Author: David

Grazed from International Business Times. Author: Valli Meenakshi Ramanathan.

Cloud computing just got a shot in the arm as online storage service provider Dropbox decided to double the capacity of its offerings to consumers without hike in prices owing to intense competition and also offers a new 500GB service plan at $499 a year.

A report published in Computerworld cites how the company is under increasing pressure from competitors to offer additional capacity at its current pricing. Apart from traditional consumer online storage services such as SugarSync, Carbonite, Mozy, new deep-pocketed players in the arena including Microsoft, Apple and Google are forcing Dropbox to face the heat…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Can Microsoft do it again? The company that morphed from an upstart in the PC era by continuously taking on, then supplanting bigger, market-leading rivals, is in that position again — trying to make up ground in smartphones, in tablets, in cloud computing and in virtualization. In short, in almost all the categories driving modern-day computing. Where it still leads – in desktop productivity applications with Office and desktop/server operating systems with Windows, it remains king, but king of the fading realm of client-server computing.

My story earlier this week recounting Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s latest vow to fight Apple on the streets, on the beaches, across product categories, raised a great deal of, um, skepticism among GigaOM readers. Ballmer said Microsoft on his watch would not cede any product category to Apple. Not one…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Emmanuel Olaoye.

Bank regulators this week raised their warnings to financial institutions on the dangers of using vendors that provide so-called “cloud computing” services.

Cloud computing lets businesses outsource data storage and transactions to vendors that host remote datacenters that can only be accessed over the internet. The model allows the companies to change their information technology without buying and setting up new systems.Bank regulators, however, want financial firms to do a better job of evaluating their vendors’ practices, citing the fact that a number of cloud computing vendors have suffered data breaches.

Cloud computing is another form of outsourcing, with the same basic characteristics and risk management requirements as traditional forms of outsourcing, the Federal Financial Information Examination Council said in a statement this week…

Grazed from FederalNewsRadio. Author: Michael O’conner.

Seven selected agencies have made progress in putting into practice the "cloud first" policy instituted by the Office of Management and Budget, according to a recently released report by the Government Accountability Office.

GAO found that the Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, State and Treasury departments and the General Services and Small Business administrations had all implemented the cloud computing requirements as part of their policies and processes.

OMB established its cloud first policy in December 2010, requiring agencies to utilize cloud-based solutions "whenever a secure, reliable, and cost-effective cloud option exists," the report states. Agencies were also expected to migrate three of their technology services to the cloud by June 2012…

Grazed from BizTech2.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

HP has announced new HP Converged Cloud solutions specifically for organisations in Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) to facilitate cloud adoption and simplify deployment to enhance business innovation and agility.

Enterprises in APJ are embracing cloud computing to keep pace with changing business demands. According to recent research conducted on behalf of HP, the top drivers of cloud adoption are rapid application development (53 percent), enhanced agility to respond to market changes (29 percent) and reduced cost of operations (18 percent). However, if not deployed correctly private cloud delivery models can create complexity, risk and added cost through vendor lock-in…

Grazed from ITDirector.com. Author: Clive Longbottom.

Cloud computing promises much when it comes to the capability to move workloads between dedicated private and shared public infrastructure so the that the use of resources can grow and shrink as needed. As mentioned in the last post from Quocirca, the strong growth in the adoption of private cloud is good for public cloud providers, providing there is the capability to port workloads between the two.

The promise is good but, in many cases, the implementation has left much to be desired. The main problem is that there are a multitude of cloud platforms that have been built either on existing underpinnings of old-style operating systems and application server stacks (and, as such, struggle to scale and share resources), or that they have been built in a proprietary manner (and, as such, can only share workloads or resources between themselves, and not with different systems)…

Grazed from The Wall Street Journal. Author: John Bussey.

What’s the real lesson to be learned from Amazon’s AMZN -1.40% cloud computing failure two weeks ago, the one that knocked Netflix NFLX +3.92% and other websites offline?

Far from being a dangerous sign that the cloud is unreliable, it was actually a blip—a painful one—on a trend line that is vectoring upward, much to the benefit of global business. There have been sporadic problems at a range of cloud providers, and each produced worrying headlines: "Can You Trust the Cloud?" "Are We Overdependent on Cloud Services?"

But what we’re seeing isn’t a breakdown. Instead, it’s the rapid expansion of a big new industry that is still in its shakedown phase—finding and fixing problems. This is Henry Ford getting the kinks out of his assembly line or cellphone companies trying to fix the dropped-call problem…

Grazed from Seeking Alpha. Author: Editorial Staff.

In a very short time, phrases like ‘on the cloud,’ and ‘cloud computing’ have become part of everyday corporate vernacular. With more and more companies using this technology to share information with employees, customers, and vendors in real-time, Internet giants like Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG), and Microsoft (MSFT) have realized the potential profits for providing cloud-based services — and the potential downfalls when servers fail.

However, with intense competition comes intense scrutiny. During a violent series of thunderstorms in the Mid-Atlantic region a few weeks ago, Amazon faced a temporary shutdown of its EC2 cloud computing services. This shutdown hurt several companies, including the popular dating site, Whatsyourprice.com, because customers could not use the service during peak hours. As a result, the company dropped EC2 and moved to another cloud provider…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Paul Lidsky.

Today’s IT data center is at an interesting crossroads. Faced with typically flat annual budgets and increasing demands from the business, IT organizations have started looking for creative ways to not just meet the needs of the business, but to exceed them – while simultaneously reducing costs and simplifying IT’s overall management required.

A tall order? You bet. Impossible to achieve? It’s certainly a challenge if you plan to use the same legacy infrastructure many data centers have in place today. However, such goals become infinitely achievable as IT organizations begin their migration to private cloud computing. One of the most transformational movements to hit IT in a long time, most organizations will seek guidance for how to best unify servers, storage, and networking infrastructures. Most will also need help with addressing the cultural shifts that are inherent when virtualizing and unifying data center infrastructures and teams that were once disparate. The end result of this migration to private clouds benefits both the enterprises that embark on the transformation as well as the vendors and solution providers best positioned to assist them…