Author: David

Grazed from Wired News.  Author: Mike Barton.

While the nation’s employment picture has been looking up in recent months, jobs in the cloud are looking positively skyward, according to the talent intelligence firm Wanted Analytics. However, a skills gap is also on the rise.

More than 5,000 cloud computing job ads were posted online in the U.S. in February, with hiring demand for cloud skills up 92% versus February 2011 and 400% compared with the same time in 2010, Wanted Analytics reported last week. But with demand for cloud skills growing so quickly, the gap between demand and talent supply is making it harder to source candidates, the firm said...

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Michael Vizard.

Thanks to the rise of cloud computing services and the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon, there’s a lot more nuance these days involving the securing of mobile computing devices.

While many organizations are still debating the merits of BYOD, companies that have embraced BYOD are finding that BYOD presents a number of challenges that go well beyond access. For example, should an end user be able to access personal applications such as games over the corporate network? And should organizations apply different levels of granular policies across different classes of devices owned by the same user?…

Grazed from InternetEvolution.  Author: Mary Jander.

In an online forum over the last few days, a group of IT executives has debated the "real value" of cloud services. Here is the note that prompted the chat:

Will cloud computing deliver us genuine business benefits or is it a clever technology looking for a home? In the long term could it negatively impact our business?

Several forum participants weighed in, agreeing that they’d read and heard all the "hype" from cloud providers, only to be left still pondering the actual value to their businesses of adopting clouds. In some cases, it was clear that upper management and boards would view a move to cloud simply as an infrastructure upgrade — and an insecure one at that…

Grazed from Talkin’ Cloud.  Author: Joe Panettieri.

In the cloud computing storage market, EVault — a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate — is taking aim at Symantec Backup Exec and other client-server data protection platforms. The EVault effort, led by EVault President Terry Cunningham, is loaded with irony.

After all, it was Cunningham who helped to build the Veritas Backup Exec business before Symantec acquired Veritas in 2004. During the glory days of client-server, Veritas helped to position Backup Exec as popular platform for Windows NT Server data and application protection. The Backup Exec team made the Windows NT bet before Microsoft gained critical mass on the server, so the move was a gamble at the time…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Jack Vaughn.

Cloud providers lead you to believe you can take your existing applications and put them on the cloud with no fuss or muss. It is true, the applications can run; but you may find the performance is not what you expected. The fact is that application integration is one of the more complicated aspects of cloud computing, as Christopher M. Moyer told us recently while we discussed issues of iPaaS and application integration.

Moyer, vice president of technology at content aggregator Newstex LLC is the author of the recent Building Applications in the Cloud (Addison-Wesley, 2011). The book focuses on real world experiences with the Amazon cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS). It discusses the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (ED2), Simple DB, how to properly construct Software as a Service, designing an architecture that takes good advantage of the cloud platform, patterns for executing actions on data and much more…

Grazed from Cloud Tweaks.  Author: Balaji Viswanathan.

Cloud computing is not an all-or-nothing option. In the past decade, the industry has matured to a point where there are almost a dozen different options to move your data and processes to the cloud. In this post, we will cover the five major options and will talk about the enterprises for whom each of these options are best suited for.

Virtual machines

This is the most common form of cloud setup, where third party service providers give you shared computing resource in their datacenter for an hourly fee. The physical servers at the data center are turned into many virtual server instances, each of which can be run by a different enterprise. Virtual machines can provide you the best utilization of resources by keeping the machines from going idle. This setup is suited for workloads that are highly varying (most websites, blogs) and for smaller enterprises that do not need the flexibility and control of a private cloud. It is very cost-effective, though it might not be suited for high performance computing…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

MCPc, Inc., a leading national technology products and solutions provider, announces anyplace workspace(TM), an approach to business technology dedicated to helping organizations reap the benefits of the modern, mobile IT ecosystem. Organizations with an anyplace workspace empower their employees to work from anywhere and on any device — all in a well-managed, secure environment…

Grazed from Stuff.co.nz.  Author: Chris Gardner.

The emerging cloud computing industry is opting for self-regulation in a bid to close down cowboy operators who may lose customers’ data.  Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service over a network such as the internet.

The New Zealand Computer Society has released CloudCode, a voluntary code of conduct for data centre operators, for consultation.  The sponsored code has been written by the society with the intention of increasing confidence in the sector and is only the second such document in the world. The industry’s reputation, the society said, was threatened by the lack of standards and practice guidelines…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Doug Henschen.

Nearly one year after announcing plans to offer its Dynamics enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications as cloud-based services, Microsoft finally will reveal specifics and details on those services on Monday at its annual Convergence Conference, being held this year in Houston, Texas.

The crux of the news: Dynamics NAV 2013 and Dynamics GP 2013 will be enabled for Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, and they will be generally available by the end of this year. A beta release of NAV 2013 is expected by May, and a GP beta is expected in late summer. Microsoft qualified that the cloud-based versions of NAV and GP will be "optimized for small and midsize businesses."…