Author: David

Grazed from ServerWatch.  Author:  Paul Rubens.

Some say idle hands do the devil’s work, but there’s no need to worry about VMware or HP. These two companies have been busy as bees working on cloud computing products, many of which they announced this week.

First up is virtualization technology specialist VMware (NYSE: VMW), with three bits of news to share with the world from VMworld 2011 in Copenhagen, Denmark: an update to vCenter Operations Manager, and new vFabric Application Management and IT Business Management suites. "Management is changing in the cloud era, and traditional management approaches are buckling under pressure from the way things work in the cloud," said Rob Smoot, a director of product marketing at VMware. "For IT to remain competitive with external providers there needs to be a change in management techniques, so we are embedding management into vSphere and vFabric."…

Grazed from CenterBeam.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A deal between Google and the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Police to provide cloud-based email and other apps has gone sour. Los Angeles CTO Randi Levin wrote a letter to Google’s contractor for cloud computing, Computer Sciences Corporation, saying the city will not pay Google due to the internet giant’s inability to provide secure email and collaboration…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

There’s a long-running debate in the cloud computing world about whether standard Infrastructure-as-a-Service resources have become true commodities, but it doesn’t look like they’re there yet. Even as prices drop ever closer to zero across the cloud-provider landscape, there are still plenty of points of differentiation…

Grazed from TMCNet.  Author: Gary Kim.

More than a quarter of all U.S. and U.K. respondents to a recent survey by international law firm Fulbright & Jaworski say their companies are using cloud computing, with 48 percent of the tech sector organizations using cloud computing already. Legal use of cloud computing

Nearly 25 percent of U.S. respondents and 13 percent of U.K. respondents say they expect to move software to the cloud…

Grazed from Computer World.  Author: Preston Gralla.

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge.  Author: David Richardson.

Cloud computing can introduce new stress points that demand great robustness of the IT infrastructure.

In order to prepare, it’s important to first evaluate the viability of a cloud deployment and conduct a thoughtful cloud planning analysis. Once this legwork has been completed, cloud may be an excellent choice based on the problem you are trying to solve and the opportunity cost. For potential cloud adopters, I believe there are several key focus areas that must be accounted for as part of any effective cloud planning analysis. To narrow it down, network connectivity, security and infrastructure capability and capacity are three areas that will need to be assessed as part of a thorough analysis in preparation for the cloud…

Grazed from InfoBoom.  Author:  Shawn Drew.

Cloud computing is on the tip of everyone’s tongue recently, and no startup exemplifies the possibilities of the public cloud more than Dropbox. A recent round of funding shows that while there were some issues with Dropbox security earlier this year, they didn’t slow down the company at all. The Dropbox security issues, which have been completely resolved and corrected, raised questions about data security in the public cloud, but the strong growth of cloud-storage companies show that while businesses and consumers may be concerned about security, it isn’t keeping them out of the cloud…

Grazed from FormTek.  Author: Dick Weisinger.

Increasingly,  groups within enterprises are using cloud-based services without the involvement of IT.  This is possible because cloud solutions are typically available via a low-cost subscription or with a pay-as-you-go plan, which means that cloud computing costs start low and easily fit within group or departmental budgets.  Cloud services and applications are attractive.  They’re frequently described with adjectives like ‘faster’, ‘cheaper’, and ‘easier’.  But, unfortunately, what may seem like a good idea today may be the source of a headache tomorrow…