Category: News

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

With other methods of tracking usage and access to cloud services and data already on the market, it was probably only a matter of time before someone aimed to help organizations track the geographic location services that are being accessed. Enter CloudLock, which launched not only its CloudLock Labs "innovation-focused projects" brand, but also GeoFence for Google Apps, the first service being offered under the new brand.

Available in the Google Apps Marketplace, GeoFence for Google Apps provides organizations—or their trusted solutions providers—with the ability to track where their users are accessing data from, what location users are logging in from, and any changes made by admins in their domain. Say "so long" to the ability to log in from sunny beaches secretively (you didn’t really think we believed you were at home sick for a week, did you?)…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud certifications are popping up more and more. Some are vendor-specific. Some are vendor-agnostic. And across those two categories are certificates that cover various categories of cloud technology. Enter Mirantis, the pure OpenStack play vendor, with a new vendor-agnostic certification around the open source cloud platform.

Mirantis Certification for OpenStack is being targeted at systems administrators and OpenStack cloud operators as the first vendor-agnostic OpenStack certification. Whether it’s truly the first vendor-agnostic certification is debatable, but the company is aiming to certify OpenStack cloud professionals on their proficiency to deploy and operate vendor-agnostic OpenStack cloud environments. That’s a good step, and one that could play well in the open source cloud space as it continues to grow and gain traction…

Grazed from AllThingsD. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Dell, the newly private computing company, will later today announce an alliance with the software company Red Hat that will become a significant piece of its cloud-computing strategy going forward. In what one source described as the “closest relationship that Red Hat has ever had,” Dell will announce plans to conduct deep engineering work on Red Hat’s version of OpenStack, the open-source cloud-computing platform.

In a move similar to a broad collaboration they launched around the Linux operating system more than a decade ago, Dell and Red Hat will cooperatively develop an enterprise-grade version of OpenStack based on the latest version, code-named Havana. The announcement will be made at a Dell event in Austin, Texas, later this morning…

Grazed from NetCraft. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing provider DigitalOcean is now growing faster than Amazon Web Services. Our December 2013 Web Server Survey showed a month-on-month gain of 6,514 web-facing computers at DigitalOcean; Amazon, meanwhile, grew by an almost as huge 6,269 web-facing computers. Together, the two companies accounted for more than two-thirds of the internet-wide growth in web-facing computers in December.

DigitalOcean is now the 15th largest hosting company in terms of web-facing computers — a remarkable feat considering DigitalOcean had only 280 web-facing computers at the start of this year. Although Amazon is still the largest hosting company (by web-facing computers) and has nearly six times as many web-facing computers in total, the rapid growth at DigitalOcean may have startled those at Amazon who thought their major competitors were Microsoft Azure and Rackspace…

Grazed from CXO. Author: Editorial Staff.

Public Cloud is reaching a greater level of maturity in India. According to a new Gartner report, around $3.9 billion will be spent on cloud services in India from 2013 through 2017, of which $1.7 billion will be spent on software-as-a-service (SaaS). The overall public cloud services market in India is also set to grow 33.6% this year to touch $404 million, an increase of $101 million from the 2012 revenue of $303 million, said the research firm.

Apart from SaaS that represents the most mature segment in the cloud services marketplace, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), including cloud compute, storage and print services, is also expected to grow 33.9% in 2013 to $59.2 million, said Gartner. “The public cloud services market continues robust growth in India through over the forecast period of 2011 through 2017. While SaaS dominates as the largest cloud segment, the high growth rates of IaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) make them important markets to watch,” said Ed Anderson, Research Director at Gartner…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

Like all the big enterprise tech vendors these days, Cisco’s got plans to grab a share of the expanding cloud computing market. For the most part, Cisco isn’t selling cloud services directly to enterprise customers (with the exception of WebEx, its Internet web conferencing service).

Instead, it sells the pieces and parts to build a cloud, and it does a brisk business with that. By one account, it sells more cloud computing infrastructure tech than competitors like IBM, HP, Dell, EMC and VMware, according to market research firm Synergy. Now the company is starting to talk about a new product, code-named Cloud Fusion, that it says will protect companies from NSA spying, reports the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Hickins…

Grazed from TMCNet. Author: Ed Silverstein.

Revenue in the global server market dropped 2.1 percent when comparing Q3 of this year and Q3 of 2012 – in what was called “weak performance” by Gartner. Sector watchers blame competition from cloud computing services, as well as some other causes such as the wider economy. Small businesses, especially, may find moving to the cloud instead of replacing an old server more sensible. Cloud is well-suited for many small companies.

The cloud offers more flexibility, leads to lower costs and provides more security and greater efficiency, according to media reports. In fact, earlier this year one MYOB survey showed that small- or medium-sized businesses that adopted Cloud technology were “twice as likely to see an earnings uplift in the past year.”…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Deborah Gage.

Despite the hype around cloud computing, there will always be some information that companies want to keep out of the cloud. File sharing and synchronization company Egnyte Inc. has built itself on that bet, and the company raised another $29.5 million this week as it moves toward a possible IPO. Valuation, while undisclosed, has more than doubled since the last round, when it was more than $100 million.

“The view that companies are going to move 100% of data to the cloud is unrealistic,” said Northgate Capital Group Managing Partner Brent Jones, whose firm invested in Egnyte. “[The idea that some] information is too sensitive to go to the cloud is a huge market [and] a real differentiator.”…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: David Roe.

Enterprise software spending will recover next year driven by the combined forces of cloud computing, data management, mobile applications and social business, according to new research from Gartner. The research adds that the nexus of these four forces will result in the biggest disruption to the software market since 2000, but will also result in new opportunities for vendors.

The research, "Market Trends: Monetizing Gartner’s Nexus of Forces in the Enterprise Software Markets" by Tom Eid, found more than 26 percent of total software enterprise revenues will be driven by the dovetailing of these areas of software, up from 12 percent in 2012…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Patrick Thibodeau.

Cloud adopters face serious risk in the next two years because of the strong possibility that their provider will be acquired or forced out of business, according to Gartner. The research firm is predicting a major consolidation in cloud services and estimates that about 25% of the top 100 IT service providers in the infrastructure space won’t be around by 2015. "One in four vendors will be gone for whatever reason — acquisition, bankruptcy," said William Maurer, a Gartner analyst. Most of the time, the changes will come through acquisition.

"There is real risk," said Maurer to a packed room for his presentation at the Gartner Data Center Conference. "We’re in the phase of buyer beware with cloud," said Michael Salvador, who attended the presentation. He is a technical solutions manager at Belden, which makes cable, connectivity and networking products…