Category: News

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…

Grazed from Delimeter. Author: Editorial Staff.

When many people come up against the term “risk” in the context of IT projects, they immediately reach for the telephone to call for their IT security experts. Risk, to many people, means the risk of data loss; in this sense, focusing on security has often been a logical proxy for more comprehensive IT risk management strategies. However, the moves which many organisations are currently undertaking as they embrace cloud computing technologies for substantial cost reductions, performance improvements and greater scalability in their IT operations have made many IT professionals aware that such definitions of risk are not always comprehensive enough to meet their needs.

The fundamental promise of cloud computing technology is that it allows organisations to externalise many of the resources previously managed within their own operations. However, unlike traditional outsourcing, which has typically been provided by one or multiple suppliers, cloud computing involves a broad range of suppliers whose varying approaches to security, governance, resilience, availability and privacy create a level of uncertainty for organisations. This creates perceived risk…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Saad Shahzad.

In addition to the legions of cloud provider startups carving out their places in market, major technology companies such as VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Google and Apple have also made a big push into cloud services. But after so many high-profile blunders last year, providers have to overcome customers’ concerns to gain mainstream traction in 2013.

Apple’s iCloud has had its share of problems, for example, and even cloud provider giants such as Amazon have struggled to ensure uptime for their cloud services, causing big customers such as Netflix, Instagram, Heroku and Pinterest to suffer outages. Amazon had a particularly tough year in 2012 with a number of cloud failures, some even causing permanent data loss to its customers. To find out whether the cloud market can still succeed in light of such major missteps, we have to take a deeper look into some cloud computing issues getting in the way of adoption…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Patrick Burke.

Symantec recently took a stroll down memory lane to revisit the first seeds of cloud computing that took hold more than a half-century ago. Symantec created an interactive timeline that illustrates the history of cloud computing, highlighting just how far the technology has progressed.

The interactive map, however, does more than just recall the roots of cloud computing; it provides an opportunity to look ahead as well. Symantec has plans to help usher in an era of safe, agile and efficient cloud computing. It recently outlined a strategy to get there, which includes providing companies with a variety of cloud solutions to address their specific needs and current IT environments, according to an article on CMSWire.com…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

According to the latest report published by Strategy Analytics, Apple is moving ahead of competitors Dropbox, Google and Amazon in the battle for cloud storage supremacy. Over a quarter (27%) of Americans polled said they had used iCloud, compared with 17% for Dropbox, with Amazon Cloud Drive (15%) and Google Drive (10%) trailing behind. Interestingly, over half of respondents (55%) had never used a cloud storage service, but 33% had first used one within the past week.

The report noted the key battleground in the cloud storage wars was music, with nine in 10 users storing music, although movie content has the potential to become a huge player in the space. “The growth of video streaming and the desire to access content via a growing range of devices will see services such as the Hollywood-backed digital movie initiative Ultraviolet – currently used by 4% of Americans – increase market share,” noted Strategy Analytics’ Ed Barton in a prepared statement…