Author: David

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: James Staten.

South Korea has better broadband than we do. Australia has faster wireless networks. And according to Forrester’s Internet Population Forecast, by 2013 the number of online consumers in emerging markets will dwarf those in the US and Western Europe. In Forrester’s Forrsights Budgets and Priorities survey, these same countries are putting far more priority on cloud computing than we are. Does this mean we could lose our lead in cloud?

We all know that cloud computing is an agility play and that our business colleagues are more excited about it than us in IT. We also know that it’s much easier to invest in public cloud services due to their economic model and ubiquitous delivery capabilities – heck it’s an Internet-based service. And we know that organizations with less in-house IT are able to leverage cloud services more readily. On top of all this, according to Forrester’s Global Tech Market Outlook For 2011 and 2012, the markets increasing their investments in IT goods and services the most – nearly twice that of other regions – are Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Rebecca Merrett.

Businesses may need to let go of the old ways of doing things and start moving into the future of Cloud computing if they are to stay ahead of the game, according to the former chief information officer of the United States Federal Government, Vivek Kundra.

As a former CIO, Kundra knows all too well what it means to keep churning out projects using an old model that doesn’t work. He has long maintained, when working for the US government, the status quo as an old model was not sustainable…

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Ed Zwirn.

The decision to migrate company information-technology functions to the cloud or elsewhere is usually broken down as a set of specific cost-benefit calculations. However complicated the weighing of the startup savings and the longer-term returns involved in outsourcing IT, it at least appears to be a rational process.

But for sure, turf battles and human egos also enter the picture. And they receive the focus in a study by Subrata Chakrabarty of the University of Nebraska and Dwayne Whitten of Texas A&M, recently revised.

For their research they break company executives into two camps: On the one hand are IT executives like the CIO and head of IT; and often opposing them, "business executives" — aka CEOs, CFOs and COOs…

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Ari Levy.

Rackspace Hosting Inc. (RAX), the biggest competitor to Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) in the market for Web-based data centers, rose 9.5 percent in early trading after sales and profit topped analysts’ estimates.

Rackspace shares climbed to $53.89 at 8:15 a.m. in New York after closing at $49.23 yesterday before it reported results.

The company runs a fleet of data centers, letting customers store their websites and applications on its servers. It competes with the Amazon Web Services business in the public- cloud market, where customers rent computing power along with related services. Rackspace’s revenue in that area jumped 86 percent last quarter to $58.5 million, the San Antonio-based company said yesterday in a statement. Sales in the traditional dedicated server business, where the company manages specific machines for customers, rose 23 percent to $224.8 million…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

If you don’t think that Amazon Web Services is the king of cloud, just look at what other cloud companies are announcing this week. Even paragons of the private cloud world are trying to cloak themselves in the glow cast by Amazon, which is squarely in public cloud realm.

On Monday, Citrix Systems said its new Citrix CloudStack 3 will let customers of all sizes build their own “Amazon style clouds.” The offering is actually the next release of Cloud.com, a private-cloud provider (and service) that Citrix purchased last July.

The new CloudStack, the first to come out under the Citrix brand, adds new support for Swift, the OpenStack object storage technology. And CloudStack 3 includes a “cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer as a core-integrated feature,” according to Citrix. Public cloud powers Amazon. Rackspace, GoGrid and SoftLayer all use XenServer or Xen virtualization. Having said that, CloudStack 3 will also support rival KVM, OVM, vSphere and Xen virtualization, Citrix said. CloudStack 3 is now in beta and will be broadly available later this quarter. The product also adds support for Swift, the OpenStack object storage technology…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Insight Enterprises, Inc., a leading technology provider of hardware, software and service solutions, today announced the InsightCloud Solution Center, which provides businesses and public sector clients a destination to learn, shop and manage cloud solutions. This first release features cloud-based messaging, security, infrastructure, and collaboration solutions with an enhanced shopping experience and management capabilities for messaging workloads.

With new solutions, dynamic content, and the ability to purchase and manage cloud solutions all in one place, the InsightCloud Solution Center offers clients these three key benefits:

— LEARN all about cloud computing and the benefits of cloud-based solutions, even chat live online with one of our Cloud Solutions Specialists.

— SHOP through our cloud solutions catalog and purchase these solutions through a simple shopping cart experience.

— MANAGE and provision cloud solutions from one place, and gain access to InsightCloud Client Care support and other cloud professional services…

Grazed from IT Wire.  Author:  Beverley Head.  

According to recruitment specialist Hudson ICT people “cloud is king”. The organisation found that people with market tested cloud skills and security specialists are in particular high demand by Australian enterprises and can command significant salary hikes.

The company released these findings from its 2012 salary and employments insight report today, which also revealed that the majority of employers last year provided their ICT staff with a modest salary increase of 2-4 per cent, and a similar level of increase is anticipated this year.

In all 52 per cent of ICT employees got a rise last year, while 27 per cent managed to score an increase of 10 per cent or higher…

Grazed from PR Web.  Author: PR Announcement.

Phoenix NAP, a full service data center, premier infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider and primary network access point (NAP), announced today that it will be attending Cloud Connect 2012, a four day conference and expo taking place in the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. The conference, which runs February 13 through February 16, is the premier cloud event, aimed toward recognizing the continual transformation of cloud computing and uniquely positioned to bring together the entire cloud eco-system of IT professionals, developers and cloud providers…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

There are reports that the dean of Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is very interested in cloud computing services, and may invest up to $100 million in the market this year.  Bloomberg quotes partner Matt Murphy as indicating the VC firm’s partners “have talked about it, and are intrigued by the idea…. Companies’ comfort level and willingness to adopt the cloud is hitting an acceleration point. Now’s the most interesting time in the last 10 years to be investing in enterprise-based companies.”

Interesting time indeed. Market Research Media, cited in the Bloomberg report, says the cloud market will reach $270 billion in 2020. Forrester is a tad less optimistic, predicting last year that the market will hit $241 billion by that time. Visiongain projects the cloud services market will be worth some $83 billion by the year 2016. Research firm IDC says the market will hit about $55 billion by 2014. But analysts at HP are super-optimistic, estimating that the cloud computing market will hit $143 billion by next year.  That’s a lot of billions — sooner or later, it will add up to real money…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Chris Preimesberger.

Reliable user authentication in deployment of a cloud service is of utmost importance. Even though a cloud service to which you subscribe may have two-factor or higher levels of secure authentication, certain protocols must be observed and rules must be followed to enter each session. Frequent changing of passwords is required, and those passwords often must be long and complicated.

However, in this day of increasingly sophisticated hacking practices, conventional online authentication for access to these systems and services is often not enough—especially for systems moving highly sensitive data, such as in the government, military, financial and retail sectors…