Author: David

Grazed from ITWeb TechForum.  Author:  Martin Ray.

The adoption levels of cloud computing are on the rise, driven not only by advancing technology and convenience, but also by the recent downturn in the economic environment. Saving money has been a focus of companies in recent years, and what better way to achieve this goal than to employ cost-efficient cloud computing services.

The cloud, with its streaming media services and promise of near limitless storage and other cost-saving functions, has become an arena of extreme interest to both the public and private sectors…

Grazed from CTR.  Author: Rand Wacker.

While the cloud makes it far easier to procure and deploy computing resources, it also mandates a new set of security requirements that differ from systems running in an organization’s traditional private data center.

Traditional security technologies simply don’t work in these new cloud-computing environments. Without access to the physical network, appliance-based network-scanning can’t see traffic going to and from your servers, and host-based scanning agents usually consume a tremendous amount of CPU time — a resource that customers pay for directly in the metered billing systems popular in the cloud…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Cloud Ventures.

In compliment to Jon’s headline focus on Enterprise Cloud Computing, my key specialism is where this technology overlaps with social media aka ‘Enterprise 2.0′.

Although it can feel like you’re playing an intense game of Buzzword Bingo, the key way to approach new technologies like Cloud Computing is to marry them up with other hot topics, like social media and big data.  Typically these aren’t entirely different domains more so simply different perspectives on to the same system, and so it’s helpful to throw them all in a pot and discuss: DevOps, IaaS, PaaS, web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, .. etc.

Agile Cloud best practices
Ultimately they all point to an evolving Internet ecosystem that favours lightweight, fast-moving, modular approaches to systems design and implementation, whereas the ‘old world’ is one of the enterprise monolith. The big bang IT project costing 10′s millions and taking years to implement…

Grazed from IT Web TechForum.  Author: Bruce Taylor.

Being agile in the face of unpredictable volatility will become even more important as pressure increases on mining companies to continue growing while reducing operating costs.

A solution to reducing costs is based in cloud computing, which has become a topic of interest for a variety of industries, specifically in mining, where historically, the preference has been to own and run applications onsite, says Bruce Taylor, Natural Resources Lead, Dimension Data Middle East and Africa.

Cloud computing offers the mining sector the opportunity to consolidate multiple applications by hosting in highly virtualised data centres, and to leverage economies of scale offered by multi-tenancy (ie, sharing) at levels ranging from physical infrastructure, to support personnel, right through to the software applications themselves. At the very least, the highly virtualised nature of a private cloud would ensure efficient use of underlying hardware infrastructure, while offering the business much shorter turnaround times on IT infrastructure requests…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

NetSuite Inc., the industry’s leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP software suites, today announced operating results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2011.

Total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2011 was $64.1 million, representing a 23% increase over the prior year. Subscription and support revenue for the fourth quarter was $54.2 million, representing 23% growth over the same period in the prior year. Total revenue for the year was $236.3 million, a year-over-year increase of 22%…

Grazed from Scientific Computing.  Author: Editorial Staff.

After a two-year study of the feasibility of cloud computing systems for meeting the ever-increasing computational needs of scientists, Department of Energy researchers have issued a report stating that the cloud computing model is useful, but should not replace the centralized supercomputing centers operated by DOE national laboratories.

Cloud computing’s ability to provide flexible, on-demand and cost-effective resources has found acceptance for enterprise applications and, as the largest funder of basic scientific research in the U.S., DOE was interested in whether this capability could translate to the scientific side. Launched in 2009, the study was carried out by computing centers at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Called Magellan, the project used similar IBM computing clusters at the two labs. Scientific applications were run on the systems, as well as on commercial cloud offerings for comparison…

Grazed from HealthCareIT News.  Author: Michelle McNickle.

As the industry is slowly changing the way it serves patients, cloud computing has become a way to reduce costs, improve services and simplify management. But with the growing use of cloud service come concerns about its performance and overall quality, said Daniel Joseph Barry, vice president of marketing at Napatech.  

“Cloud service providers have established the necessary competence and IT infrastructure to deliver on demands, but there is one potential Achilles heel that can present a challenge: assuring cloud service quality and performance," he said.

Barry outlined five issues affecting cloud service quality and performance…

Grazed from Network Computing World.  Author: Esther Shein.

The Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee recently formed by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), the not-for-profit open standards consortium, along with several IT vendors and consumer groups, will be good for facilitating cloud portability, industry observers say. The goal of TOSCA is to enable deploying cloud applications without vendor lock-in, while maintaining application requirements for security, governance and compliance.

TOSCA joins an already crowded field of standards and requirements principles for cloud computing that includes but is not limited to the Open Cloud Principles (OCP) from the Open Cloud Initiative (OCI), the Open Data Center Alliance standards for cloud providers, a guide to cloud computing from the Cloud Standards Customer Council, the OpenStack Compute for developing a cloud-based server environment and OpenStack Object Storage for cloud-based storage, the IEEE’s Cloud Computing Initiative and the Clouds Standards Customer Council (CSCC)…

Grazed from Private Equity.  Author:  PR Announcement.

Irvine, Calif.-based Numecent has raised $2 million of a planned $10 million Series A round. The company, which says it is developing “cloudpaging” technology, did not disclose the names of investors. The company said that it previously raised $7.5 million from investors.

Numecent™, a stealth startup pioneering next-generation “cloudpaging” technology, today announced it has received the first $2M tranche in a $10M Series-A funding round from unnamed corporate investors. This is in addition to the $7.5M of seed funding the company has so far received from private investors since its inception…