Microsoft’s Shift to the Cloud: What It Means for You
Microsoft’s announcement of Office 2013 is another linchpin in the company’s effort to assume a leadership role as a cloud-computing services provider.
The new version of Office will be tightly coupled to the company’s SkyDrive cloud-storage service. SkyDrive, in turn, is one of the key built-in features of Windows 8.
Microsoft has yet to announce pricing for the new Office. But with Windows 8 Pro upgrades costing just $40 if you upgrade online directly from Microsoft, the software giant has already signaled a willingness to change its upgrade models.
That’s the most aggressive pricing yet for the company’s flagship operating system, and it could be a harbinger of Microsoft’s approach to Office upgrades. One clear message that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer delivered at the Office 2013 announcement is the shift from packaged goods to services. Ballmer noted that the new Office was “the first round of Office designed from the get-go as a service.”…
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) today announced the establishment of the new CSA corporate headquarters in Singapore, under an effort led by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), and founding APAC sponsor Trend Micro (tyo:4704) . The CSA will undertake a three-year strategic private-public partnership with support from the Singapore government to further the security of cloud computing. As part of the agreement, the CSA will establish a Global Research Centre, Global Standards Secretariat, and Global Centre of Excellence for CCSK training and education in Singapore.
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CSC today announced BizCloud for Government — the industry’s first and only on-premise private cloud that is billed as a service and ready for application workloads in 10 weeks. As federal agencies strive to improve operational efficiencies, reduce costs, meet federal mandates and embrace cloud services, CSC’s BizCloud for Government provides the privacy, security and control of a private cloud with the agility, convenience and elasticity of a public cloud.
6fusion, the leading provider of utility metered public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructure management solutions, today announced that Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere has achieved general availability and the latest version of the product is now available for 
Managed hosting provider Datapipe this week said it has deployed the industry’s first global Apache CloudStack platform. Datapipe’s Stratosphere Elastic Cloud Computing Platform is available in Silicon Valley, the New York Metro area, Northern Virginia, London, Hong Kong and Shanghai.