Category: News

Grazed from CFOWorld.  Author: Dallon Christensen.

The pace of cloud computing will only accelerate in 2012. The increasing development of information technology, and the intense focus on cost reduction, are highlighting the benefits of moving IT administration off-site. And one cloud computing expert wants CFOs to be aware of the short-term challenges and long-term benefits to organizations.

"Large enterprises must realize cloud computing will not(in all cases) provide immediate cost benefits to their organizations," Sadagopan (Sada) Singam, global vice president, cloud computing, of HCL Technologies, said in a recent interview. CEOs and CFOs “must understand how cloud computing technologies will drive long-term benefits two to three years following the initial implementation.”…

Grazed from Telecom Paper.  Author: PR Announcement.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has established a Joint Coordination Activity on cloud computing (JCA-Cloud). The work of the ITU-T Focus Group on Cloud Computing (FG Cloud) will now be progressed through a number of ITU Study Groups with the JCA acting as a mechanism to coordinate the many dimensions of the study of cloud computing.

The primary objectives of JCA-Cloud will be to allocate FG Cloud’s deliverables to study groups with associated domains of competence, and to ensure that the ITU-T standardisation work on cloud computing progresses in a well-coordinated manner across all the relevant study groups…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Frank Ohlhorst.

"Convergence" is the word as big data moves further into the cloud and into the reach of small and midsize enterprises.
 
Truth be told, big data is not a big or new concept.

The ideology behind big data has been around since the early days of mainframes and scientific computing. What is new about big data is the term itself, which has become part of the nomenclature of today’s business speak. Still, for most of its existence, big data has been out of the reach of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) because the storage and processing power needed to make this technology work is too expensive…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Yung Chou.

Amid the many benefits of having the NIST SP 800-145 as a tool to facilitate the understanding of cloud computing, the classification and some definitions of the four deployment models are redundant and inconsistent. Particularly, the definition of "community cloud" is a redundancy of that of a private cloud, the deployment models are defined with two sets of criteria, and "hybrid cloud" is a confusing, ambiguous, and extraneous term.

SP 800-145 is the de facto standard in the IT industry of describing what cloud computing is with five essential characteristics, three delivery methods, and four deployment models. The five essential characteristics will specify the qualifications and expected behaviors of an object qualified with the term cloud. The three delivery methods signify the essence of cloud computing centered on the concept of a "service." Both the characteristics and the delivery methods in SP 800-145 form a solid foundation and present a conceptual model envisioning what cloud computing is and about. SP 800-145 gets inconvenient where the four deployment models including public, community, private, and hybrid clouds are defined, as shown below…

Grazed from Sacramento Bee.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Ascent Data, Pittsburgh’s trusted provider of Cloud Computing, Colocation, Disaster Recovery Solutions and Data Encryption is pleased to announce new additions to its hosted Cloud solution, Ascent2Cloud. Ascent Data’s newest Cloud clients include Computalogic, The National Association of Subrogation Professionals (NASP) and StepOne Systems.

Compared to the traditional approach of purchasing servers and adding IT staff, an increasing number of companies are moving their IT infrastructure to the Cloud.  Cloud services are especially effective for start-ups, small-to-mid size businesses (SMBs) and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers.

Computalogic’s MethodOne software application is a fully integrated clinical and financial management system. "Working directly with a senior-level technical team that is familiar with HIPAA regulations was important to me. Our data is confidential. I need to know that my records are protected. We’ve worked with other Cloud vendors and didn’t receive the personal service we receive with Ascent Data," said Keith Jones, CEO at Computalogic…

Grazed from Federal Computer Week.  Author:  John Moore.

Everything old is new again, as the saying goes. Take wide-area network (WAN) optimization. Products designed to boost data traffic over long distances date back about 10 years. Agencies have used the technology to speed the delivery of applications from a centralized data center to branch offices or help back up data to an off-site facility.

Today, cloud computing can create bandwidth and latency issues reminiscent of the situations that prompted WAN optimization in the past. Now agencies are tapping public cloud providers or recasting their own data centers as private clouds that offer IT resources to remote shared-services customers. Both scenarios potentially involve long network trips.

So should cloud adopters incorporate WAN optimization into their plans?…

Grazed from MSPWorld.  Author: Anuradha Shukla.

Infrastructure and cloud computing solutions provider Enteracloud has teamed with Scale Matrix to deliver PCI (News – Alert) Compliant colocation and private cloud computing solutions.

San Diego Colocation and Datacenter provider Scale Matrix takes an infrastructure-based approach to provide best-in-class hosting solutions to clients at every stage of their IT Lifecycle development. Providing real-time, biometric reporting capabilities at the cabinet level, Scale Matrix helps businesses address some of the ambiguous portions of compliance with a definitive solution.

Enteracloud noted that the executive team and key investors recently toured the Scale Matrix datacenter for an in-depth demonstration of key security components. This demonstration was expected to facilitate customers who require PCI and related security compliance…

Grazed from Defense Systems.  Author: John Edwards.

Virtually all defense organizations and intelligence agencies are turning toward cloud computing for everything from satellite imagery to telecom traffic to Web content. For these applications and many others, the focus is on building private cloud systems that can cost effectively store and efficiently distribute multiple petabytes of data to endpoints worldwide.

John Thielens, chief architect of cloud services at Axway, a provider of data security services to the Defense Department, said it’s hard to build a financially wasteful cloud environment. “It’s the main benefit of adopting cloud [technology],” he said, “[Adopters are] saving money through massive economies of scale and increasing the use of commercial, off-the-shelf products, as opposed to undertaking expensive, specialty, old-fashioned, government-style development.”.

Dan DelGrosso, director of Naval Networks and Enterprise Services, said no matter how cloud computing is approached, it promises to save money. “For the Navy, there would be at least two general cost models: utility and fixed price,” DelGrosso said. Utility cloud computing is billed by the contractor on a usage basis while a fixed price agreement supplies a packaged set of cloud services for a specific period. “If both cost models support so-called ‘cloud elasticity,’ then either cost model will save the Navy money,” he said. “This is true, since the cost of expanding capacity, upgrading and patching applications, and continually updating security, will be absorbed by the cloud provider.”…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

AppDynamics, the newfangled application performance management house started in 2008 to cater to mission-critical web apps, has picked up a handsome $20 million C round led by Kleiner Perkins.

Its existing VCs Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners also kicked in. With the new infusion it’s raised a total of $36.5 million.

The start-up will use the new money to enhance its product and expand sales to extend the 400% growth in bookings it says it saw last year.

It puts the surge down to a shift in application architectures and growth in mission-critical cloud applications. It says "modern applications are no longer monolithic in nature but are highly distributed and dynamic, fueled by architectural trends such as cloud, SOA, Big Data and Agile development. As a result, traditional application performance management solutions have become obsolete."…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

Call it one of the most expensive insurance policies in the world. Companies have spent billions of dollars over the years building and maintaining  backup disk arrays and secondary data centers to keep things running in the event that something goes wrong.

Cloud turns backup and recovery on its head, making it possible to provision back-up sites as needed, for pennies. Ironically, however, this goes against the gut instincts of many IT executives, who spend a lot of time worrying about data security and availability.

That’s the view of David Nichols, principal and Americas CIO services leader for Ernst & Young IT Advisory Services, who has been working closely with companies across the globe to identify cloud opportunities. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Nichols to get his take on the pluses and minuses of cloud computing, who observed the approach is still in its early stages. While “there is a lot of demand for cloud,” he confirms, most companies do not yet have a formal strategy or end-goal. That’s because most companies have not reached the point where at least 30% of their workloads are carried in the cloud, he says.  Once an organization passes that 30% threshold, cloud starts to become a serious part of the business…