Category: News

Grazed from The Register.  Author:  Timothy Prickett Morgan.

Being the touchstone for cloud computing, online retailing giant Amazon wants to brag about its compute, storage, and other cloud services that are sold under the Amazon Web Services brand. For whatever reason – probably to obscure the costs and possibly the profits of the AWS subsidiary – Amazon has not broken out the business, and still lump it into the Other bucket.

But sometimes, Amazon just can’t resist itself. As the new year got rolling, Amazon did a little bit of chest beating about AWS.

First, the company said that with the opening of its AWS data center in São Paulo, Brazil in mid-December, the company has doubled its AWS data-center footprint…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Michael Vizard.

Application testing is one of those areas that many IT organizations give short shrift; only for it to invariably come back to haunt them in the form of some fix that usually needs to be accomplished quickly and at great cost.

It’s not that developers are fundamentally opposed to testing; it’s just that acquiring the equipment to set up the test is expensive and the amount of time needed to conduct the tests properly isn’t available. Worse yet, the applications are getting more complex than ever, which makes testing them an even more challenging task.

Grazed from CSNews.  Author: Cliff Duffey.

Running a convenience store operation means continuously finding new and innovative ways to improve the customer experience, maintain a competitive edge and manage the rising complexity of business. This is often compounded when an operator owns many different store locations. Investment in the latest technology plays an important role in solving all three of these challenges and cloud computing has become an increasingly popular approach to help highly distributed organizations, strapped with a minimal budget for technology and personnel, ensure they are up to date with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) compliance.

Security services delivered through cloud computing have many benefits over the traditional approach of buying, integrating, deploying and managing security technologies. Cloud-based security services can reduce costs, eliminate business operations complexities and ensure a business is always up to date with the latest protection. All of this can be done much in the same way a person at home orders cable or a phone service…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Dave Meizlik.

With the New Year having rolled in, you’ve probably had your fill of "This is the year of (pick your technology, fill in the blank)" predictions. After all, for how many years now have we heard, "This is the year for cloud computing?"

While there’s no doubt that the wave of cloud computing continues to swell, real-world IT organizations are clearly not as quick to jump aboard as prognosticators. That’s because there are a lot of unknown aspects of the cloud, and security is chief among them…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Stacey Collett.

It’s 2 p.m. Do you know where your cloud data is? Really?

Executives at one large Fortune 500 company thought they knew, but a routine audit of the cloud provider uncovered a serious problem.

"The cloud provider that we thought we had became merely a shell, and it outsourced the provision of the service to an offshore company that no one had even heard of and that the company would never have provided data to," recalls Brad Peterson, counsel for the company and a partner in the Chicago office of Mayer Brown LLC. ..

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Sourya Biswas.

Today, there are two startups in focus – Xeround and SurDoc.

Xeround, a California-based startup that describes itself as “The Cloud Database”, announced the successful completion of its Series C round of funding in which it raised $9 million. Previous investors that included Menlo Park-based Benchmark Capital, Israel’s Giza Venture Capital, Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership, put in money in this round as well.

According to a press release, Xeround “offers a database-as-a-service for MySQL-based applications that’s elastic, linearly scalable and always on for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments.” The company claims that its “database-as-a-service solution effectively manages auto-scaling, high-availability, self-healing and multi-tenancy, while guaranteeing continuous service during schema changes, resource modifications and the scaling process.”…

Grazed from Minyaville.com.  Author: Professor Pinch.

My friend Conor Sen‘s piece on consumption in the cloud (See 2012: The Year of Cloud Consumption?) offers some things that are sorely lacking in the discussion of our current social and economic environment: Originality and, dare I say it, optimism.

That’s not an easy thing to do when the prevailing topics of discussion are Europe, Occupations, elections, and everything else that’s gloomy. It’s all become a well-rehearsed Broadway show by now because we’ve been doing it so often for so long. We know all the songs, the dance numbers and lines by heart…

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

Over the past 90 days, employers and staffing firms placed more than 10,000 job ads that included requirements for cloud computing skills and experience, according to WANTED Analytics™ (www.wantedanalytics.com), the leading source of real-time business intelligence for the talent marketplace. More than 2,400 companies posted job ads during this 90-day period and hiring demand grew 61% year-over-year. Computer Specialists and Programmers are most commonly required to have cloud computing experience. However, as cloud-based software increasingly impacts additional areas of business, other fields are more commonly required to understand and work with cloud-based applications. Other jobs that most often include these skills in job ads include Marketing Managers, Sales Managers, Customer Service Representatives, and Cargo and Freight Agents…

Grazed from The Data Center Journal.  Author: Rakesh Dogra,

Cloud computing in Middle East Asia region gets a new high as NCR Corporation, a leader in helping companies across the world connect and transact business, has been given Data Center Unified Computing Authorized Technology Provider certification from Cisco. This recognition comes after NCR has gone through the required training and programs from Cisco to sell and support the UCS or Unified Computing System from Cisco. NCR had to also meet requirements like Cisco Data Center Networking Infrastructure Specialization and Cisco Data Center Storage Networking Specialization. The Cisco program is an integral part of its strategy to implement advanced technologies in this sphere…

Grazed from The Nation.  Author: Editorial Staff.

NetApp, Cisco, VMware, Microsoft and CAT Telecom have joined the government cloud-computing initiative, whereby a new information-technology platform will be designed to pool resources and reduce the government’s IT spending.

Information and Communications Technology Minister Anudith Nakornthap said at the launch today that the scheme should help reduce the government’s IT spending by at least 30 per cent, while ensuring regularly updated technology as well as advancement in electronics-based public services.

He noted that each year, government units spent nearly Bt50 billion on hardware and software, but they ended up buying old but pricey technology…