Category: News

Grazed from Sacramento Business Journal. Author: Editorial Staff.

Experts in cloud computing told a meeting of Sacramento business leaders Friday that companies can reap benefits from shifting data storage and processing to remote servers — but they must continue to think about security.

“Cloud Security: What Your Business Needs To Know About Cloud Computing,” brought together about 100 business leaders at the Hyatt Sacramento for a breakfast conference sponsored by NWN Corp. , Intel and McAfee and presented by the Sacramento Business Journal…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Peter Ulander.

It’s clear that the technology industry is moving from the PC era to the cloud era in several significant ways. While cloud represents a new way for IT to deliver — and end users to consume — IT applications and services, this transition also represents a significant change in how applications, services and systems are defined. The move to cloud computing is the most important technology disruption since the transition from mainframe to client-server, or even since Al Gore invented the internet. While industry veterans like Oracle’s commander in chief declared it a fad, this is a decade-long trend that is here to stay, and one that will define the next generation of IT.

The movement itself has been in play for the last decade, however there continues to be a lot of (mis)information in the marketplace about the cloud. So much so that it is difficult for organizations to figure out what is real and what is not to help them develop a successful cloud strategy, or simply learn about technologies that have been specifically designed and purpose-built to meet this dramatic shift in technology. While it’s important to know what the cloud is, it’s just as important to separate the wheat from the chaff, and for IT to understand what cloud is not…

Grazed from Federal Times. Author: Nicole Blake Johnson.

The federal cloud computing market is projected to jump from millions to billions of dollars over the next five years, thanks in part to a new cloud security program launched this month.

Market research firm Deltek projects that agency spending on cloud computing services will increase from $734 million this year to $3.2 billion in 2017, with a compound annual growth rate of 34 percent. The projection is based on current cloud computing initiatives at the 12 largest agencies, including the Health and Human Services and Transportation departments, and their readiness and preference for cloud services…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Janko Roettgers.

If there’s one key lesson startups in the consumer web space can learn from the big guys, it’s this: Don’t invest in in-house servers. That was one of the key take-aways from the guru panel at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco, where Netflix’s director of architecture Adrian Cockcroft confided: “The master copy of our data is now stored in the cloud.”

Dropbox’s VP of engineering Aditya Agarwal agreed, and gave founders this bit of advice: “If you are a startup, you’d be crazy if you built your own infrastructure.” He added that using the cloud instead of homegrown infrastructure wasn’t just about costs, but also about giving your own engineers the flexibility they need. “If you build it in-house, it should be easier to use than AWS,” he said…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Ryan Kim.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) has a bright future but one of the big concerns is vendor lock-in, which can prevent companies from making their applications portable. That’s going to be one of the big challenges for PaaS to grow, said Lucas Carlson, founder and CEO of AppFog.

Speaking on a panel at the GigaOM Structure conference Thursday, Carlson said every time a company adds a new service to an existing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, there’s the danger of getting more entwined in their services, making it harder to move…

Grazed from BusinessCloud9. Author: Stuart Lauchlan.

Some of the fastest-growing emerging global markets are erecting new trade barriers that discriminate against foreign ICT and services – and holding back the progress of Cloud Computing.
That’s the grim conclusion of the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the global software industry lobby group, in a new study that concludes that the actions of some of the new economic giants – most notably China, India and Brazil – are having what the BSA calls “a contagion effect” by encouraging other smaller markets to take similarly protectionist measures.

“The global scope of the problem poses immediate and long-term threats to the IT industry and the broader global economy,” warns the BSA. “ These threats cannot be overstated or ignored . Leading IT economies should press a concerted bilateral, multilateral, and regional effort to combat discriminatory trade barriers where they already exist and eradicate them before they spread further.”…