Author: David

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Ann Bednarz.

Despite some hopeful fits and starts, the U.S. economy didn’t escape the doldrums in 2011. Unemployment remained stubbornly high, the U.S. debt-ceiling crisis and budget scuffles spurred more economic uncertainty, and Europe’s ongoing financial problems threatened global markets. If there’s an upside, at least it’s familiar territory.

"Back in 2008, nobody knew what was going to happen as a result of the global financial crisis and IT spending almost stopped overnight," says Richard Gordon, a research vice president at Gartner. "We’re not in that kind of situation now. The solutions to the problems [in the U.S. and Europe] are understood and known. The question is now, is there a political way to execute and make them happen?"…

Grazed from Business Computing World.  Author: Kevin Tea.

Is that’s time of year for making seasonal wish lists, new year’s resolutions so I thought I’d chip in with a few of my own personal choices.

In the two or so years that I’ve been blogging about cloud computing I have seen a plethora of services that have been great, average or downright bloody awful. Wading through all of these I have got a rough idea of my perfect cloud and social media mix so here is my slightly tongue in cheek breakdown.

Wish List #1

Please, please, please will Box open up desktop syncing to non enterprise users. This is holding back what is a great service and could be truly phenomenal. Looking back through the Box forums it seems that us pond life users have been promised this for more than a year so quite why the delay I have no idea. I really don’t want to have to give up on Box but manual synchronisation is so last century…

Grazed from Digital Journal.  Author:  PR Announcement.

OW2, the global open source community for open source middleware and generic applications today announces its presence at the Cloud Expo Europe in London, January 25-26. OW2 and the Open Source Cloudware Initiative (OSCi) will introduce two major cloud computing projects: CompatibleOne, a cloud interoperability platform based on a cloud broker, and CloudForce, a project dedicated to developing a cloud application life-cycle management environment.

Attendees at Cloud Expo are welcome to visit the OW2 booth and attend presentations illustrating the organization’s involvement in leading open source cloud computing collaborative projects…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Cloud Ventures.

Cloud Computing is now a maturing field with a number of sub-topics that make up its structure, and smart Cloud Providers can use these as building blocks for their service offerings, combining them through consultative selling techniques to deliver the ideal client solutions.

For example the core building blocks include ‘Cloud Identity’ as well as virtualization, and an excellent description of how they can be combined is this case study from BT of Norfolk County Council…

Grazed from Di9it.  Author: Prakash Advani.

Cloud computing is the new buzz and everyone is talking about it. Is this for real or just another technology fad that will soon fade away? Well cloud computing is for real, it has been around for a while and is here to stay. We’ve been using cloud computing since the early days of the Internet, however now it has been given a formal name. What’s changing rapidly now is that more and more applications, softwares and services are being made available on the cloud.

Cloud computing simply means the applications that you use are now stored in and served from the cloud; that means,instead of them running on your computer they are running on a computer (or server) on the Internet. You access these applications using your browser. Simple examples of this are Web based email, online office such as Google Docs and cloud storage services such as Ubuntu One…

Grazed from OStatic.  Author: Sam Dean.

As Linux becomes more firmly entrenched in businesses, and as cloud computing advances in general, Linux and the cloud are set to converge faster than ever. In fact, some are looking at 2012 as the year that Linux begins to dominate in the cloud. That’s why a new post out from Mary Jo Foley is significant. Foley reports (based on input from contacts who ask not to be identified) that "Microsoft is preparing to launch a new persistent virtual machine feature on its Azure cloud platform, enabling customers to host Linux, SharePoint and SQL Server there."…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Dan Kusnetzsky.

Summary: Cloud computing has been frightening to some. They see it as a way to get locked in. Racemi gives organizations the key and makes server migration easy.

One of the issues constantly raised during discussions of cloud computing is the fear that the organization will be locked into one service provider and not be able to achieve their overall goals of flexibility, reliability and, of course, cost reduction. This concern gives me an opportunity to speak about a number of suppliers offering products and services making it possible to migrate industry standard server workloads including:..

Grazed from Help Net Security.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing will revolutionize the way IT resources are deployed, configured, and managed for years to come. Service providers and customers each stand to realize tremendous value from this paradigm shift—if they can take advantage of it.

Cloud Computing brings together the realistic, start-to-finish guidance they need to plan, implement, and manage cloud solution architectures for tomorrow’s virtualized data centers…

Grazed from ere.net.  Author: John Zappe.

Thinking of heading to the cloud in 2012? Everyone seems to be, including some of the biggest HR vendors in the world.

Just a few weeks ago, when SAP snapped up SuccessFactors, the buzz was all about the cloud. A similar buzz ensued when Oracle bought RightNow Technologies.

Even though Wall Street reacted to the SAP/SuccessFactors deal as if the cloud had just been discovered, the reality is cloud computing has been around almost as long as the Internet itself. What the excitement is about is how HR software services are delivered, and the big deal is that increasingly, companies aren’t buying systems, they’re licensing seats…