Category: News

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Carolyn Fitton.

The cloud is not a new concept for most businesses. Software companies big and small are leveraging cloud platforms to innovate and drive go-to-market activities. Mobile is also not a new concept, but it’s a popular area of focus for many companies and software vendors. Like the cloud, mobile is used by many to drive innovation and create new market opportunities.

What opportunities are created when these two innovative technologies are combined? SAP teamed up with Oxford Economics to answer this question. They collaborated on the research behind the report, ‘Unleashing the Cloud – Putting Mobility to Work.’ This report, the second in a series of papers that analyze the strategic adoption of cloud computing, is based upon a global survey of 200 senior business and IT executives, conducted in December 2012 and January 2013…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Douglas Bonderud.

IT system security is about more than just walling out attackers and making sure employees use strong passwords. The fundamental nature of networks has changed from being fully entrenched at the local level to being a mixture of owned, rented, in-house, distributed technology. While this provides greater flexibility for admins and can help lower total spending, the advent of ubiquitous cloud computing also presents new security challenges for midsize IT pros.

Defending the Stack

To create a solid set of IT security practices, admins need two things: patience and paranoia. The cloud provides an excellent touchstone for patience because IT departments are often pressured by executives and employees familiar with the cloud to fast track its adoption. The claim here is that lowered costs and greater agility override potential security concerns – they do not…

Grazed from TheVarGuy.  Author: DH Kass.

Mike Clayville, VMware’s (VMW) former Cloud Infrastructure Product Marketing vice president, became the third exec to exit the virtualization kingpin in recent weeks, joining cloud computing giant and rival Amazon (AMZN) Web Services (AWS) as the company’s new Worldwide Commercial Sales vice president.

Clayville’s switch to AWS, which was first revealed in a NetworkWorld report, comes amid Amazon adding some 200 enterprise sales reps in the last two years. The company is gearing up perhaps to pursue bigger enterprise customers not just for its public cloud business but also with an eye to challenging VMware’s private cloud dominance, as speculated by Business Insider…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Abdul Salam.

Ethics and morality have always been dictated by culture and the times. It takes on different forms and their forms from different places and time periods often contradict each other, and what is considered ethical or moral in one era may not be in another. The World Wide Web, and now more recently the move to Cloud Computing and the social revolution is changing the norms of our world’s cultures and ethics and morality along with it.

Just a decade ago it was very unethical to read someone else’s letter, it still is, but the medium of transportation and consumption has changed so much that it has become a little hard to define. Before, it was only between you and the mailman, and he was bound by law to never touch the contents of what he delivers. But in today’s Cloud environments there are no such laws and standards so companies are free to make their own…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Chris Talbot.

Application performance monitoring has only becoming increasingly more important as more and more applications are migrated to the cloud. Plenty of vendors are talking about the importance of monitoring cloud services. Now Boundary is looking to help customers of Google Compute Engine monitor and receive visualizations of the apps they run on the Google (GOOG) cloud service.

A new member of the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program, Boundary has based its business on what it calls "the first central intelligence service for modern IT operations management." The cloud service analyzes and correlates per-second application traffic "chatter" with input from third-party management tools. The goal is to provide IT administration teams with an early warning system so they’re aware when cloud services and applications are facing a failure…

Grazed from Channelnomics.  Author: Larry Walsh.

Vendors love cloud computing, at least in theory. The cloud computing model offers something many IT companies — vendors and solution providers alike — have never seen: recurring, predicable and accruing revenue. And, because cloud can be delivered at scale with fewer resources, such services are inherently more profitable.

Cloud economics aren’t lost on businesses. Rather than building and maintaining their own IT systems and applications, cloud computing promises to lower costs by making applications and resources more affordable through fractional recurring fees.  Here’s the problem: Businesses are worried about getting trapped in a service provider’s cloud…

Grazed from ZeeNews.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Invention of a new technology in the hardware is going to make data encryption more secure on the Internet, a new study has revealed.   According to the study conducted by MIT researchers found that cloud computing, a process of outsourcing computational tasks over the Internet, could give home-computer users unprecedented processing power and let small companies launch sophisticated Web services without building massive server farms. However, it also raises privacy concerns.

A bank of cloud servers could be running applications for 1,000 customers at once; unbeknownst to the hosting service, one of those applications might have no purpose other than spying on the other 999.   Encryption could make cloud servers more secure. Only when the data is actually being processed would it be decrypted; the results of any computations would be re-encrypted before they’re sent off-chip…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Brandon Butler.

The public cloud computing market is becoming increasingly competitive with new entrants focusing on hybrid offerings that combine public and private clouds. That’s leaving some asking the market-leading public cloud provider, Amazon Web Services, where its private cloud offering is.

The question was posed to Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels at GigaOm Structure last month and Vogels didn’t give any indication of plans to offer customers a way to run Amazon-style clouds on their premises behind their own firewalls. Instead, he says the company offers a variety of ways for customers to build private-like cloud on Amazon’s infrastructure. Also, acknowledging that customers will not abandon their own resources, Amazon has built ways to connect existing on-premises systems with its public cloud. “We’ve been doing quite a bit for people looking for that model,” Vogels said.For example, the company has tools like:..

Grazed from HCAMag.  Author: Cameron Edmond.

Cloud computing and the opportunities that come with it have quickly swept through the business world, and most organisations wouldn’t be blamed if they weren’t quite sure where the path leads.

Although the concept of offshore data storage is anything but new, its recent proliferation has meant that an understanding of the laws and regulations involved may be further behind than anyone wants to admit…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: CJ Arlotta.

Technology distributor Avant Communications Inc. has tapped private cloud and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider Unitas Global to provide private cloud services for its partners and customers.

Avant said the partnership will customer companies with a single source solution for designed, deployed and managed complex IT environments. Avant Executive Vice President Jennifer Gallego said in her prepared remarks that Unitas bridges the gaps in various technologies for Avant customers and partners…