Category: News

There are reports that the dean of Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is very interested in cloud computing services, and may invest up to $100 million in the market this year.  Bloomberg quotes partner Matt Murphy as indicating the VC firm’s partners “have talked about it, and are intrigued by the idea…. Companies’ comfort level and willingness to adopt the cloud is hitting an acceleration point. Now’s the most interesting time in the last 10 years to be investing in enterprise-based companies.”

Interesting time indeed. Market Research Media, cited in the Bloomberg report, says the cloud market will reach $270 billion in 2020. Forrester is a tad less optimistic, predicting last year that the market will hit $241 billion by that time. Visiongain projects the cloud services market will be worth some $83 billion by the year 2016. Research firm IDC says the market will hit about $55 billion by 2014. But analysts at HP are super-optimistic, estimating that the cloud computing market will hit $143 billion by next year.  That’s a lot of billions — sooner or later, it will add up to real money…

Reliable user authentication in deployment of a cloud service is of utmost importance. Even though a cloud service to which you subscribe may have two-factor or higher levels of secure authentication, certain protocols must be observed and rules must be followed to enter each session. Frequent changing of passwords is required, and those passwords often must be long and complicated.

However, in this day of increasingly sophisticated hacking practices, conventional online authentication for access to these systems and services is often not enough—especially for systems moving highly sensitive data, such as in the government, military, financial and retail sectors…

HP today announced programs and solutions that enable channel partners to grow cloud and services revenue while helping customers ease their transition to the cloud.

Unveiled at HP’s 2012 Global Partner Conference, the new HP PartnerONE cloud specialization and collaboration programs and expanded HP ServiceONE offerings can extend channel partners’ sales reach and speed customers’ time to market.

The cloud computing market is projected to reach $143 billion by 2013, which offers channel partners new business opportunities. According to an independent survey commissioned by HP, partners want broad cloud solutions that incorporate software and services, offer more collaboration with each other to share cloud expertise, and are flexible enough to support a range of business models…

If cloud computing is going to spread to more mission-critical type applications, it needs to get more accurate when it comes to transaction-based applications. Trying to keep everything in a structured framework is going to require a more rigorous network infrastructure that includes timing down to milliseconds, if not nanoseconds.

One way to accomplish this is to use the IEEE 1588 protocol or "Precision Time Protocol" (PTP), which provides timing. In an earlier article entitled, "Cloud Transaction Synchronicity," I discussed the need for this type of capability if financial organizations are to look at cloud computing as a real solution for any transactions-based services…

Cloud computing is coming and businesses need to be ready. The transition to public or private clouds is gaining pace as companies realise the potential for transforming business capabilities and driving new innovative services. In fact, while cloud services are still in a nascent stage, IDC estimates that the market was already US$16 billion (about Bt500 billion) worldwide in 2009 and is expected to reach $55 billion by 2014.

To put this in context, cloud-related IT spending was only 4 per cent of the total IT market in 2009, but is expected to increase to 12 per cent of the total IT market by 2014…

A new joint cloud computing initiative called Cloud4Gov has been announced by the Government and EMC, with support from Cisco, VMware, VCE and Industrial Development Agency (IDA) Ireland, that will create a cloud innovation centre that will enable the development and testing of new applications and services for government.

The cloud innovation centre will have nodes in EMC’s Centre of Excellence and on government networks that will allow indigenous small and medium enterprises (SME) and multinational corporations to develop and demonstrate applications to the public service. As the centre provides public sector departments and agencies with a platform to trial cloud solutions, it will also allow for such solutions to be productised and sold to other governments…

Cloud platforms are inherently multi-tenanted. When you sign up for the services of a Cloud provider, you’re a tenant of theirs. If you’re ready to embrace Cloud Computing, being a tenant in a multi-tenant world is a key feature that you need to accept. 

Today at Cloud Connect 2012, Citrix announced the general availability of Citrix CloudStack(TM) 3, the first release of the market leading open source cloud platform under the Citrix brand. CloudStack is already the world’s most successful platform for public clouds, powering over $1B in revenue for more than 85 large scale production clouds, including some of the biggest brands in the industry. With the new CloudStack 3 release, Citrix brings the power of true Amazon-style clouds to customers of all sizes. For the first time, enterprise customers who want to build clouds the way the world’s most successful clouds are built, can quickly and easily transform virtualized datacenter resources into automated, elastic, self-service clouds.

Citrix CloudStack is a key component of the Citrix cloud computing portfolio, providing customers with solutions that make it easy to Build new clouds, Connect to existing cloud services, and Deliver any cloud with the best security, performance and reliability. The Cloud Era is built on a completely different set of assumptions than past generations of IT — in fact, many of the exceptions from the PC Era now represent the norm in the Cloud Era. This is forcing enterprise IT organizations to reevaluate IT strategies, causing them to search for lower costs, greater capacity and improved agility. The Citrix cloud portfolio is designed to help customers accelerate this Cloud Era innovation by making inexpensive compute power accessible to anyone, allowing people to work from anywhere any device, and enhancing business agility…

Even as the world tries to find a balance between individual privacy and the eternal vigilance of a nanny state, cloud computing is a casualty of the heightened security concerns in post-911 America. This is something that I had explored in earlier articles, from the ramifications of the PATRIOT Act (See: Is Cloud Computing a Threat to Consumer Rights?), to how rivals of American cloud vendors are actually touting the latter’s vulnerabilities to government investigation as a key business differentiator (See: Your Data in Australia is subject to the US Patriot Act).

More recently, I had written about how concerns have actually translated into business decisions to the detriment of American companies (See: European Firm Refuses To Go On the Microsoft Cloud Due to PATRIOT Act Concerns). Even the European Union had waded into the argument, stating that US laws may be contrary to the interests of the Union’s citizens. In an effort to address these concerns, the US government has decided on confidence building measures…

Cloud computing is assumed to be an IT staff initiative at most businesses. But business strategists at IBM have concluded that it needs to be a top management priority.

Too many companies are experimenting lightly with cloud computing. They’re using it to tweak existing operations, as opposed to thinking about how it could revise or re-invent the fundamental way they sell their goods and services, said Saul Berman, global strategy consulting leader in IBM’s global technology services.

Berman based his remarks on a survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence research unit of the Economist magazine in the fourth quarter of 2011, based on interviews with 572 business and IT managers. IBM sponsored the survey, which will be released later this week, titled The Power Of Cloud: Driving Business Model Innovation. InformationWeek was given an advance look at its contents…