The IaaS Rush

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and company showed off the latest version of Office Monday, they hit all the right marks — a touch interface, cloud storage, VoIP integration and social networking tie-ins.

The new Office (now in customer preview) will be both “ink-” and “touch-” enabled. It will store user documents to Microsoft’s SkyDrive by default. (Microsoft already said it was tying SkyDrive cloud storage closely into its upcoming Windows 8 operating system.) And the new Office Home and Student 2013 RT versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote will ship with Microsoft’s promised ARM-based Windows 8 machines including Surface…

Grazed from InternetEvolution. Author: Kim Davies.

What are we to make of the "mobile cloud," and is it something midmarket enterprises should be focused on?

It’s self-evident, I suppose, that mobile cloud computing implies a cloud architecture geared to serving mobile connections. Let’s take a look at an academic definition:

MCC is an amalgam of three foundations, namely cloud computing, mobile computing, and networking. The most promising and intriguing characteristics of MCC paradigm are mobility and rich functionality. We define mobile cloud computing as "a rich mobile computing technology that leverages unified elastic resources of varied clouds and network technologies toward unrestricted functionality, storage, and mobility…"

That’s a definition offered by researchers at the University of Malaya’s Mobile Cloud Computing Research Lab, and it has the merits of being both current and clear. Their 2012 paper on the subject, from which the definition is taken, is well worth reading in full…

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Shawn Drew.

There are tremors of economic uncertainty reverberating throughout almost every segment of IT. Through it all, cloud computing continues to grow as strong as ever. With performance and management benefits that non-cloud solutions have difficulty matching, it’s little wonder that the cloud is one of the few areas of IT still showing growth. But recent surveys have shown that midsize businesses may be a little slow to adopt the cloud and, in this market, that could be killing them.

Gartner IT Predictions

This certainly isn’t the perfect time for many businesses. Enormous economic uncertainty in the United States, Europe, and China has put a damper on many business performance predictions, with analysts choosing caution in the face of such an uneasy customer base. However, this global downtrend doesn’t seem to be affecting IT as badly, and it has the cloud to thank…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Cisco Systems is adding to its data center and cloud portfolio by buying Virtuata, a company that specialized in virtual machine security.

Cisco officials announced July 16 that Virtuata will be incorporated into the company’s Data Center Group, which is headed up by Senior Vice President David Yen. No financial terms for the deal were announced.

Officials with the networking giant see a huge growth opportunity in the cloud and virtualization, as enterprises and network operators alike look to bulk up their infrastructure to leverage the rapid adoption of the cloud computing model. Cisco has been building up its data center capabilities over the past few years, not only with its networking portfolio of switches and routers, but also through its Unified Computing System (UCS) converged solution…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Florence de Borja.

The core agencies of the US government have a central plan, Cloud First, which aims to shift the majority of their operations to the cloud. Before the plan can be implemented, it must go through a process of evaluation by the agencies concerned. In December 2010, a Cloud First policy was released by the Office Of Management and Budget so that federal agencies could implement the shift to cloud computing services if such agencies could find a cost-effective, reliable, and secure cloud computing service. The target was to move three of the core agencies’ technology services by June of the following year.

The Government Accountability Office recently released an overall progress report on the implementation plan. It reported that the Office found common challenges which the organization feels represent a hindrance to the Cloud First initiative. According to the report, one of the common threats is that cloud computing providers must first meet federal security requirements. Each of the government’s core agencies has their own security requirements, which cloud computing suppliers must satisfy first before such suppliers can be provided with a service contract. The problem is that most of these agencies have very strict requirements which suppliers find hard to meet…

Grazed from The Wall Street Journal. Author: Editorial Staff.

Despite the advantages cloud computing can offer larger enterprises, adoption continues to be slow.

Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace, predicts the take-up of cloud systems will accelerate. But he warns the industry has to innovate or risk being commoditized itself. Mr. Napier said infrastructure-as-a-service, or IaaS, was the most widely used service as it was the easiest for the market to understand, but that it was a “race to the bottom.”

“If all you are selling is a [gigabyte] of computing power, you are in trouble,” he said. “The big boys are in a race to zero. They are trying to drive that price down to halfpennies.”…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Mary Shacklett.

The CIO called a 4 p.m. meeting to gather his chief data architect, senior systems manager, applications group director and QA and help desk managers over a fresh pot of coffee to talk about the finer points of cloud adoption.

This wasn’t a meeting about "cloud in a box," or cloud services implementation. The real challenge now was ensuring that the company’s cloud services strategy would pay off the way everyone believed it would. This meant understanding and being willing to do what it took to get there.

The first step was service…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

It’s been over a month since Larry Ellison strutted across the stage and unveiled Oracle Cloud and its first three enterprise applications: CRM, human capital management, and enterprise social networking. Plus, Ellison took the wraps off cloud versions of WebLogic and Oracle Database itself.

All told, Oracle’s fearless leader said that more than 100 applications would be available, including ERP eventually — typically the last application category enterprise customers consider trusting to the cloud.

Quite a few responses to the announcement have been cynical: another golden opportunity for Oracle lock-in. Or: The same old stuff, now available by subscription through the cloud at rates Oracle hasn’t even seen fit to announce yet. Some even questioned whether it was a cloud offering at all, since Oracle touted the fact that each customer would get its own instance of the software…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Joe McCarthy.

This week marks the second anniversary of the founding of the OpenStack cloud computing platform, and it will be an occasion for celebration in the open-source community. After all, OpenStack is leading a movement in cloud computing, garnering the label of the "Linux of cloud computing," a reference to the hugely successful open-source operating system.

OpenStack started as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing project by Rackspace and NASA, and has grown at a rapid pace with more than 150 companies participating in the project. On Wednesday at the OSCON open-source convention in Portland, Ore., an expected 3,000 attendees will salute OpenStack.

OpenStack is supported by many tech stalwarts, including Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp and Red Hat, all endorsing the OpenStack commitment to open-source development and the use of nonproprietary technologies within cloud stacks. In April, Rackspace turned control of the project over to the OpenStack Foundation, which will continue to develop the platform…