Grazed from FedLine. Author: Nicole Johnson.

The Defense Information Systems Agency will play a major role in deciding how the Defense Department adopts cloud computing services and products.

DISA will serve as the department’s enterprise cloud service broker, which means all DoD components must acquire government or industry-provided cloud services using DISA, according to a June 26 memo from DoD chief information officer Teresa Takai that was released Wednesday. The only exception is to obtain a waiver from a review authority designated by Takai.

DISA will work on behalf of the department to manage the use, performance and delivery of cloud services and negotiate contracts between cloud service providers and DoD consumers. The memo does not detail how DISA’s relationship with DoD will work in the event that DISA is competing for DoD’s cloud business. Currently, DISA provides cloud email services for the Army…

Enterprise Clouds and Swiss Cheese

Grazed from Trefis. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) recently debuted its virtual cloud-routing and WAN optimization platform under the Cisco Cloud Connected Solution brand. The new product solution will help businesses take advantage of cloud computing to deploy cloud-related services and transition their virtual private networks into the cloud. It would also address the traditional cloud computing concerns of speed and bandwidth problems to “offer an optimal user experience at the lowest cost”. [1] With businesses increasingly looking to move their applications to the cloud, Cisco’s move will help it address the changing trends and drive its earnings higher in the future.

Cisco’s enterprise muscle

Enterprise routing is a Cisco stronghold with the company boasting of as many as 500,000 customers who have deployed its routing solutions worldwide. It has more than 77% market share of the global enterprise router market, as per our estimates…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Greg Ferro.

People are the No. 1 reason why private clouds fail. The traditional IT management team is composed of tactically oriented, powerless leaders who aren’t familiar with their core business and aren’t equipped to handle dynamic IT business challenges presented by private clouds. They’re more comfortable with sticking with what they know, avoiding change and ignoring the business risk of preventing change. They will be the downfall of your private cloud deployment.

Today’s IT management is unprepared for change and unable to map a dynamic IT environment like a private cloud into a static and unyielding business process such as that espoused by ITIL or The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). Everyone can see that business drivers are changing. Engineers have already embraced the new technologies of the private cloud. Management must deliver new accounting methods, better risk management and long-term funding to develop new private cloud infrastructures. At the same time, IT managers are refusing to change the existing business processes, accept risk and move their organizations forward…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

It’s a tough economy out there. That’s why some figures from the new Uptime Institute’s 2012 Data Center Industry Survey might surprise those who would expect spending on data center infrastructure to be cut to the bone. That’s not true for the majority of the 1,100 owners and operators that responded to the second annual survey. Here are my top five fun facts from the new survey.

1. Public cloud is big, private cloud is bigger. This year, 25 percent of respondents said they’re adopting public cloud, up from 16 percent last year. And 49 percent are deploying private clouds, up from 35 percent last year…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Michael Cooney.

It’s no secret that agencies core to the U.S. government has as a central plan – known as Cloud First — to move most operations toward a cloud computing service. In the process of course is a never-ending evaluation by other agencies to talk about how those cloud implementations are doing.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued the Cloud First policy in December 2010 which requires federal agencies to implement cloud services whenever a secure, reliable and cost-effective cloud option exists; and to have migrated three technology services to the cloud by June.

This week the Government Accountability Office issued a report on the overall progress of that plan and in the process found seven common challenges that the GAO said may end up impeding their ability to realize the expected benefits of cloud-based implementations…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Elizabeth White.

ActiveState has announced the general availability of Stackato 2.0, the application platform for creating a private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The private PaaS solution now supports .NET applications, offers web-based visual cluster management and delivers performance improvements that foster enterprise development agility. In conjunction with the release, ActiveState also announced a Stackato enterprise customer relationship with Aeroflex.

According to Bart Copeland, CEO at ActiveState, "Stackato 2.0 redefines private PaaS for the enterprise, enabling more agile development, greater DevOps transparency, more efficient cloud management and faster time to market."…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

GenoSpace, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based informatics company, has launched a cloud computing platform to provide access to a variety of genomic and phenotypic data and designed to advance biomedical research and personalized medicine.

Formed in 2011, GenoSpace leverages years of systems development experience and deep domain knowledge of founders John Quackenbush and Mick Correll, who, together at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, created software systems linking clinical and research data. Recognizing that the rapidly falling cost of genome sequencing would make existing systems obsolete, they developed a cloud-based data storage and "software-as-a-service" platform based on a robust, scalable, and secure data model. A key element of the GenoSpace system is its collection of intuitive, informative, data-access portals that can address the needs of a broad range of users…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Cumulogic, a company with strong Sun Microsystems and Java DNA, wants to make its technology the foundation of enterprise-class PaaSes to be offered by telcos, hosting companies and other service providers.

The two-year old company started out building a managed public PaaS that it would sell to developers, but changed course, said Mike Soby, a CA veteran who joined the company as CEO in February. Now the idea is to be more an arms dealer to service providers that want to offer an enterprise-friendly Java PaaS to their customers.

“We want to be in the software business, not the service provider business.” On Wednesday, that PaaS infrastructure software, which has been in beta for some time, is generally available…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Dropbox has doubled the space in its existing $99-a-year Pro 50GB and $199-a-year 100GB cloud storage plans without raising prices and introduced a new $499-a-year 500GB plan.

It says it’s responding to user demand though it’s really more a matter of trying to keep up with the competition. Google Drive only costs $60 a year for 100GB and Microsoft’s SkyDrive is $50 a year for 107GB. Current Dropbox Pro users have been automatically updated to the added space, and all new Pro users can sign up access the new 100GB, 200GB and 500GB plans.

Consumers can still get 2GB for free and businesses may be better off with Dropbox for Teams, which starts at around $800 a year for five users.