Category: News

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Penny Jones.

Cloud computing and virtualization go hand in hand. Virtualization is cloud’s foundation and cloud computing software – such as OpenStack, for example – “is just the bit that sits on top of the house to manage this”, as Rackspace’s VP of technology and product, Nigel Beighton, will tell you.

But as the Cloud evolves, so too must virtualization to support more IO-intensive network and storage workloads, and to ensure that open standards being developed across the industry can also be applied to hypervisor designs. Beighton says most clouds today run on virtualization technology that is ten years old. But work is taking place behind the scenes to revolutionize the way virtualization is done…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Ian JA Ferguson.

Touted for its business and cost benefits, cloud computing has become a hot topic in Asia but enterprises and service providers alike have yet to fully understand the requirements and challenges of this delivery model. Over the last couple of weeks there have been several announcements relating to cloud computing that indicate a growing demand for cloud services, including in Asia.

There’s still a lack of clarity about regulations and business requirements in the delivery of cloud services. Last week it was reported that cloud computing investments in Malaysia will grow by more than 20 times over the next eight years to hit 2.8 billion ringgit (US$873 million), according to Forrester Research. Badlisham Ghazali, CEO of Multimedia Development Corporation (MDEC) said this area would continue to be a key area of development for the country’s ICT roadmap…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Depankar Neogi.

In 2010, Netflix made a very bold move. It decided to completely move all its Internet media streaming business to the cloud. The company would rather focus its engineering effort on solving challenging business problems rather than spending money on data centers. Besides, that lets someone else worry about being experts in a technology. Amazon’s Cloud Computing group actively is solving problems such as storage solutions, hardware failover, and networking infrastructure so that customers like Netflix don’t have to be superstars. Using the cloud’s elastic computing capability, Netflix’s business has grown and its traffic today comprises more than 30% of all North America’s peak Web traffic.

Yet, the decision to move to the Cloud was not easy for Netflix, and that is true for many other businesses. Here I explore some of the best practices around selecting the right type of cloud computing vendor, running your business processes on the cloud, what to run on the cloud, and how to know if you are doing it right…

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Cirrity, the secure and compliant cloud services provider, has added Desktops as a Service (DaaS) to its cloud-based solutions.  Cirrity’s DaaS solution provides a complete virtual workspace from the cloud, delivering Windows desktops and applications as an easily managed, unified cloud service. Powered by industry-leading Desktone technology — a multi-tenant, grid-based platform purpose-built for cloud-hosted desktops — Cirrity’s DaaS solution eradicates the barriers to virtual desktop adoption and enables a risk-free, incremental evolution of the next-generation workspace.

"Cirrity’s DaaS solution improves desktop accessibility and security while also supporting disaster recovery strategies," says Andrew Albrecht, COO of Cirrity. "If employees rely on desktops located in the office but physically can’t get to their computers, the disruption to business operations is immediate. With Cirrity’s DaaS solution, the desktop resides in Cirrity’s secure, compliant cloud infrastructure built on enterprise-class hardware. Employees can access their desktop from any device, anywhere, anytime."…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author:  Revital Libfrand.

In the competitive world of SaaS, where great software products are provided in a relatively low fee subscription model, many companies focus heavily on users’ acquisition and the cost of acquisition & support that is associated with such customers. As a result, almost all processes requiring interaction with the customers have become automated.

This leads to one of the major challenges SaaS companies are facing nowadays: customer churn. Thousands of new customers mean nothing, if hundreds or more give up on the company and leave at the same time…

Grazed from Wired.  Author: Alpheus Bingham.

Few would dispute the enormous impact that cloud computing has had on the technology and business landscape during the past decade. In 2001, the approach to hosting business applications on the emerging web wasn’t even remotely proven and, in fact, had failed because the first generation of web-hosted application service providers (ASPs) got it all wrong.

But over the course of a decade, what we now call cloud-based or software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications has taken the world by storm and become mainstream. Today, cloud computing is an umbrella term that applies to a wide variety of successful technologies (and business models), from business apps like Salesforce.com, to infrastructure like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), to consumer apps like Netflix. It took years for all these things to become mainstream, and if the last decade saw the emergence (and eventual dominance) of the cloud over previous technologies and models, this decade will see the same thing with crowdsourcing…

Grazed from CFO.  Author: Alissa Ponchione.

Seeing an opportunity to make workflow more efficient, residents and physicians-in-training at Oregon Health & Science University started using cloud-computing service Google Drive to keep everyone up to date on patient information. After a faculty member discovered the staff was using the cloud service, the university launched an investigation, and it found that Drive documents held health data from 3,044 of its patients.

Although Google Drive is password protected and has security measures in place, the university did not have a contract agreement with the cloud provider to use or store OHSU patient health information. By disclosing patient information in the cloud, the university violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which requires doctors to keep patient information private and secure…

Grazed from SiliconHills.  Author: Editorial Staff.

All of Rackspace’s customers will be hybrid cloud customers in the future, said Gerardo Dada, the company’s product marketing leader.  San Antonio-based Rackspace, which calls itself the Open Cloud company and co-founded with NASA the Open Stack operating system, has seen its cloud computing business skyrocket in the past few years.

The cloud lets customers operate a “network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.”  Rackspace faces competition in the hybrid cloud market from Amazon Web Services, the number one leader, and other players such as Microsoft, HP Cloud and IBM’s SoftLayer…

Grazed from Piston.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud software is changing the way IT departments run. IT is no longer the “owner” of technology in the enterprise. As Rick Vanover put it, “the ‘server admin’ we have known over the years is a job description that is seriously at risk.” With cloud software providing an increasingly self-serve computing environment, the IT department will have to change. Thoran Rodrigues writes in Tech Republic about how this is going to happen.

Rodrigues points to a fundamental shift in corporate IT from capital intensive data center build-outs to cloud-based software hosting. Whether the cloud is running as a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, or a public cloud, the truth remains that the IT department no longer has iron control over all computing in the enterprise…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Ethan Banks.

While outsourcing applications or infrastructure to the public cloud relieves IT of some operational burdens, IT still has to monitor that infrastructure. Companies often overlook the complexity of troubleshooting a cloud app integrated with local infrastructure. If there’s a performance problem, is it the cloud provider? A congested link on the Internet path between the application and the consumer? A problem on the LAN?

How does one find the root cause without the provider and IT department pointing fingers at each other? This is the problem that ThousandEyes wants to address. ThousandEyes was founded in January 2010 to address the challenge of network performance management in the cloud era. I saw a presentation from ThousandEyes at Network Field Day 6, and have also played with a trial version of the service…