82 percent of Singapore respondents said they believed they had a strong understanding of cloud computing, higher than the regional average of 75 percent, said Michael Barnes, vice president and research director of Forrester Research, which conducted the study.

Respondents who believe they strongly understand cloud
1. Singapore: 82%
2. Korea: 80%
3. India: 79%
4. Australia: 72%
5. Hong Kong: 74%
6. Taiwan: 72%
7. China: 72%
8. Thailand: 70%
9. Indonesia: 70%
10. Malaysia: 66%

Source: VMware Cloud Index 2012…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Joyent has named a new CEO and announced the altest generation of its infrastructure as a service software. The moves are in preparation for a big play in the coming months as the company looks to build the right computing platform for data and cloud applications.

Joyent, the private cloud infrastructure service provider, has named Henry Wasik as chief executive officer and unveiled a new version of its infrastructure management software called Joyent7. Wasik fills the role left vacant by David Young when he left earlier this year. In the interim, Joyent co-founder and CTO Jason Hoffman had filled the role…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Natalie Smith.

One of the hottest topics in IT circles this past year has been cloud computing and the promises it has to offer. Advocates claim the cloud will provide substantial savings to enterprise IT, since acquiring servers and software licenses – as well finding IT personnel to manage and maintain infrastructure – has traditionally been time consuming and often costly. As technology develops ways to improve computing resources for businesses, companies’ infrastructures are also evolving to meet the needs of their users. Access to company networks is now more convenient with the advent of tablets and smartphones – regardless of location, employees are urged to view and upload data. It is this flexibility that cloud hosting can also offer, removing the need to invest significantly in equipment and software.

Traditional business IT environments spend about 70 percent of their budgets on maintenance alone, while only 30 percent is allocated for innovation and increasing productivity. Moreover, deploying these innovations often takes longer because of over-burdened resources. IT personnel are frequently spread too thinly, with tight budgets and complex, under-resourced systems. This is exactly where cloud hosting can showcase its benefits by lowering costs and outsourcing much of the day-to-day maintenance…

Grazed from HealthCare IT News. Author: John Andrews.

With its ease of installment, functional versatility, cost effectiveness and seemingly limitless capacity, cloud computing is taking the healthcare IT landscape by storm. There are many different deployments happening at facilities across the industry as providers search for ways to improve their computing power, inject vitality into established systems and utilize the cloud’s potential for clinical, financial and administrative purposes.

"Cloud computing is definitely a high growth area," says Paul Burke, director of revenue cycle technology for Chadds Ford, Pa.-based IMA Consulting. "It serves as both a conduit and repository for data. For hospitals that are still using 25-year-old technology, hooking up to the cloud provides a wealth of new functionality and enables them to squeeze more mileage out of those systems."…

Grazed from Federal News Radio. Author: Jason Miller.

The General Services Administration is working overtime to get the first set of cloud-computing services through their cyber hurdles. The Federal Risk Authorization and Management Program (FedRAMP) is five months into its initial operating capability of reviewing and offering preliminary approval to vendors which meet the cyber standards for cloud services. And the list of agencies and companies wanting to take part is growing faster than expected.

"We’ve got over 50 applications from cloud service providers. We’ve got six in the queue, and we have a target of issuing three [vendors a] Joint Authorization Board-approved authority to operate by the end of the calendar year," said Kathy Conrad, GSA’s principal deputy associate administrator in GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and IT, which runs the FedRAMP program office. "We’ve also got 15 accredited third-party assessment organizations and more in the queue."…