Category: News

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Wyatt Kash.

If you spend any time listening to what government IT executives are talking about in Washington these days — besides the NSA’s data-collection practices and what everyone should have learned from HealthCare.gov — it’s hard to ignore at least some discussion about secure cloud computing and a federal program called FedRAMP.

Talk to IT executives outside of Washington, however, and it’s evident that discussions about FedRAMP and its impact on cloud service providers are reaching far beyond the Beltway and rippling through the boardrooms of IT services providers. As Amazon Web Services VP Teresa Carlson said in a recent interview: "Cloud companies won’t be able to participate in any [government] procurement or award without being able to achieve the FedRAMP standards."…

Grazed from WashingtonPost. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing company VMware says it is buying mobile computing company AirWatch for about $1.18 billion in cash. The deal also includes about $365M million in installment payments and assumed unvested equity. VMware says the acquisition of the privately held Atlanta-based company will boost its mobile computing offerings for businesses without compromising security.

AirWatch will continue to be led by its founder and CEO John Marshall and will become part of VMware’s end-user computing group. AirWatch has more than 10,000 customers and 1,600 employees around the world…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloudnexa, an industry leading cloud managed services provider known for helping clients realize the full utility power of cloud computing, today announced that it has been recognized as a Premier Consulting Partner by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company was one of twenty two partners to receive this status for 2014 globally. In addition to its Premier Consulting Partner Status the company also recently received its specialization competency in Managed Services, Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange from AWS.

The AWS Premier Consulting Partner designation highlights the top Amazon Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partners globally that have distinguished themselves by investing significantly in their AWS practice, providing exceptional customer service, helping a large number of significant customers run their applications on top of AWS and building a healthy consulting business on AWS…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Frank Konkel.

The Defense Information Systems Agency is piloting the cloud security model it developed for the Defense Department in an effort to better formalize processes for future commercial cloud service acquisitions. To test the new model, DISA will leverage a series of pilot programs between mission partners — various DOD agencies — and cloud service providers as both take initial steps to harnessing commercial cloud computing services within DOD.

According to a DISA spokesperson, "If a mission partner wishes to execute a cloud service pilot with controlled unclassified information" – the information at DOD Impact Levels 1 and 2 – "it coordinates its implementation plans with DISA, the cloud broker." Once a mission partner procures the pilot cloud service, the agency and DISA will meet regularly to assess the pilot and its effectiveness…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Sensing the customer need for more computational muscle in smaller packages, Amazon Web Services has added a number of new packages in its Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service. The Amazon subsidiary also reduced prices on selected storage packages, reducing the cost of its Simple Storage Service (S3) by up to 22 percent and Elastic Block Service (EBS) by up to 50 percent. The new packages, or compute instances, in the EC2 line fill out the company’s second-generation M3 line of instances, which the company is now touting as the successor to the original M1 line.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced the M3 series a year ago as a more performance-minded alternative to the base M1 offerings. The M3 series features faster CPUs, making them better suited for compute-intensive tasks such as video encoding, batch processing and caching. The M3 line also features SSDs (solid-state disks) which, according to AWS, offer a more consistent I/O rate than M1 services…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

One of the more annoying aspects of anything to do with the cloud is the number of individual services that have to be contracted in order to create something that resembles a workflow within an organization. Each of the services may seem relatively inexpensive, but when you add them all up along with the cost of integrating them, the cost of cloud computing starts to rise considerably. The good news is that we?re starting to see a shift toward the consolidation of cloud services. Case in point is PanTerra Networks, which today launched a SmartBox cloud service that combines file sharing with a unified communications service delivered via the cloud.

PanTerra Networks CEO Artie Chang says that via SmartBox, organizations can now combine file sharing and unified communications to deliver a more holistic approach to managing workflow across the organization that allows users to share, communicate and collaborate within the same cloud service…

Grazed from The Star Tribune. Author: Steve Alexander.

Best Buy appears to be jumping off the cloud. The company said Tuesday that it is selling its MindShift Technologies cloud-computing business to the Japanese firm Ricoh for an undisclosed amount. In 2011, Best Buy paid $175 million for MindShift, a Waltham, Mass., provider of information technology and cloud computing services to small businesses. In cloud computing, customers can use computers, software and data storage in remote data centers rather than buying their own.

At the time, acquiring MindShift was seen by analysts as a way for Best Buy to diversify beyond selling computers and other electronic devices, as well as the company’s first major effort to enter the cloud computing market. Ricoh said MindShift, which has 650 employees, will continue to operate under the same name and management. The deal is expected to close in February…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Gillian Livingstone.

In today’s ERP world, one of the main choices when choosing a business system – is would you like this to be on the cloud or located on a server in your office? From speaking to a variety of different companies, it is clear many people are divided, mainly an age divide.
What becomes more apparent is the lack of understanding of the cloud.

The cloud is used in many different aspects of your everyday life. The first cloud experience I had was my Hotmail account (and I wasn’t even aware I was using the cloud when I created my account) accessing my emails from any device and any time. The next big realisation of the cloud is your iTunes account, streaming your music from all your different Apple accounts whether this was your Mac laptop, iPad or iPhone. Now we have the ability to pick up iMessages on your iPhone or iPad. All these features are down to the creation of the iCloud. Like me, I imagine most people in society would be lost without the ability to get my music at any time…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Don Sheppard.

A definition for cloud computing, despite it having been with us for many years (some say back to the 1960s), seems to be fairly elusive. The U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) definition is perhaps the best known but it is a user-centric definition. Most recently the ISO (International Standards Organization) and the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) have jumped into this game with an emerging standard called ISO/IEC 17788 that provides a basic vocabulary and description for cloud computing.

First, two points to note:

• there is not currently, and there may never be, a single conformance statement for all of cloud computing – it is just too diverse for a single standard.
• cloud computing is really a "paradigm shift"? not a single system – there will be many forms of cloud computing system, with many different deployment patterns…