Author: David

Grazed from Computing.co.uk. Author: Danny Palmer.

While Europe teeters on the brink of financial armageddon, the European Commission (EC) claims that a coherent cloud strategy for the bloc could generate £127bn per year and create 3.8 million jobs.

In its Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe report, the EC suggests that implementing a coherent cloud strategy across the region could cut the operational costs of IT departments for all types of organisations, along with boosting productivity and growth. According to the report, three key areas need to be addressed in order to enable a workable cloud strategy across Europe…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Further showing its commitment to the OpenStack project, Cisco has rolled out a free distribution of the open source cloud management platform, which it will package other services on top of, including virtual networking and high-availability features.

Cisco becomes one of a growing group of OpenStack member organizations that have released distributions of the open source code, joining the likes of Linux-distribution companies Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical and Ubuntu, as well as Rackspace and OpenStack pure-play vendor Piston Cloud Computing. The news comes as OpenStack backers meet this week at the semi-annual OpenStack Summit held in San Diego. Cisco VP and CTO of cloud computing Lew Tucker, who is also vice chairman of the newly formed OpenStack Foundation, says the value of the Cisco edition of OpenStack is around services that will be integrated into Cisco’s OpenStack distribution, especially virtual networking…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

New funding from GGV Capital and Onset Ventures will help Gridstore push its case that, with the right software, plain, old disk drives can scale out to do the heavy lifting for most web-scale applications.

Gridstore, which makes software that converts inexpensive, commodity disks into scale-out storage, has closed a $12.5 million Series A round led by GGV Capital and Onset Ventures. That brings total funding, including seed money, to $15 million, the company said. The new cash will be used to build out its sales channels…

Grazed from IT News. Author: Jorn Bettin.

Any large, software-intensive business considering cloud computing needs to weigh up the risks of the cloud against its reliance on in-house legacy IT systems. There are several risks involved when sweating legacy systems – outages at the Royal Bank of Scotland and NAB serve to illustrate, as do countless unreported delays in introducing new features.

I have come across global banks with legacy systems that require a gestation period of 18 months from requirement specification to delivery into production for the smallest of new software features. Below the surface, web-based business software is redefining the story of outsourcing and blurring organisational boundaries to an extent where business executives are no longer in any position to list all the software services that are consumed by an organisation…

Grazed from Government Health IT. Author: Tom Sullivan.

Tom Savel, MD, is that rare breed of physician who contends his real goal in life is to be a technologist. Savel, like any IT guy worth his weight in geek, thinks big – which is exactly how what started as a software-testing sandbox five years ago is now on the cusp of being a quiver of cloud computing capabilities offered to state and local public health entities.

Within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Savel is the director of the Informatics Research and Development Activity (IRDA), under the Public Health Surveillance and Informatics Program Office. The CDC is about to open IRDA’s cloud services to federal, state, and local public health departments…

Grazed from The Star Tribune. Author: Steve Alexander.

Cloud computing — using remote data centers over the Internet instead of buying computers — has been quietly creeping into companies under the noses of corporate executives. Departments are using it without permission by putting it on company charge cards, and employees widely use some common cloud applications such as Google Docs or Salesforce.com, said Bill Martorelli, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass.

"Corporations really need to reconcile themselves to cloud computing," said Martorelli, who will be the keynote speaker Tuesday at the Enterprise Cloud Summit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts that’s sponsored by Wisconsin-based TDS Telecommunications. "But they also have to find the balance between empowerment of employees and corporate control."…

ADTRAN’s vWLAN is a hypervisor-based WLAN that enables the delivery of powerful cloud services. Leveraging the benefits of network virtualization and a distributed data plane, vWLAN frees the WLAN from the local area network. No longer does the control and management of the WLAN have to be on the same LAN as the access points, instead, user control and device management resides in the cloud. Success in cloud-services depends on operational agility. vWLAN’s multi-tenancy capability, combined with network virtualization, gives managed service providers the ability to quickly create a hosted WLAN and respond to customer demands.

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Karen Goulart.

Jessica Carroll, managing director of IT and digital media at the United States Golf Association in Far Hills, N.J., was something of a pioneer in her embrace of cloud disaster recovery and business continuity.

In 2008, when cloud computing was still a blip on the technology horizon, Carroll was faced with the challenge of bringing her ’90s-era IT shop into the 21st century. She knew that tape rotation and colocation weren’t going to be the wave of the future. Higher expectations for disaster recovery — quick, seamless, gap-free — led her to consider and ultimately adopt a cloud disaster recovery solution from IBM. "It enabled us to port our data to an off-site location without adding strain to the administration of managing the backups, without adding huge amounts of infrastructure and without unreasonable costs," she said…