Category: News

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Gregory Musungu.

Cloud computing is a term we hear quite often, but there are very few people who understand what it’s all about. You would argue that whatever technology this is, it is probably out of your world or too complex. In reality, cloud computing is a simple technology that has been around for a while, and almost all of us have used it, without even knowing. In simple terms, cloud computing entails running computer/network applications that are on other people’s servers using a simple user interface or application format. It’s that simple.

If this language still sounds strange, going back to basics will tell you something about what cloud computing is all about. In the olden days of networking, way before Google or Yahoo was born, companies ran e-mail as an application whose data was stored in-house. As such, all the files, documents, messages, and other things you currently use in e-mail were stored in a safe, dark room on the company’s premises. These sounds familiar because you were probably banned from visiting that room due to security reasons…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

As VMware transitions from CEO Paul Maritz to CEO Pat Gelsinger and keeps pushing beyond its server virtualization roots, there are a lot of questions about where the company is headed. Here are 6 key issues the company should address at VMworld.

VMware’s annual VMworld shindig is next week, giving the company a golden opportunity to answer a lot of questions about its future and its future products. Here are five topics the company needs to address at the event where incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger, and out-going CEO Paul Maritz will both keynote…

Grazed from SiliconRepublic. Author: John Kennedy.

The global app development market will be worth US$9bn in 2012 and major shifts in the direction of mobile, agility, cloud computing and open source projects will transform the industry forever, a new report from Gartner claims.

Growth will be driven by evolving software delivery models, new development methodologies, emerging mobile application development (AD) and open source software.

“Application modernisation and increasing agility will continue to be a solid driver for AD spending, apart from other emerging dynamics of cloud, mobility and social computing,” said Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

If your organization has moved past all the excuses to use the public cloud, congratulations! But did you think through your data-integration strategy before deployment? If not, you’ll find it difficult to maintain your corporate data in a public cloud.

The best bang for the cloud computing buck comes from using public cloud resources, such as Amazon Web Services, Google, Rackspace, IBM, and Microsoft. But that means you have to move some of your corporate data to the public cloud to take advantage of its cheap storage and per-use rental of compute cycles.

When you move even a smidgen of data to a public cloud, you quickly understand the need for some sort of synchronization with on-premise enterprise systems. Otherwise, users will rekey data, overnight USB drives, and take other ugly approaches to data movement — it happens more often than most IT organizations realize…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknas.

Rackspace has released Cloud Monitoring, which includes an API designed to give users flexibility in monitoring websites and Web applications that run on a variety of platforms, the company said on Wednesday.

Cloud Monitoring is based on the technology from Cloudkick, a company Rackspace acquired in 2010. Since then the Cloudkick team has been working to incorporate its monitoring system into Rackspace’s product portfolio, according to John Engates, CTO at Rackspace.

An important function is the service’s ability to monitor different systems…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

Autodesk missed second quarter sales expectations by a wide margin and the company said it would restructure and lock down expenses as it tried to position its business better for cloud computing.

The design and engineering software maker reported second quarter earnings of 28 cents a share on revenue of $569 million, up 4 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 48 cents a share. Wall Street was expecting second quarter earnings of 49 cents a share on revenue of $593 million.

That sales miss translated into Autodesk shares plunging 21 percent in afterhours trading…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Agam Shah.

Dell on Thursday said it will offer dedicated servers in its data centers and off-premises application and storage services for companies looking to establish private clouds.

Dell’s Cloud Dedicated program intends to reduce the stress of companies hosting servers locally by moving workloads off premises to Dell’s data centers. Dell will deliver IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) offerings through the private cloud, which could reduce the costs involved in deploying servers and managing services locally.

The program helps companies move applications into the cloud, and the service levels can meet security and compliance requirements, Dell said. The service bundles storage and networking, and can handle large or small workloads. A number of managed service options are offered with the program…

Grazed from MSPNews. Author: Laura Stotler.

Virtualization, the growing prominence of "bring your own device" in the workplace, the push to move applications to the cloud and the growing presence of big data all present unique challenges for today’s managed service providers (MSP). In the face of these changes in technology, end devices and the way services are delivered, perhaps the most important solution MSPs can offer their customers is solid security services.

And yet delivering security in a changing marketplace isn’t as simple as offering firewall management – not in a world in which data centers are migrating throughout the globe, mobile devices are multiplying faster than hardware can be manufactured and users are demanding more and more from their service providers…

Grazed from Federal Times. Author: Nicole Blake Johnson.

For some federal network managers, the topic of cloud computing causes palms to sweat and hearts to race.

That is because “moving to the cloud” really constitutes a huge leap of faith for managers used to controlling every switch, router, firewall and wire that makes their network responsive. In short, it’s about ceding a lot of control, said Joe Beal, director of security services and chief information security officer at Creative Computing Solutions Inc., a program management and information technology services firm.

These managers are transitioning from being infrastructure and systems owners to data owners, Beal said…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Florence de Borja.

Business organizations are increasingly moving towards the cloud. However, there are still some obstacles to its widespread acceptance and ongoing development. While many are happy about how things are evolving in the cloud, there are also some missing pieces that must be taken into consideration.

For one, service administration is still far from being perfect. Cloud computing services must be managed by enforcing policies, offering service authentication, and allocating such services only to authorized users. There are very few cloud computing providers who can offer an acceptable service administration but majority of these suppliers have to step up in order for cloud computing implementation to be successful…