Author: David

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Dawn Altnam.

While some critics would have you believe otherwise, cloud computing is not a fad. It is here for the long haul. Odds are, your business is already using cloud services without realizing it. However, many businesses start using cloud services without having an adequate understanding of their data needs, budgetary resources or the ability of a specific cloud provider to meet business needs.

Let’s dive into some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your data by using cloud-based services…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: Cheryl McKinnon.

Earlier this month, OASIS hosted a forum to discuss standards and interoperability issues for cloud computing. As a technical community dedicated to creating and promoting open standards, OASIS tackles many of the tough challenges that government institutions, private enterprises, software vendors, academics and system integrators face when creating applications and platforms to run our digital economy. Business is global, systems must interoperate, and content flows from person to person both inside and outside the firewall. Sharing and re-use of information is made possible only by letting diverse systems work together. This is the beauty of standards.

Speakers throughout the event — representing governments in the US, Europe and Canada, as well as regulated industries, such as banks and pharmaceuticals — highlighted several consistent themes. One presenter, Sounil Yu, shared his perspectives gleaned from the world of financial services, nicely encapsulating five key points made by several of the speakers…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Jacqueline Vanacek.

Imagine a world in which researchers share data via one massive supercomputer to advance medicine, energy, agriculture … where nations respond in unison to natural disasters … and governments share services around the world.

This is what I envisioned as I spoke with Chris Kemp, founder and CEO of Nebula and co-founder of OpenStack. It’s a world in which business and government can deliver only their core competencies – while buying other services from global partners to fulfill their needs. As we increase the scale of cloud computing to manage big data, we increase our ability to “operate as one” — in research, business, government, everything. Chris Kemp confirmed that we are building the elements of a global cloud architecture that can make that vision real…

Grazed from ZDnet. Author: Phil Wainewright.

People in the tech industry generally prefer not to get caught up in politics, but it’s now becoming vitally important to do so, especially if your business is in any way connected to cloud computing in any European market. Read on for the back story of how policy makers at the EU have now officially discovered the cloud, and the decisions they’ll take over the coming year about regulation of the industry. This is something I’ve been close to as chair of EuroCloud UK and a vice-president of EuroCloud in Europe (both unpaid roles). It’s now time to for everyone to take note of what’s going on.

First of all, a bit of context. In the tech industry, all eyes tend to be on the US and thus it’s easy to underestimate the size and complexity of the European market. Europe is a bigger economy than the US — $17.5 trillion in the 27 EU member countries alone, according to World Bank figures for 2011, compared to $15 trillion for the US. So why does it have less impact in tech? The trouble is, it’s far more difficult for any one business to exploit that market value (even a cloud business) because of the EU’s 23 different languages, 11 currencies, and a myriad of different business regulations, practices and cultures. US tech companies find it much easier to scale up fast because they don’t have to contend with such barriers…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

As data centers struggle to fend off or repair the effects of superstorm Sandy, Netflix says lessons it learned from past Amazon Web Services outages helped it dodge a bullet last week when Amazon’s US East data center complex went down again. Other companies that have been impacted by cloud outages might be able to apply these lessons as well…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Laurie MacVittie.

Originally used as an inexpensive alternative to quickly deploy services outside the realm of IT, cloud computing is quickly becoming a de facto standard for new application resources. The challenge is how to manage those resources transparently. The cloud should be an extension of the internal data center, and cloud bridges, gateways and brokers are all components that IT should focus on for connecting to their external cloud deployment.

But there are challenges to integrating bridges, gateways and brokers to any production cloud deployment. First, the market is still shaking out what each of these product categories do and what they’re called. Second is where they fit in the infrastructure, and then third and possibly most important, who owns these technologies and who ultimately is responsible for their success…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Lucian Constantin.

Some cloud providers fail to detect and block malicious traffic originating from their networks, which provides cybercriminals with an opportunity to launch attacks in a botnet-like fashion, according to a report from Australian security consultancy firm Stratsec. Researchers from Stratsec, a subsidiary of British defense and aerospace giant BAE Systems, reached this conclusion after performing a series of experiments on the infrastructure of five "common," but unnamed, cloud providers.

The experiments involved sending different types of malicious traffic from remotely controlled cloud instances (virtual machines) to a number of test servers running common services such as HTTP, FTP and SMTP. In one test case, services running on a targeted server were accessible from the Internet, but the server was located in a typical network environment, behind a firewall and an IDS (intrusion detection system). The goal of this particular test was to see how the cloud provider would respond to the presence of outbound malicious traffic originating from its network…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

EarthLink, Inc. (NASDAQ: ELNK) a leading IT and communications provider, today announced plans to extend its core fiber IP network, expand its IT Solutions footprint with four additional data centers and launch its next generation cloud hosting platform. By integrating additional distributed data centers with an expanded IP network, EarthLink is creating an end-to-end cloud fabric to meet the growing demand for highly-secure cloud hosting and IT services.

EarthLink will expand its new cloud hosting platform into four new data centers in San Jose, Chicago, Dallas and South Florida throughout next year through agreements with leading-edge space and power providers. It is also enhancing its existing data center in Rochester, N.Y. with its next-generation cloud architecture early next year. The company’s next generation cloud architecture is a state-of-the-art, integrated computing and storage platform designed to support current and future demands of the IT Services business. EarthLink is using best-in-breed platforms to provide comprehensive IT solutions including cloud hosting, virtual desktop, security, colocation, back-up and application solutions…

Grazed from InsiderMonkey. Author: Marshall Hargrave.

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is a giant in the communications technology industry, with a market cap around $90 billion. However, this size has made it tough for the company to navigate the nimble cloud computing and wireless area network sector. The company grew EPS by only 5% annually for the last five years. As well, the company is expected to only see limited improvement over the next five years, with an 8% EPS annual growth rate, so is now a good time to buy Cisco?

Although the company made its largest acquisition in seven years earlier this year, we believe Cisco can make a bigger splash in the cloud computing area. Cisco has been in a heated battle with a number of smaller companies that have been attacking its communications equipment market share, namely in the cloud. We currently see little reason to invest in Cisco, even with a 3.2% dividend yield and a trailing P/E of 12x, given the other higher growth opportunities in the communication and wireless area network optimization space…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Having your own cloud is great. But what if you need to isolate different applications and resources from one another? You could, of course, build multiple clouds. Or you could adopt technologies like Rackspace‘s (NYSE: RAX) new Cloud Networks feature, which supports multi-tiered networks across an Open Stack cloud infrastructure. Here are the details, and what they reveal about future cloud trends.

It’s easy to think of the cloud as the place where everything that doesn’t live locally should be dumped. After all, since the definition of what exactly constitutes cloud computing has always been a bit hazy, the simple conceptualization is to treat the cloud as one lose and wild expanse of infrastructure which doesn’t need much hierarchy or internal organization…