Category: News

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Anne Fisher.

Putting all or part of a company’s operations on the cloud — shorthand for large, remotely hosted data sets and applications — isn’t without risk, as recent outages and security lapses have shown. Still, cloud computing is so cost-effective that its popularity is growing by leaps and bounds.

In 2010, U.S. firms paid $21.5 billion to make the move to cloud services, a figure expected to balloon to $72.9 billion by 2015, according to a new study by IT research and advisory firm IDC…

Grazed from Gov Info Security.  Author: Howard Anderson.

Before entering a contract with a cloud computing vendor, it pays to do your homework on key privacy and security issues.

Chris Witt, president of Wake Technology Services, sums it up this way: "If you’re not comfortable with how the cloud vendor runs their operation and you’re not 100 percent confident that they can provide similar or even better protections than you are already providing, then you probably should not be moving forward with that vendor regardless of how good of a contract you can negotiate."…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Dell has officially become a cloud computing provider with the launch of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud built atop VMware technology. The move is just the first in Dell’s three-pronged IaaS attack, which will soon include clouds based on the Microsoft Windows Azure and OpenStack platforms. While Dell is busy adding a strong software play to its flagship server business, it looks to be rebuilding that business model in the cloud…
 

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Lenovo announced today that customers are now able to buy Virtual Computer NxTop(R) directly through Lenovo sales and its network of business partners in North America. NxTop(R) 4.0 offers extreme flexibility, allowing IT to centrally manage images and use the same image templates for multiple deployment models, regardless of whether the data is hosted on a storage array network or locally on a fully encrypted hard drive. With NxTop(R) deployed on select Think-branded PCs, including models of ThinkPad laptops and ThinkCentre desktops, customers gain the unique benefits of NxTop(R), including centralized PC management, greater mobility, remote support and a rich end-user experience.

"We chose Virtual Computer’s NxTop(R) virtualization platform as a key part of our focus on building a robust portfolio of virtualization and cloud computing solutions," said Peter Schrady, vice president and general manager, Software & Peripherals Business Unit, Lenovo. "With NxTop, we’re combining our rock-solid, reliable PC hardware with multi-functional virtualization support to give business customers an affordable and easy-to-use computing solution."…

Grazed from iStock Analyst.  Author: PR Announcement.

Cisco has announced the introduction of new networking and computing solutions to enable VMware and Cisco customers to increase network scalability, infrastructure performance, and enhance their security for virtualized data center and cloud computing environments…
 

Grazed from Delimeter.  Author: Renai LeMay.

Microsoft has attempted to dampen concerns about US Government access to Australian information hosted in American cloud computing facilities by claiming cooperation between governments would likely mean either country’s law enforcement branches could get access data they wanted anyway — regardless of where it was hosted.

Over recent months, Australian cloud computing companies such as Macquarie Telecom-backed Ninefold have raised worries about legal jurisdictions with regard to cloud computing facilities. For example, in mid-July the company warned any datacentre set up by global rival Amazon Web Services in Australia would still be subject to US legislation, despite being located in a different jurisdiction. And earlier that same month, the company highlighted a case in the US which saw the FBI seize a number of servers at the US-based datacentre operated by DigitalOne, without informing customers hosted in the facility about the raid…

Grazed from Press Enterprise dot com.  Author: Richard Rubin and Juliann Francis.

State sales tax systems created to generate revenue from face-to-face exchanges of tangible goods are struggling to keep up with the rapid shift of business transactions into the so-called cloud of the Internet.

As more companies use cloud-based servers and software, which are remote networks of computing resources often shared by multiple customers, the 20th-century rules of taxation no longer apply. Instead, accountants, lawyers, state tax officials and companies such as Google Inc., Apple Inc. and NetSuite Inc. are working to develop new guidelines for taxing the use of these emerging technologies…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Kevin L. Jackson.

Despite the myriad benefits of cloud computing solutions, several challenges still exist. Being a young industry, there are few tools, procedures or standard data formats or service interfaces in place to guarantee data, computer application and service portability. As evidenced with the recent situation involving the services failure of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, outages can be a potential risk—and can have widespread implications for consumers of cloud services. This risk becomes even more severe if a mission-critical environment could be impacted…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author:  Winston Damarillo.

The open source movement has the potential to empower developing countries to use IT as an important national resource — to communicate to its citizenry, expand its educational platform and address national disasters. Open source software is not only free from license restriction; it is also free to be used as a basis for innovation, allowing custom solutions for the unique context of specific issues faced by developing nations. But for many nations, software is not enough…