Author: David

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Cloud Identity Security Leader(TM), today announced open registration and the initial lineup of workshops, lectures, discussions and featured speakers for the 2012 Cloud Identity Summit. Identity and security thought leaders, architects, and enterprise practitioners will converge at Vail, Colorado’s Cascade Resort July 16-20, 2012, to explore the central role of identity in enterprise cloud security and discuss how cloud computing, mobile device access and social networking are transforming the role of IT.

To remain competitive and capitalize on new opportunities, organizations require IT systems that are increasingly complex and heterogeneous. Pressure from employees to bring their own devices (BYOD) further complicates the demands placed upon IT. Cloud computing has been the proposed solution to these challenges, but enforcing, and monitoring access to corporate resources that are scattered around the Internet is difficult. Successful adopters of this new computing paradigm have recognized that identity is the new network perimeter…

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Matt Hamblen.

Antenna Software today unveiled cloud-based software called AMPchroma for designing, testing and managing mobile apps and mobile websites.

Sold as a managed service, AMPchroma will give companies access to their apps and mobile sites from a single Web-based console that can be shared by work groups and IT workers, said Jim Somers, chief marketing and strategy officer for Antenna.

Somers said part of the value of AMPchroma is to help large companies centrally manage an array of mobile-related projects. Forrester Research recently reported that some companies have dozens of mobile projects under way at any one time, including designing of custom mobile apps…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Kevin Fitchard.

At Mobile World Congress next week, Nokia Siemens Networks plans to reveal its most ambitious mobile network design to date: a complex system of 100 small LTE, HSPA and Wi-Fi cells that behaves, from the network’s point of view, as a single cell site. NSN is using a concept from cloud computing called a ‘fabric’ and retooling it for the purposes of mobile broadband. While we probably won’t see this technology in live networks for some time, it has huge implications for the heterogeneous networks (or hetnets) of the future, which aim to create a sea of cheap bandwidth through which our devices can leisurely swim.

Such architectures speak to the growing complexity in cellular networks as more people use more devices on them. Plus, the very mobility of such devices makes building out a network even more of a challenge. Base stations are fixed devices with fixed characteristics. Turning them into something that can scale to deliver capacity on command isn’t easy. But NSN thinks it has found a way…

Grazed from govWin.  Author: Ronald Sherwin.

The simple economic model for cloud computing is relatively straightforward:

• The enabling technologies (virtualization, blade servers, SANs, etc) drive data centers to massive consolidation to achieve economy-of-scale.
• The required capital investment drives government budget wonks to favor a service delivery model of ‘cloud computing" that rolls these up-front costs into the cost of per-unit delivery.

Lobbyists have been successful in writing language into recent legislation (i.e., NDAA 2012) that establishes a pre-bias towards cloud computing, by stating that it is cheaper and more secure than existing capabilities. But do we really understand the true costs involved; what economists refer to as the marginal costs (since they are rarely included in a simplified cost analysis)…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Art Wittmann.

The cloud is one of those amorphous technologies that gets trotted out as the answer to all of our woes, usually by people who don’t think all that deeply about IT and its challenges. We hate to puncture anyone’s bubble with a dose of reality, but at a macro level, adoption of all public cloud services except software as a service is going pretty darned slow.

For the past five years as part of our annual cloud survey, InformationWeek Reports has asked a simple question: What are your company’s plans for cloud computing? The response we watch most closely is: We’re receiving services today from a cloud provider. In 2008, 16% of survey respondents chose that option. In 2009, it was 21%, then 22% in 2010. It jumped to 31% last year, and to 33% this year…

Grazed from CIO.com.  Author: David Taber.

In the decade since the Agile Manifesto, the movement has encouraged a number of best practices like test-driven development, user-centered design, iIterative development, clean code, refactoring, continuous integration, and—arguably—cloud computing. I’m a card-carrying Agile zealot, and to me its benefits are unarguable. (Although here’s a great spoof site that does argue against it.)

There’s a catch, though: not every IT organization can really implement Agile, let alone profit from it. There are organizational, project, and personnel characteristics that can make Agile downright dangerous. The awesome price of freedom is that you have to live up to its obligations…

Grazed from ChannelEconomics.  Author: Larry Walsh.

If distribution has an undisputed king of cloud computing enablement of solution proiders, it’s Ingram Micro.

According to the forthcoming Cloud & Technology Transformation Alliance’s (CTTA) State of the Channel Cloud Report, Ingram Micro led the field of distributors in enabling and supporting solution providers in reaching the burgeoning cloud marketplace.

When asked which distributor provided the channel with the best support for developing cloud practices and participating in cloud computing opportunities, Ingram Micro overwhelmed the rest of distribution with the endorsement of 26.5 percent of the survey participants. The next closest distributor, ScanSource, garnered only 7.8 percent of the channel’s preference. And ScanSource barely edged out Tech Data, which received the commendation of 7.2 percent of solution providers. (See below for the Top 5 Distributors in Cloud Computing.)…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

vCompute announced today that it has deployed and enabled a new vPOC (virtual point of compute) location consisting of thousands of cores in Houston, Texas. This new infrastructure is implemented to support continued demand for cloud and high performance computing resources.

The new vPOC location consists of 1000’s of cores and is a customized architecture to accommodate the latest industry requirements for virtualization and complex HPC applications. The vPOC infrastructure has the specialized features needed to run complex hyperscale applications while providing flexibility with open standards. vCompute has the ability to scale to 10,000 cores as demand surfaces globally. The new vPOC location is positioned strategically on the net to accommodate high speed connectivity to strategic global locations where existing clients reside such as Japan and the UK…

Grazed from The Register.  Author:  Lucy Sherriff.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave even less well equipped for the modern age than Fred Flintstone’s, you will have noticed the buzz about something called cloud computing. It comes with a menagerie of buzzwords: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure on demand, hosted apps … We could go on.

The trouble with buzzwords is that they can buzz for quite a while before people begin to notice they haven’t agreed on exactly what they mean.  So, in the manner of a lepidopterist, let’s try to pin a few down for closer inspection…

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

Microsoft has detailed plans to integrate its SkyDrive cloud storage service more closely with Windows 8, a move that will enable users to seamlessly access files on any computer and use SkyDrive as a remote access service to fetch files held on their computer.

In its latest update posted to the Building Windows 8 blog, Microsoft said SkyDrive will evolve with Windows 8 from being just a website into a true "device cloud" for Windows customers…