Category: News

Grazed from Tech Crunch. Author: Leena Rao.

Nebula, a company that allows businesses to deploy large private cloud computing infrastructures has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Comcast Ventures and Highland Capital Partners with Kleiner Perkins, William Hearts II, Maynard Webb, Scott McNealy, and Innovation Endeavors participating. Also joining the round are Google’s first three investors, Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram.

Founded by Chris Kemp, the former CTO of NASA and OpenStack co-founder; Nebula allows businesses to create a private infrastructure and data systems. As Kemp explained to TechCrunch’s Semil Shah earlier this year, Nebula’s infrastructure is similar to Amazon Web Services and runs behind your own firewall in your own data center environment…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Saroj Kar.

The digital economy is experiencing rapid growth driven by broadband penetration; parallel computing power and storage capacity continue to grow. These developments contribute to the emergence of global markets content for the benefit of rights holders, but also create a new threat – copyright, which could seriously harm the creative industries.

The intellectual property rights are central to share innovations, stimulate creativity and strengthen consumer confidence. But the digital world is in a new challenge – how to find a good balance in a context where the consumer and creator merge, where the marginal cost of copying is zero, where it is extremely difficult to enforce existing legislation and where many consider the access free as a right…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Robert J. Mullins.

Windows Server 2012 Day is finally here, as Microsoft officially launches the server operating system that’s been in development for four years and is geared to serve the current needs of IT for secure but reliable access by workers to corporate data and applications regardless of their location and type of device they are using.

Microsoft experts from the Server and Tools businesses delivered a live streaming presentation Sept. 4, doing a deep dive on Windows Server 2012 features in the data center, in the development and deployment of applications and in the delivery of what the company calls “people-centric IT.”…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, announced today it plans to withdraw its applications to trademark the term "social enterprise."

For nearly two years, salesforce.com has evangelized the term "social enterprise" to describe how social and mobile cloud technologies empower companies to connect with customers, partners, and employees in entirely new ways. When salesforce.com applied to trademark the term in the IT sector earlier this year, members of the social sector expressed concern that it would cause confusion around the meaning of the term. The social sector, including both non-profits and for profits, define the term "social enterprise" as organizations that apply commercial strategies to improve human and environmental well-being such as reducing poverty or improving education…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Jack McCarthy.

With the channel buffeted by changes brought about by cloud computing, partners often look to vendors for support as they try to transform their business. In turn, vendors need to respond by placing more emphasis on programs that can help partners and win their loyalty, according to a report from analyst firm Forrester.

"Cultivating partner loyalty today is a complex, multifaceted endeavor, one that warrants a new vision incorporating new approaches to partner enablement," says the report, titled "Reinforcing Channel Partner Bonds In the Era of The Cloud," by analyst Tim Harmon…

Grazed from Smart Data Collective. Author: Paul Barsch.

As more companies turn to cloud computing, social media and online selling platforms to avoid spending budgets on infrastructure, it is also likely that they are sharing a key business enabler—behavioral data. So what happens when your cloud-based provider shifts from providing infrastructure or a platform for your business to actually competing with you?

Online business Zynga understands while they develop games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars and others that run on Facebook’s platform, it’s also not far-fetched that Facebook could get into the profitable business of gaming. In fact, Zynga is turning away (though not completely) from Facebook to also support games for Google plus and other social/mobile platforms…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

On Tuesday, Netflix put source code for its Eureka mid-tier load balancing technology onto Github so that other Amazon Web Services users can tweak it for their own use. This isn’t the first time Netflix has filled voids in the AWS stack.

Pretty soon we’re going to need a score card to track the increasingly complex Amazon-Netflix relationship. As Amazon dives deeper into streamed video on its own, Netflix, which runs its video streaming business on Amazon Web Services, is getting more proficient at plugging gaps in Amazon’s cloud platform…

Grazed from CircleID. Author: Paul Budde.

There have been some interesting developments in cloud computing over the last year.

For over five years our position has been that we acknowledge the enormous economic advantages that cloud computing has to offer, but at the same time recognise that the risk of losing control over data and IT systems is, at this stage, too great for most companies and governments to start utilising the cloud advantages in a serious way.

Traditionally cloud computing has been more successful in the consumer market — companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and many others have basically moved all of their IT activities into the internet cloud. The economic advantages are very clear as most of these services are free for the users; obviously they would not have been developed if they involved the use of the expensive traditional IT structures. ‘Free’ is a magic password for the consumer market and literally billions of people are using these companies via cloud-based services…

Grazed from Secure Business Insight. Author: David Grimes.

The easiest way in IT to stop a new technology or solution from being implemented is to play the security card.

As soon as someone mentions concerns around a new IT solution not being ‘secure’, the project will immediately come to a halt. Since cloud infrastructure and cloud computing first entered conversations within the enterprise sector, concerns about the security of cloud quickly became the biggest barrier to adoption.

As with security for any other technology solution– past, present or future – creating a security strategy and plan must be one of the first considerations for enterprise organisations. While choosing a service provider that can enforce strong security procedures and measures in the cloud is an important step, enterprises need to continue to take an active role in their own security and risk management…