Category: News

Grazed from ABCNews. Author: Jake Sturmer.

Security experts warn cloud computing in Australia is becoming an increasingly appealing target for hackers as businesses rapidly take up the technology. Tapping the online cloud is fast becoming the service mode of choice for many big Australian businesses, with nearly half of them using the technology. Instead of cables and computers crowding company offices, reams of information floats online.

Advocates say it is a more efficient and cost-effective way to manage data. Analysts Frost & Sullivan estimate the Australian industry was worth $842 million in 2012 and is expected to grow to $3.15 billion in 2016. F&S information and communications technology vice president Andrew Milroy says Australia is leading cloud adoption in the Asia-Pacific region…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Joe Hewitson.

Computing resources have been a quickly changing and ever-improving facet of modern business for many years. Innovations stream at breakneck pace. The rise of cloud computing has, in recent years, combined PaaS and SaaS (Platform and Software as a service) to provide a unified solution for IT groups looking for a more distributed computing resource strategy. As the data fed into these cloud platforms and applications continues to increase, the infrastructure supporting its growth will need to expand. This foundational need is exactly why many IT professionals in organizations of all sizes, including midsize companies, have begun pushing their computing infrastructure into the cloud.

Growth of IaaS

Gartner Inc., the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, has recently released a projected growth analysis of public cloud computing and its services. As reported by Forbes, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) stands out as the fastest-growing sector. Forecast with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just over 41 percent through 2016, the increase in demand for computing resources in the public cloud shows no sign of slowing down. The need for agile computing resources and scalable infrastructure has clearly caused a shift in focus for IT professionals. Playing catch up to the other two major services of the cloud, this IaaS growth proves to be a great illustration of the importance of the cloud in today’s business…

Grazed from GizMag. Author: Will Shanklin.

In the past few years, "the cloud" has revolutionized consumer tech – nearly as much as the mobile devices that it often accompanies. But how much has it changed us? Has cloud computing lived up to the tremendous hype that it promised a few short years ago? Let’s revisit 2011’s favorite buzzword, two years later.

Sneaking up on us

A couple of years ago, the tech world was abuzz about the cloud. Cloud storage service Dropbox was growing in profit and popularity. Spotify finally hit the U.S. Even Steve Jobs used his last Apple keynote to introduce iCloud. Sometime between then and now, the cloud went from being the next big thing to being something that’s so closely intertwined with computing – and our lives – that we often forget about it…

Grazed from ArabNews. Author: RD Rasooldeen.

Mobily’s new cloud computing service will offer its customers enhanced security and efficiency at an attractive price, Marwan Al-Ahmadi, Mobily’s chief business officer (CBO), said in Riyadh.
Al-Ahmadi was speaking at a press conference held in Riyadh following the launch of advanced public and hybrid cloud computing services for the business sector in the Kingdom, in cooperation with Virtustream.

Rodney J. Rogers, Virtustream chairman and CEO, was also present at the event. The conference comes following the strategic alliance agreement signed by both companies earlier this year in which public and hybrid cloud computing services were jointly built and provided by Mobily and Virtustream…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Stephen Bell.

Cloud computing might seem on the surface to be a cause of potential discord between the ICT team and the other parts of the business. Business users, knowing they can flexibly and cheaply fire up applications to handle many standard tasks, will seek to do this without involving ICT.

But in practice, say panellists at a cloud session at the NZ Oracle User Group conference last week in Wellington, the effect will be beneficial, giving the ICT department a means of concentrating on the unique aspects of the company’s business – their market differentiators. Changing the relationship between business and ICT as a result of the rise of cloud can be “a massive positive”, says Doug Hughes, vice president responsible for Oracle’s Fusion cloud services in Asia-Pacific…

Grazed from SBWire. Author: PR Announcement.

"Despite the perception of not being a “cloud company,” Microsoft continues to push its cloud computing platform, Windows Azure, onto the development world," says AJ of Consumerevidence.com. Designed as a platform for both developing and hosting web applications, Azure provides all the tools necessary to build a website or other web-based application. Azure further offers tremendous flexibility in managing applications once they are deployed. When using Windows Azure, one can rapidly deploy websites to its highly scalable cloud environment, easily create both Windows and Linux virtual machines, develop highly-scalable PaaS-based applications and reliably establish secure backends for mobile apps.

Azure is scalable in nature, supporting organizations both large and small. It is designed to be used by the following types of personnel:

• Application Developers
• IT Professionals
• Web Developers
• Graphic Designers…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Technologies around the Internet and the WAN have been around for some time. However, it wasn’t until very recently that a specific term began circulating which was supposed to emphasize the combination of these technologies. Cloud computing was born out of the idea of a distributed computing system where information was available from numerous different points. Although the idea has certainly caught on – there are still some misconceptions and confusions around the cloud.

Many businesses have found great ways to utilize a cloud model. Now, they’re able to be more agile, grow faster and even add to their business resiliency. Still, there are those that have never really worked with an enterprise cloud model and are held back by myths and confusion points around the technology…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Spanning Cloud Apps has tripled its funding after an undisclosed investor led the company’s latest round of financing. The developer of Spanning Backup for Google Apps has added another $6 million to its coffers to build out its direct sales team and its reseller channel. Existing investor Foundry Group of Boulder, Colo., participated in the Series B funding, which has brought the total raised funds for Spanning Cloud up to $9 million.

"We’ve spent the last two years building the best backup system on the planet for the millions of businesses that use Google Apps," said Charlie Wood, CEO and founder of Spanning, in a prepared statement. "This infusion of capital will allow us to accelerate the buildout of our direct sales team and reseller channel, while extending the product lead we’ve established over our competitors. It also provides us with an important strategic partner."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Joe Masters Emison.

On March 13, Netflix announced $100,000 in prize money for the developers who do the most to improve its open source tools for controlling and managing application deployments on cloud computing. Before spearheading this contest, Netflix’s cloud architect, Adrian Cockcroft, released many internal Netflix tools as open source. Currently, 8 cloud-architecture-specific tools are available from Netflix, and Cockcroft has been very open in sharing his and Netflix’s knowledge in public forms.

In theory, all of this should be wonderful. In reality, however, it’s likely to leave cloud computing with an enormous hangover of subpar practices and architectures for years to come. Netflix is the poster child for "Cloud Computing v1.0" and demonstrates both the enormous benefits and troubling problems. Cloud Computing v1.0 is a strictly an Amazon Web Services affair — it was first, and no other provider had the core features necessary to build comparable applications (think multiple availability zones and EBS with snapshots and quick restores). So it makes sense that Netflix embraced AWS; it saw huge benefits in being able to deploy and scale its service using the interfaces and architectures that were possible when AWS launched…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Jaroslav Cerny.

One of the many areas where services are beginning to move towards the cloud is in the database, as cloud providers, either public or private, can remove many of the time-consuming tasks around installing, configuring and provisioning the database. These roles are typically assigned to the database administrator (DBA), and one of the questions this raises is around the future of DBAs and their role in a cloud environment.

While cloud providers may take on a large proportion of the mundane tasks associated with the database, this by no means negates the position of the DBA. Instead, it allows the DBA to move from a tactical position to more of a strategic role, focusing on tasks that will add value to the business rather than being exclusively assigned to the day-to-day maintenance and running of infrastructure. For many reasons, the role of the DBA will continue to be an important one in the cloud environment, but DBAs need to be prepared for a shift from a highly technical role, to one that adds greater business value down the line, says Jaroslav Cerny, CEO at RDB Consulting…