Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Mimecast, which bills itself as a unified email specialist, has $62 million in new Series C funding from private equity firm Insight Venture Partners. The UK-based company plans to build more applications that tap into customers’ unstructured data and boost its presence in North America.

Mimecast which has built a business around archiving and securing Exchange Server email for law firms and other businesses, now has $62 million in fresh Series C funding to build new applications atop its cloud platform…

Grazed from Readify. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud computing is a very popular phrase that is used extensively, yet a lot of people struggle to be able to define what it is. According to Gartner:

“Cloud is a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided as a service to external customers using Internet technologies. This is a very deliberate choice of words and can be broken down further by looking at the five attributes of cloud computing as identified by Gartner: http://www.whatech.com.au/technology-releases/windows-8-development/11500-whitepaper-cloud-and-windows-azure-introduction.

For more information about Readify’s Windows 8 Development services, call +61 3 9600 2339 or 1300 666 274 (within Australia) or visit the Web site at http://www.readify.net/

Grazed from China Daily. Author: Editorial Staff.

Huawei, China’s leading global information and communications technology solutions provider showcased its latest Cloud Computing and Business Support System solutions Wednesday in Jakarta, in a bid to further enhance its commitment to the growing number of Indonesian customers.

"As cloud computing continues to make dramatic impacts on business and everyday life in general, Huawei is increasingly committed to developing our solutions to further enhance business and quality of life value to our end users." said Vincent Li, CEO of Huawei Indonesia…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Aoife White.

European Union regulators will urge government agencies in the EU to use cloud-computing services to reduce costs, according to a European Commission strategy for cloud computing published today.

Public agencies in the EU, the bloc’s biggest buyer of information technology services, and cloud-computing suppliers will work together on common procurement requirements to ensure that services meet governments’ needs, the commission said…

Email Discovery for the Cloud

Grazed from TheServerSide. Author: Jason Tee.

There’s no arguing the fact that development cycles in the mobile application development world are incredibly short. So it’s no surprise to discover that development teams who are intent on getting their mobile applications to market quickly are relying heavily on a variety of cloud-based technologies. Here are five of the most effective ways that mobile projects are finding success by taking advantage of the cloud:

1. Hosting services

Amazon and their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering through their EC2 platform largely pioneered the idea of the cloud, so it should come as no surprise that many organizations are handing off the job of application hosting to their EC2 service. But of course, Amazon is only one of the many players in this growing field, and in many cases, IaaS plays like EC2 are being pushed aside in deference to various Software as a Service (SaaS) plays, where clients surrender a certain amount of control over their operating system and runtime environment for the promise of fewer configuration issues and a lower administrative overhead. It’s probably the most tried-and-true way of leveraging the cloud, and as such, more and more mobile applications are taking advantage of cloud-based hosting services…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

HP has added a pair of systems to its eighth-generation HP ProLiant server family, which cram four-socket designs into a smaller form factor, allowing for denser datacentre deployments in private cloud environments.

Available immediately, the HP ProLiant BL660c and DL560 (pictured above) are based on Intel’s latest Xeon E5-4600 processor family. HP claimed the systems are ideal for virtualisation, database applications and other data-intensive workloads where optimum use of datacentre space and price/performance is paramount…

Grazed from Canadian Reviewer. Author:  Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla.

Softchoice , an IT services and products provider, launched its Softchoice Cloud service yesterday in downtown Toronto. The event featured representatives from various cloud computing, storage and software as a service solutions providers such as Google, Microsoft, Box and many others and touched upon the challenges and opportunities related to cloud computing solutions.

The event focused on how the cloud is changing the way Canadians and the world are doing business. The challenges and opportunities presented by cloud computing are manifold and how businesses can use Softchoice as a curator and manager for various cloud solutions that can scale from small businesses to enterprise…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Chad Berndston.

Now that Cisco Systems (NSDQ:CSCO) has significant traction with its Cloud Partner Program, it’s looking to elevate partners who have made the deepest investments in its cloud vision to a new Master specialization, one that will bring added benefits and a level of preferred status among top Cisco partners focused on the cloud.

As of this week, Cisco partners can begin applying to become Master Cloud Builders, a specialization that builds upon the Cloud Builder designation but requires significantly more involvement on the part of partners — for significantly more benefits. Cisco unveiled the Cloud Channel Program at its 2011 Partner Summit in New Orleans as a way to organize Cisco partners around their potential cloud computing opportunity with the vendor. According to Cisco figures culled from various research reports, the market opportunity for building cloud infrastructure is on a roughly 24 percent CAGR over the next four years and could hit about $112 billion by 2015. Cloud services, meanwhile, are on a roughly 35 percent CAGR, expected to reach $113.6 billion by then…

Grazed from CSO. Author: John Kinsella.

As we’re adopting cloud computing, we’re more aware of the security concerns it raises than we were of issues created by other large-scale technologies we adopted in the past. This is a wonderful thing! But security nirvana has yet not been achieved. While there’s still plenty of room for cloud providers to improve, many aspects of cloud security must be the responsibility of the consumer.

In particular, I see five security-related issues with cloud computing that are critical to the success and security of a cloud-based project—and that are not always getting the full consideration they deserve…