Author: David

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Eric Goldman.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar has introduced a new bill, the “Cloud Computing Act of 2012” (S.3569), that purports to “ improve the enforcement of criminal and civil law with respect to cloud computing.” Given its introduction so close to the election, it’s doubtful this bill will go anywhere. Still, it provides an excellent case study of how even well-meaning legislators can botch Internet regulation.

What the Bill Does

From its 1980s origins as a law restricting hacking into government computers, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) has morphed into a general-purpose federal law against trespassing on anyone else’s computers. With that breadth, the CFAA extends to a wide variety of activities, ranging from data scraping (see, e.g., EF Cultural Travel v. Explorica) to fake profiles (see, e.g., the Lori Drew prosecution related to Megan Meier’s death) to ex-employees walking out the door with competitively sensitive information (see, e.g., US v. Nosal and WEC v. Miller)…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Sharon Hurley Hall.

Business adoption of cloud computing is happening fast. This sector alone is predicted to outpace growth in the overall IT industry fivefold. But this brings challenges for hardware and software vendors and for the IT administrators who are using their products, says Antone Gonsalves in ReadWriteWeb. The IDC research he quotes suggests that by 2016 companies will spend $100 billion on cloud services, an annualized growth rate of 26 percent. And the SaaS market will be a huge chunk of that, accounting for 60 percent of the public cloud by 2016.

New Models for Vendors

Both software and hardware vendors will need new revenue models in this new cloud-based business environment, and that could bring benefits for IT administrators at midsize businesses. Software vendors will have to broaden their offerings beyond the Fortune 5000 to target a wider range of customers. That may lower the entry point for IT administrators looking to get into cloud services at an affordable price. (And they WILL have to get in. A Washington Technology article points out that cloud computing is no longer an optional extra, but a must-have in business.) Within the hardware business, providers that now target IT departments directly will shift to supplying the companies providing cloud services. Those companies will ramp up demand as cloud business becomes more widespread…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

With more software vendors fielding their own cloud storage capabilities, Box continues to beef up enterprise security and perks for its offering. New features include two-step authentication, company-wide search for admins, and content scanning, the company said.

When it comes to cloud storage for the enterprise, security and manageability are key – for compliance reasons, IT departments need to know who is storing what. That’s the impetus behind new features Box is rolling out this week and will showcase next week at its Boxworks event…

Grazed from ReadWriteWeb. Author: Brian Proffitt.

If you think Larry Ellison’s re-definition of cloud computing was confusing, get ready for a compete replacement of the term. If some companies get their way, "cloud computing" may be dissipating rapidly.

Of course, it’s not like the phrase has a close connection with the public to start with. Even prominent members of the technology community have issues with it, if Ellison’s marketing-spiel is any indication. A recent national survey by Wakefield Research, commissioned by Citrix, showed that most respondents believe the cloud is related to weather, while some referred to pillows, drugs and toilet paper…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

The two companies were already working together on mPulse when they decided a deal was in order. The new product aims to give mobile and web developers a real-time look at how their apps are perfroming in the field, said SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos.

SOASTA, the startup that made its name in cloud-based load testing, is buying LogNormal, which measures the performance of mobile and web applications. The acquisition, SOASTA’s first, is scheduled to be announced Tuesday at the same time SOASTA unveils mPulse, a new product that incorporates LogNormal technologies…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Advantest Corporation today announced that it has established a new subsidiary to conduct sales of its CloudTestingTM Service, which provides test solutions utilizing IT and cloud computing technology.

Fusing cutting-edge test technology with cloud computing, Advantest’s new CloudTestingTM Service represents a new concept in semiconductor test: on-demand test solutions tailored precisely to customer needs. The establishment of Cloud Testing Service, Inc. creates a framework for the Advantest Group to provide this new service promptly and flexibly, at a highly competitive price point. The new subsidiary was incorporated on October 1, 2012 and officially launched sales of CloudTestingTM Service today…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Marshall.

OpenStack was originally started in 2010 as an IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) cloud computing joint project between Rackspace and NASA. The reins have since been turned over to the new OpenStack Foundation, which is now finally official, complete with a 24-member board chaired by Suse executive and Linux Foundation director Alan Clark. The group has grown to more than 5,600 individual members across 87 countries and 850 different organizations, and is financial backed by more than $10 million in funding.

The question now is, can this open source cloud project really thrive and survive in this competitive market? The community-at-large is watching to see how the foundation handles itself now that there are so many competing interests within its own membership — especially with the recently added and most controversial new member, VMware…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Software development is software development; the basics don’t change when you introduce cloud computing. But moving to cloud-based development presents a few new opportunities, as well as some challenges. Though each enterprise is different, these tools offer something most companies can use to develop applications in the cloud.

One of the most fundamental tools for developers is an integrated development environment (IDE). Development tools, such as the Amazon Toolkit for Eclipse and features within Microsoft Visual Studio, are useful for developing cloud applications. When developing for the cloud, enterprises might also want to consider using cloud-based IDEs in the engineering process…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Alan S. Cohen.

I recently spent the past year on the front lines of the computing revolution, bringing network virtualization technologies to dozens of telecommunications companies, new cloud computing entrants, and enterprises that are changing their business models through Cloud. Cloud promises to profoundly transform how we produce and consume information and information technology (IT). If you drive up and down Route 101 here in Silicon Valley today, there is a hot billboard war going on; if you drive up and down Main Street someplace else, there is a quieter but no less compelling revolution.

The current computing model was pretty simple: your business bought the hardware and software required to run key applications, the storage devices to maintain your data, and the networks to allowed it all to flow. Today, however, there is a range of new choices, which including renting some or all of the IT supply chain…