Author: David

A new joint cloud computing initiative called Cloud4Gov has been announced by the Government and EMC, with support from Cisco, VMware, VCE and Industrial Development Agency (IDA) Ireland, that will create a cloud innovation centre that will enable the development and testing of new applications and services for government.

The cloud innovation centre will have nodes in EMC’s Centre of Excellence and on government networks that will allow indigenous small and medium enterprises (SME) and multinational corporations to develop and demonstrate applications to the public service. As the centre provides public sector departments and agencies with a platform to trial cloud solutions, it will also allow for such solutions to be productised and sold to other governments…

Cloud platforms are inherently multi-tenanted. When you sign up for the services of a Cloud provider, you’re a tenant of theirs. If you’re ready to embrace Cloud Computing, being a tenant in a multi-tenant world is a key feature that you need to accept. 

Today at Cloud Connect 2012, Citrix announced the general availability of Citrix CloudStack(TM) 3, the first release of the market leading open source cloud platform under the Citrix brand. CloudStack is already the world’s most successful platform for public clouds, powering over $1B in revenue for more than 85 large scale production clouds, including some of the biggest brands in the industry. With the new CloudStack 3 release, Citrix brings the power of true Amazon-style clouds to customers of all sizes. For the first time, enterprise customers who want to build clouds the way the world’s most successful clouds are built, can quickly and easily transform virtualized datacenter resources into automated, elastic, self-service clouds.

Citrix CloudStack is a key component of the Citrix cloud computing portfolio, providing customers with solutions that make it easy to Build new clouds, Connect to existing cloud services, and Deliver any cloud with the best security, performance and reliability. The Cloud Era is built on a completely different set of assumptions than past generations of IT — in fact, many of the exceptions from the PC Era now represent the norm in the Cloud Era. This is forcing enterprise IT organizations to reevaluate IT strategies, causing them to search for lower costs, greater capacity and improved agility. The Citrix cloud portfolio is designed to help customers accelerate this Cloud Era innovation by making inexpensive compute power accessible to anyone, allowing people to work from anywhere any device, and enhancing business agility…

Even as the world tries to find a balance between individual privacy and the eternal vigilance of a nanny state, cloud computing is a casualty of the heightened security concerns in post-911 America. This is something that I had explored in earlier articles, from the ramifications of the PATRIOT Act (See: Is Cloud Computing a Threat to Consumer Rights?), to how rivals of American cloud vendors are actually touting the latter’s vulnerabilities to government investigation as a key business differentiator (See: Your Data in Australia is subject to the US Patriot Act).

More recently, I had written about how concerns have actually translated into business decisions to the detriment of American companies (See: European Firm Refuses To Go On the Microsoft Cloud Due to PATRIOT Act Concerns). Even the European Union had waded into the argument, stating that US laws may be contrary to the interests of the Union’s citizens. In an effort to address these concerns, the US government has decided on confidence building measures…

Cloud computing is assumed to be an IT staff initiative at most businesses. But business strategists at IBM have concluded that it needs to be a top management priority.

Too many companies are experimenting lightly with cloud computing. They’re using it to tweak existing operations, as opposed to thinking about how it could revise or re-invent the fundamental way they sell their goods and services, said Saul Berman, global strategy consulting leader in IBM’s global technology services.

Berman based his remarks on a survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence research unit of the Economist magazine in the fourth quarter of 2011, based on interviews with 572 business and IT managers. IBM sponsored the survey, which will be released later this week, titled The Power Of Cloud: Driving Business Model Innovation. InformationWeek was given an advance look at its contents…

Business cloud computing users will take note: the power of AT&T’s "virtual private cloud" has arrived.

AT&T* today announced AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service(SM) with VMware vCloud® Datacenter Service. 

The new enterprise-class cloud service combines technologies from virtual private networking (VPN) industry leader AT&T(1) and cloud infrastructure software industry leader VMware.

Like AT&T’s other cloud offers, this new cloud capability is embedded directly into its network. This means compute and storage services can be scaled, managed, routed and delivered to business customers, down to virtually any fixed or mobile device, quickly and flexibly, on demand, with enterprise-grade security and performance…

6fusion, a provider of utility-metered public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure management software and services, today announced it will be previewing its free 6fusion Cloud Resource Meter for VMware(R) vSphere at the VMware Partner Exchange (booth #504) and Santa Clara Cloud Connect (booth #910).

Understanding how many computing resources are being used (and by whom) is essential in infrastructure planning, upgrade planning and cost allocation or chargeback. 6fusion’s patent pending metering algorithm, the Workload Allocation Cube (WAC), normalizes the way cloud infrastructure is metered both for suppliers and consumers. The UC6 web based console federates private data center and third party cloud operators, providing a single console to allow IT organizations of all types to access, meter, manage and optimize hybrid cloud infrastructures…

Brocade, the leader in fabric-based data center networking solutions, today announced the company will be exhibiting and attending Cloud Connect Santa Clara 2012, the premier technology event for cloud computing. Scheduled for Feb. 13 – 16 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, this year’s event will feature the latest technologies, platforms, strategies and innovations within cloud computing. Brocade (booth #204) will be discussing its vision and strategy for helping organizations transition smoothly to a world where information and applications reside and can be accessed anywhere, whether the objective is a private, public or hybrid cloud.

The Brocade vision for organizations that are considering cloud deployments is simple: Networks must be cloud-optimized at every critical point because they will define the application performance and the end-user experience within the cloud. With a strong heritage in both data and storage networking, Brocade uniquely delivers solutions that are capable of providing data center-class capabilities across the entire network…

Guardian Life Insurance isn’t about to take big risks when making IT investments, and CIO Frank Wander will be the first to tell you that he doesn’t have a cloud computing strategy, per se.

But over the past five years, the $10 billion financial services company has moved 18 applications into the cloud. It shut down a compute grid and moved its actuarial modeling application into an Amazon EC2 cloud. And it’s now in the process of broadly deploying two major software-as-a-service suites.

One of the two is Workday’s human resource management suite. Guardian wasn’t ready to reveal the other, but at the Atmosphere conference last fall, Google announced that it had signed Guardian as a Google Apps customer…

Platform as a service (PaaS) remains to be the core element of cloud computing in any personal or business solutions. Any changes, therefore, to its make up will definitely affect cloud vendors and users according to the research analyst Gartner.

Vice president and Gartner analyst, Yefim Natis said, “With large and growing vendor investment in PaaS, the market is on the cusp of several years of strategic growth, leading to innovation and likely breakthroughs in technology and business use of all of cloud computing. Users and vendors of enterprise IT software solutions that are not yet engaged with PaaS must begin building expertise in PaaS or face tough challenges from competitors in the coming years.”