Category: News

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey Nelson.

Cloud computing’s adoption in the enterprise has been primarily driven by personal use. People are now accustomed to being able to access their personal email and documents from all devices and at all times. So it only makes sense we should be able to do this with our work content!

As I’m sure if you’re reading this article, you’re already with me. It’s not you I have to convince, but it’s you who has to convince your CEO. But I’m guessing if you aren’t there already, he’s a huge skeptic. So how do you persuade him/her otherwise? Here are 5 steps to convince your CEO 0n cloud computing:…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

WBUR is reporting a new proposal to tax cloud computing services as part of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s fiscal 2014 plan to boost state spending by $1.9 billion. Included in the budget is a $265 million line item that if accepted will see sales taxes expanded to include broadly worded “canned software.”

The tax would cover custom-designed software and services hosted on the Internet (aka The Cloud). “Custom” software includes the design and custom development of Web sites, so the cost to local businesses of a new Web site could increase by 4.5%…

Grazed from ProfitBricks. Author: PR Announcement.

ProfitBricks, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company that completely reengineered the delivery of cloud computing, today announced that Pete Johnson, senior director of platform evangelism at ProfitBricks, will present at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) on March 27 at 5 p.m. Johnson will discuss how ProfitBricks’ Cloud Computing 2.0 solution empowers gaming companies to implement lower-cost, higher performing back-end infrastructures.

During "Matching Your Costs to Your DAU: Thin Client Back-End Infrastructure Made Easy," Johnson will reveal how gaming companies no longer have to take on horizontal scaling, which is often more programmatically intense or a waste of resources. ProfitBricks offers per minute billing and live, vertical scaling without requiring a reboot, allowing users to add more CPU and RAM to existing virtual machines as DAU rises and remove them when no longer needed…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

OpenStack is the open source success story of the contemporary era, a project that started as a gleam in the eye of Rackspace executives who wanted to compete with Amazon, and rapidly grew into a project with its own governing board and foundation.

It consists today of numerous distinct parts, all of them making progress on the problems that confront their individual areas of cloud computing. It’s been criticized for lacking the beneficent dictator who, it used to be believed, was a necessary force behind a successful open source project. That was before the procedures of an open source development process — and the ability to govern those seemingly chaotic procedures — were well understood. The Apache Software Foundation and Linux kernel development process supplied the models…

Grazed from InvestorsDaily. Author: Pete Barlas.

Cisco Systems (CSCO) said early Monday that it would acquire SolveDirect, a privately held enterprise software company based in Vienna, Austria. The acquisition will boost Cisco’s growing portfolio of products for cloud computing environments. Terms were not disclosed.

The No. 1 maker of computer networking gear such as switches and routers, Cisco has been building up its software business through mostly small acquisitions of software companies that deal in cloud computing, a system that lets companies access their data and apps over the Internet "cloud." Here is a recent IBD report on Cisco’s software progress…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Bart Perkins.

Moving to the cloud may reduce infrastructure costs and headaches, but clouds have their shortcomings. When they rain, millions can quickly become drenched. In the past year, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other providers experienced problems, from minor disruptions to major outages. A June 2012 headline captured the fallout: "Modern life halted as Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram go down."

The service interruptions experienced by those companies and others disappointed countless consumers, but it was worse than a disappointment for the businesses themselves. They had come to depend heavily on cloud reliability; when the cloud services they had put their trust in failed, it was as if they had ceased to exist. All the outages were temporary, of course, but revenues were lost during the downtime, and afterwards customers wrote blog posts expressing everything from disappointment to anger, with some proclaiming that they would take their business elsewhere. Organizations that depend on cloud services need to manage four areas to help ensure that their dependence isn’t a liability:…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

For the past few months, I’ve been poking around the various commercial clouds, buying new machines, trying software, and running benchmarks. Well, not exactly buying machines — just renting them for a few hours and plunking down a few pennies on the barrelhead. Along the way, I noticed it wasn’t working out the way I expected. The machines aren’t as interchangeable or as cheap as they seem. Moving to the cloud isn’t as simple or as carefree as it’s made to be. In other words, the machines weren’t living up to their hype. Anyone who’s been chugging the Kool-Aid and dreaming that the word "cloud" is a synonym for "perfection" or "pain-free" is going to be sorely disappointed.

This isn’t to say there’s no truth to what the cloud companies proclaim, but there are plenty of tricky details that aren’t immediately obvious. At their core, the machines aren’t miracle workers, just the next generation of what we’ve been using for years. The improvements are incremental, not revolutionary. If we dial back our hopes and approach the machines with moderated expectations, they’re quite nice. To keep our expectations in check, here is a list of what to really expect from the cloud…

Grazed from BrightMove. Author: Traci Kingery.

Chances are high that your industry, company, or perhaps more specifically, your role, has been altered over the years by cloud computing. The rate by which these changes continue to happen is increasing at an alarming rate as more corporations seek cost saving solutions and tools to increase productivity and effectiveness. Your organization has most likely transitioned, or begun to transition, toward cloud computing strategies and more specifically utilization as it relates to Human Resources and Recruitment. Assuming a basic understanding of what the cloud is, let’s breakdown some of the advantages and disadvantages for those that are still unfamiliar or possibly resistant.

As already mentioned, there are several reasons companies decide to evolve through the use of cloud computing. I once heard an analogy, though very simply put, gave a basic explanation of the cloud and why it is necessary for business. If the electricity used to power your home is representative of the internet, then the cloud is the original power source for that electricity. You may not know exactly where it’s coming from, but you have a basic understanding of how it gets there and the necessity of it (I said it was basic)…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Plenty has been said or written on cloud computing in recent years — pro, con and somewhere in between. Periodically throughout the rise of cloud computing, there have been some real gems put out there, aptly describing what’s on people’s minds — and maybe what was needed to be said. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s famous “fashion-driven” analogy back in 2008 is the stuff of legend, and makes this list, compiled below. Here are some memorable quotes and apropos quotes about cloud that that have surfaced over the years:

1) “First to mind when asked what ‘the cloud’ is, a majority respond it’s either an actual cloud, the sky, or something related to weather.” – Citrix Cloud Survey Guide (August 2012)

2) “Ultimately, the cloud is the latest example of Schumpeterian creative destruction: creating wealth for those who exploit it; and leading to the demise of those that don’t.” – Joe Weinman, Senior VP at Telx and author of Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing…

Grazed from BRW.  Author: Marianna Papadakis.

It’s easy to be bamboozled by the chatter about the benefits of cloud solutions for business and what’s available. Deciding on the right mix of cloud versus having your own dedicated infrastructure is even more daunting.

So what exactly is on offer? At one end of the scale you have software-as-a-service, which allows businesses to use a provider’s cloud-based applications, such as web-based email systems. At the other end there is infrastructure-as-a-service, where companies outsource their entire operations, including servers and networks to a provider on a pay-per-usage basis…