Category: News

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

It doesn’t matter if you are a technology wizard or a non-tech business professional. Cloud computing is impacting your job, and the ability to be savvy with cloud resources can mean career advancement. For business professionals, it means better understanding information technology. For IT professionals, it means better understanding the business.

There is a rising number of IT jobs that require the ability to either build or interface with cloud computing services and systems. One report estimates that only about five percent of the IT workforce is “cloud ready.” Whether or not this is accurate, it does point to a market that is accelerating faster than the skills available to keep up with it…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Vijay Sethi.

Cloud computing is about delivering massively scalable IT-enabled capabilities, as service to external customers using Internet technologies. Instead of saying that Cloud computing is a hyped tech-trend, I will say it is a buzz word today and still many service providers actually interchangeably use SaaS and Cloud Computing in their discussions.

Not all SaaS solutions leverage cloud-based computing and cloud computing is not another term for SaaS. In fact it is a broad technological concept where some types of SaaS offerings could qualify for to be included under cloud computing. That is, if the IT application being delivered under SaaS concept is one which is highly scalable; it could qualify for being considered as a cloud computing application…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud adoption is on the rise, but according to the results of a survey conducted by OneLogin, there are a lot of naughty end users out there. As 78 percent of organizations surveyed said they planned to increase the number of cloud apps they have in 2013, 71 percent admitted to using unsanctioned apps. Rogue IT is, of course, nothing out of the ordinary, but it does present a great deal of security risk in this information age. Rogue cloud, specifically, has been making the lives of IT administrators difficult ever since the first cloud service was opened up for credit card billing. The survey clearly shows it’s still a major problem for administrators.

According to OneLogin, the survey demonstrated that 2013 will be the tipping point for cloud adoption. The company, in collaboration with security consultancy flyingpenguin, surveyed 200 IT and business professionals within organizations of all sizes and across various industries. The results were interesting, but perhaps not entirely surprising…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Xath Cruz.

Cloud Computing is taking off in various parts of the globe, partly because companies are now realizing the great potential of cloud computing technology when it comes to cost efficiency, productivity, agility, and operational flexibility. However, Canadian companies seem to be lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to the adoption of this newly matured technology.

Canada’s Slow Adoption of the Cloud

The chief reasons why Canadian companies are slow to adopt cloud technology despite its maturity is due to security and privacy concerns. Canada has extremely stringent data privacy laws, and many Canadian companies are still waiting for the provincial and federal governments to standardize and update the policies in order to accommodate the cloud. With the Canadian government’s lack of clear policies on data privacy and their effects on the cloud, companies will not be willing to risk possible legal troubles regarding cloud use…

Grazed from NewsObserver. Author: Deanna Gibbs Lanier.

How can cloud computing help entrepreneurs on the go? Or small businesses with employees who spend most of their time on the road, and need access to company information anywhere, any time? Shop Talk put those questions to Deanna Gibbs Lanier, director in advisory for KPMG LLP, an audit, tax and advisory services firm with 87 offices, including Raleigh. Lanier helps clients see what it means to conduct business “in the cloud” – accessing emails, documents and applications through a combination of the Internet, plus hardware and software as a service.

Some firms find cloud computing to be a less expensive alternative to the traditional software licensing model, where companies are contracted to pay for a set number of users — even if that number shrinks over time. Cloud computing allows companies to add or decrease users as they go, and pay only for what they use, Lanier said. Some cloud models for small offices can start as low as $7 per user, per month, she said…

Grazed from Fox Business. Author: Donna Fuscaldo.

Small businesses are adopting cloud computing to save money, but it could end up costing them. According to a recent survey by Symantec, enterprises and small businesses are embracing cloud computing at a fast clip, but at the same time are experiencing escalated costs due to things like rogue cloud use, complex backup and recovery and inefficient cloud storage.

“Because it’s so easy to setup … there’s rouge deployments of cloud services,” says Tom Powledge, Symantec’s vice president of product delivery for SMB and Symantec .cloud. "Employees inside companies are using various cloud services on their own without checking in with IT administrators.”…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Patrick Burke.

Ask not what your cloud can do for you, but what it can do for your country. The Defense Department’s IT infrastructure is on a mission of consolidation, standardization, security and access, the Defense Department’s principal deputy CIO told attendees at a recent cloud computing panel discussion, according to an article on Defense.gov.

The department is reducing the number of data centers from about 1,500 to "a number far below that," Robert J. Carey said, and is implementing a coherent and consistent architecture across thousands of computing environments. This process is taking place in part because of costs, but also because it makes sense when it comes to securing data within the network, Carey said…

Grazed from HostReview. Author: Lucy Goodell.

Our cloud technology works on three specific cloud computing service models that are popular, effective, and flexible and most importantly user friendly. Therefore, the basic models of the cloud architecture are: 1. Infrastructure as a service: The infrastructure part includes the computer, network, storage, load balancing devices, virtual machines. All the hardware or the physical resources required for the clients are provided and also can be scaled up and down with the help of these services.

2. Software as a service: as the name suggests it includes the software section such as the virtual desktop, various utility applications, content resources management, email, games and much more. In this cloud computing model the service provider install, manage and operate various software’s and the client access them from the cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

The setting was Dogpatch WineWorks in San Francisco, a site where customers produce their own barrels of wine. But a different kind of ferment gripped the venue Jan. 24 as 120 developers, bloggers and analysts gathered there to see which mobile application producers Amazon Web Services selected as winners of this year’s Global Startup Challenge.

Before the winners crossed the stage in WineWorks’ large meeting hall, attendees sat through a presentation by Simone Brunozzi, senior AWS technology evangelist for the Bay area, on the many technical assists and services that Amazon provides developers building mobile apps in the EC2 cloud. They ranged from its AWS Mobile Software Development Kit to its DynamoDB database service…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Jeremy Geelan.

"Cloud computing’s not a panacea and it’s not the ideal solution for every business situation," wrote Oracle SVP Bob Evans recently in Forbes, "but at the same time, it’s no longer some nebulous (pardon me) theory whose risk is high and whose potential benefits are impossible to quantify."

Evans was commenting on the state of the infrastructure industry in response to a report by McKinsey consultants James Kaplan, Chris Rezek, and Kara Sprague in which they suggested that the recent IDC saying spending on third-party-managed and public-cloud environments will surpass $70 billion in 2015 might significantly under-estimate the true size of the market…