Category: News

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Bob Evans.

No, it’s not security, and it’s not privacy. It’s not speed of provisioning, rogue credit-card purchases for skunk-works projects, or even integration hairballs.  No, the biggest threat to cloud-computing companies today is customer fatigue.  Businesses are tired of hearing the tech industry squawk about whether this or that is a managed service or a faux cloud or a virtualized cumulonimbus cluster or a passing shower or black cloud of doom.

They are tired of hearing what the NIST’s definition of a cloud is or isn’t, and whether the solution that’s best for their global systems does or does not comply with the definitions of some self-appointed experts whose only certainty is that they’ll capriciously change their definitions to match the prevailing winds…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Jack Clark.

Platform-as-a-service provider AppFog is evaporating its cloudy bridge to Rackspace due to poor customer demand, in yet another case of the fluffy industry coming to terms with hard business realities. AppFog provides an application infrastructure automation service – otherwise known as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) – that lets devs choose the infrastructure upon which their apps run. The company has decided to curtail support for Rackspace’s OpenStack-based cloud due to "low adoption rates," according to an email seen by The Register that was circulated to AppFog customers last week.

"While we believe [multi-cloud support] to be one of our main selling points, it’s also become increasingly resource intensive to maintain so many instances of our infrastructure," AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson wrote in the email. "In an effort to keep our service affordable and reliable, we’ll be discontinuing support of the Rackspace public cloud due to low adoption rates."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Michael Endler.

For avid tech industry followers, it’s hard to go more than a few days without seeing another article about the benefits companies can gain by taking business into the cloud. These benefits, such as the ability to better connect remote or mobile workers, can lead to legitimate gains in an organization’s efficiency and bottom line. Nevertheless, cloud resources often demand that sensitive data be housed on an outside party’s servers, so many institutions and enterprises are cautious about, if not prohibited from, adopting the new technology.

Teambox believes its newest offering, Teambox On-Premise, can help more businesses climb onto the cloud bandwagon. Released earlier this month, the product brings the capabilities of the Barcelona-based company’s cloud platform behind the corporate firewall, allowing users to harness the file-sharing and collaboration advantages of the cloud while still meeting internal security and compliance requirements. The enterprise-oriented cloud market grows more competitive every week, but for organizations in highly regulated industries, Teambox On-Premise could offer the secure ladder into the cloud that they’ve been looking for…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

I was just reading an interesting post over at Information Age which outlines Accenture ACN +3.14%’s ambitious plan to position itself as the IT industry’s “cloud broker.” The strategy is part of a broader plan that sees the consulting company investing upwards of $400 million in new cloud computing capabilities. According to the story, the Accenture Cloud Platform will be part of what the company describes as a plan to grow its more than 6,700 cloud focused experts and related cloud services.

The term cloud broker seems to be thrown around a lot lately. TechTarget defines it as “a third-party individual or business that acts as an intermediary between the purchaser of a cloud computing service and the sellers of that service. The broker’s role may simply be to save the purchaser time by researching services from different vendors and providing the customer with information about how to use cloud computing to support business goals. In such a scenario, the broker works with the customer to understand work processes, provisioning needs, budgeting and data management requirements. After the research has been completed, the broker presents the customer with a short list of recommended cloud providers and the customer contacts the vendor(s) of choice to arrange service.”…

Grazed from Windows IT Pro. Author: BK Winstead.

Whether your organization is jumping full force into cloud computing or hanging back and assessing options carefully before deciding if the cloud can benefit your organization, there’s no question that IT shops are being changed by the industry’s drive toward cloud delivery. However, it’s equally clear that not every change is for the best. The challenge for IT pros is to find the cloud computing models that can aid your organization without sacrificing data security, organizational efficiency, and business productivity.

Dark Clouds

You’ve probably heard all the standard complaints against the cloud: can’t guarantee security; can’t access data or applications if the service or your connection goes down; no visibility into where your data is stored. Of course, these problems are real, and not something you can just gloss over. Yes, you do need to consider your back up plans, your legal obligations, and everything else very carefully—just as you do for your on-premises deployments…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Pete Manca.

We all know cloud is the future of IT, but there are still a few unanswered questions. For instance, with all the high-profile cloud outages, is the cloud really ready for mission critical applications? This common question arises because inevitably, we wonder if the cloud is more or less reliable and secure than our own data centers.

In a recent survey from North Bridge Venture Partners on cloud computing trends, 50 percent of respondents said they were confident cloud solutions were viable for mission critical business applications. Only three percent of those surveyed believed cloud was too risky, which improved from 14 percent the year prior. It’s clear many companies are transitioning to the cloud, and as more make the move, more applications are being transitioned as well…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

AnyPresence, a leading enterprise mobile development platform, today announced it was named one of the Top 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors of 2013 by CRN Magazine, a leading IT channel publication. AnyPresence was honored along side Cloudera, Heroku, Nimbula and other cloud computing innovators.

In the recent edition of CRN Magazine, editors highlighted how AnyPresence’s cloud-based mobile platform for enterprises aims to cut costs and make it easier to develop and deploy mobile applications. The publication also acknowledges the key benefits of the AnyPresence solution, including the ability to generate customizable mobile backend servers (MBaaS), mobile SDKs, and user interface starter kits for native iOS, native Android, and HTML5 mobile apps, with a unique no platform lock-in guarantee…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Marshall.

VMware is one of the latest household technology brands to throw its weight behind OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system that launched more than two and half years ago to enable any organization with the opportunity to gain quick entry into the cloud computing market.

Of course, VMware’s contribution to the OpenStack community hasn’t always been seen in a positive light. The virtualization giant’s joining of the OpenStack Foundation was initially met with skepticism since the company hasn’t always fully embraced the project. And even more recently, there was an interesting twist of marketing FUD centered on an announcement that PayPal — and perhaps even its parent company eBay — was ditching VMware in favor of moving to an OpenStack environment…

Grazed from InformationAge. Author: Pete Swabey.

At first, it seemed as though cloud computing might pose an existential threat to the IT outsourcing industry. If customers can rent IT capabilities over the Internet without setting up their own infrastructure, why would they need outsourced IT skills?

In truth, there is a lot of extra work associated with using cloud computing. In 2009, Gartner analyst Darryl Plummer spotted the need for a so- called “cloud broker”, a function – internal or external – that makes it easier for a business to adopt public cloud services by certifying approved cloud providers, taking care of integration, managing user identity across services, and more besides…

Grazed from PRNewswire. Author: PR Announcement.

BT is accelerating its push into cloud computing all round the world by launching BT Cloud Compute, an enhanced service that allows CIOs far greater control in terms of designing, building, buying and operating a cloud solution that is tailored to their specific needs. CIOs can keep pace with the changing demands of their customers and confidently build powerful ‘pay as you go’ cloud solutions that they can use from anywhere in the world with consistent levels of quality, security and service from BT.

From the boom economies of Latin America and the financial hubs of Europe to the huge developing markets of Asia and the fast-moving retail sectors of the US, BT’s smartest, fastest customers are transforming their businesses by creating or changing their service in response to new demands. BT research has shown that customers using BT Cloud Compute make an average saving of 40 per cent against traditional ways of working. By using BT’s advanced Cloud orchestration of infrastructure, network, applications and services, customers can align costs directly to their business needs…