Author: David

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Dave Meizlik.

With the New Year having rolled in, you’ve probably had your fill of "This is the year of (pick your technology, fill in the blank)" predictions. After all, for how many years now have we heard, "This is the year for cloud computing?"

While there’s no doubt that the wave of cloud computing continues to swell, real-world IT organizations are clearly not as quick to jump aboard as prognosticators. That’s because there are a lot of unknown aspects of the cloud, and security is chief among them…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Stacey Collett.

It’s 2 p.m. Do you know where your cloud data is? Really?

Executives at one large Fortune 500 company thought they knew, but a routine audit of the cloud provider uncovered a serious problem.

"The cloud provider that we thought we had became merely a shell, and it outsourced the provision of the service to an offshore company that no one had even heard of and that the company would never have provided data to," recalls Brad Peterson, counsel for the company and a partner in the Chicago office of Mayer Brown LLC. ..

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Sourya Biswas.

Today, there are two startups in focus – Xeround and SurDoc.

Xeround, a California-based startup that describes itself as “The Cloud Database”, announced the successful completion of its Series C round of funding in which it raised $9 million. Previous investors that included Menlo Park-based Benchmark Capital, Israel’s Giza Venture Capital, Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership, put in money in this round as well.

According to a press release, Xeround “offers a database-as-a-service for MySQL-based applications that’s elastic, linearly scalable and always on for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments.” The company claims that its “database-as-a-service solution effectively manages auto-scaling, high-availability, self-healing and multi-tenancy, while guaranteeing continuous service during schema changes, resource modifications and the scaling process.”…

Grazed from Minyaville.com.  Author: Professor Pinch.

My friend Conor Sen‘s piece on consumption in the cloud (See 2012: The Year of Cloud Consumption?) offers some things that are sorely lacking in the discussion of our current social and economic environment: Originality and, dare I say it, optimism.

That’s not an easy thing to do when the prevailing topics of discussion are Europe, Occupations, elections, and everything else that’s gloomy. It’s all become a well-rehearsed Broadway show by now because we’ve been doing it so often for so long. We know all the songs, the dance numbers and lines by heart…

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

Over the past 90 days, employers and staffing firms placed more than 10,000 job ads that included requirements for cloud computing skills and experience, according to WANTED Analytics™ (www.wantedanalytics.com), the leading source of real-time business intelligence for the talent marketplace. More than 2,400 companies posted job ads during this 90-day period and hiring demand grew 61% year-over-year. Computer Specialists and Programmers are most commonly required to have cloud computing experience. However, as cloud-based software increasingly impacts additional areas of business, other fields are more commonly required to understand and work with cloud-based applications. Other jobs that most often include these skills in job ads include Marketing Managers, Sales Managers, Customer Service Representatives, and Cargo and Freight Agents…

Grazed from The Data Center Journal.  Author: Rakesh Dogra,

Cloud computing in Middle East Asia region gets a new high as NCR Corporation, a leader in helping companies across the world connect and transact business, has been given Data Center Unified Computing Authorized Technology Provider certification from Cisco. This recognition comes after NCR has gone through the required training and programs from Cisco to sell and support the UCS or Unified Computing System from Cisco. NCR had to also meet requirements like Cisco Data Center Networking Infrastructure Specialization and Cisco Data Center Storage Networking Specialization. The Cisco program is an integral part of its strategy to implement advanced technologies in this sphere…

Grazed from The Nation.  Author: Editorial Staff.

NetApp, Cisco, VMware, Microsoft and CAT Telecom have joined the government cloud-computing initiative, whereby a new information-technology platform will be designed to pool resources and reduce the government’s IT spending.

Information and Communications Technology Minister Anudith Nakornthap said at the launch today that the scheme should help reduce the government’s IT spending by at least 30 per cent, while ensuring regularly updated technology as well as advancement in electronics-based public services.

He noted that each year, government units spent nearly Bt50 billion on hardware and software, but they ended up buying old but pricey technology…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Based on its recent analysis of the sensor cloud computing market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes MicroStrain, Inc. with the Global Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Leadership for SensorCloud(TM), a platform for sensor data storage, visualization, and remote data management. MicroStrain leverages advanced cloud computing technologies in SensorCloud(TM) to provide data scalability, rapid graphing, and user programmable online analytics for sensor data.

One of the unique features of SensorCloud(TM) is Fast Graph, a visualization and graphing tool that allows customers to rapidly navigate through gigabytes of data, and discover points of interest. However, it is the computational engine feature that really makes MicroStrain’s SensorCloud(TM) stand out. This feature enables customers to remotely process and analyze vast quantities of sensor data in the cloud. As a result, users can quickly and easily create virtual sensors based on mathematical relationships. Scalable user options benefit academics, small companies, and large companies alike…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Mustafa Kamal.

For the past few weeks I have been reading different articles, publications, blog postings and so one regarding the generic software architectural model for cloud-based applications, and I am very interested in hearing other ideas about this as well.

Through my reading, I have found the following three types of software architecture in use within the current industry  for different types of web-based distributed applications…