Category: News

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Mike Fratto.

At the InformationWeek 500 conference, editor at large Charlie Babcock and I held a workshop on private cloud. We learned as much from the audience members as they did from us. One of the more interesting discussions centered on the challenges organizations face in implementing private clouds. For almost all in the room, it wasn’t a matter of technical as much as organizational: How do you overcome employee resistance and get them to embrace cloud?

Prior to the event, I was talking to a longtime friend who’s a software architect and is now heading up his company’s private cloud initiative. The problem he’s facing isn’t making the business case–he has a budget and a directive. He’s not troubled by the technology–the company will train and outsource for the expertise it needs. The No. 1 problem is staff resistance. As a software architect, Bob (not his real name) is an outsider to IT operations, but he’s comfortable with automation and software-driven IT. Unfortunately, the IT department isn’t…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Ashlee Vance.

The transition to cloud computing has not been all that kind to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). Over the years, HP has unfurled one cloud service and then another, only to rescind the services a short while later after a lack of interest from consumers. Such is life when you’re a company used to selling computing infrastructure goods that arrive via forklift rather than URL.

HP does have a secret weapon in the cloud, though, and that’s its line of online publishing services, which happen to be very good and often quite novel. The lead service—outside of Snapfish, which HP got through an acquisition—is MagCloud. It lets you create a magazine or a brochure and sell it on demand to the public for a price of your choosing. A DIY rocket enthusiast, for example, could craft a magazine dedicated to the goings-on in his local rocket building scene and then sell it to the club members. You can find some real examples of the magazines here…

Grazed from Government Computer News. Author: Editorial Staff.

In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture fund company, has made its second investment in cloud computing in as many months, having recently entered into an agreement with Huddle to develop a secure version of its content collaboration platform for U.S. intelligence agencies, Information Week reports.

Last month, In-Q-Tel signed an agreement with Adaptive Computing to develop a cloud operating system. The agency company is also working with cloud storage specialist Cleversafe. Huddle, which promotes itself as an alternative to Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration technology, is developing a version of its cloud-based platform that complies with the Federal Information Security Management Act. The Homeland Security Department and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are preparing to implement the technology, according to the tech publication…

Grazed from CFO. Author: Rob Livingstone.

In 10 Things You Just Gotta Have in Your Cloud Contract, I covered a range of things (10, as a matter of fact) that CFOs should think about when they sign a cloud contract.

But the subject is hardly exhausted, especially when it comes to software-as-a-service (SaaS), the most popular flavour of cloud computing, and (not coincidentally) the one with the lowest barrier to entry. The risks in cloud computing are more concentrated at the software layer than the platform and infrastructure layers (the other cloud computing flavours). The software layer contains all your application and business logic, which supports and runs your business…

Grazed from The Wall Street Transcript. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing remains the main secular trend driving investment spending in technology, and it is enabling more secular trends in mobility, analytics and social computing, both in the consumer and enterprise worlds, says Deborah L. Koch, a Co-Manager at the Northern Technology Fund (NTCHX) and Senior Vice President at Northern Trust Corporation.

“You don’t really have the data or the logic of the applications stored on your computer, you’re accessing it through the Internet. What we’re seeing today is a broader adoption of that, not only by consumers to access digital content of all forms but also in the enterprise,” Koch said…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: George Crump.

he primary objective of virtualization and cloud computing is to create a data center that is more responsive to the needs of the business, that enables technology to be a competitive weapon instead of a cost center. Storage has to play a key role in this evolution so it can support these Agile IT initiatives.

In our upcoming webinar 3 Ways To Use The Cloud To Eliminate Storage Headaches, we are going to discuss how to eliminate storage administrative headaches like provisioning, performance management, storage expansion, and data protection. The key to eliminating these headaches is to create a storage value infrastructure which has three steps: virtualize the storage, automate the storage, and cloud-extend the storage. This first column will be devoted to storage virtualization, and we’ll cover the other two steps in our next column…

“IT organizations are moving beyond simple virtual machine provisioning. Our clients are now considering how to orchestrate the delivery of multi-tier applications and assure committed service levels,” said Alessandro Perilli, research director at Gartner. “Automated infrastructure optimization, through dynamic resource allocation and intelligent workload placement, is critical to enable service assurance and scale operations in large private or public cloud environments”.

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