Category: News

Grazed from CIO. Author: Kenneth Corbin.

If you’re a cloud service provider, the federal government wants to hear from you. Federal agencies are actively shopping for new cloud computing technologies, but vendors will help their cause by packaging their services to be more readily implemented in a government environment that is highly security conscious and almost preternaturally cautious about rolling out new IT systems.

The feds have been developing a system for streamlining the security requirements for cloud service providers (CSPs). Under the FedRAMP program, vendors can submit their cloud service for a review by an inter-agency panel to gain clearance to operate across the government, or can seek approval of a single department or agency…

Grazed from JDSupra. Author: Quinn Emanuel.

In the May 2014 issue of the Business Litigation Report, we discussed a hot topic in law and technology: cloud computing. That topic did not cool down over the summer. Businesses and courts—including the Supreme Court—have continued to grapple with issues presented by computing in the cloud, including who owns the rights to key cloud computing technologies. Given the increased competition and growth in the cloud computing market, such litigation is likely to continue in the future, and will need to take changing legal rules into account.

The Cloud Computing Market

Broadly defined, “cloud computing” refers to the shared use of computing resources over a distributed computer network. Those resources may include storage, processing, communication, or other computer tasks. The network over which such resources are accessed may be public like the Internet, private like many enterprise IT environments, or a hybrid network combining public and private elements. The business case for shifting computing resources to the cloud is based on the flexibility that cloud computing provides. Instead of needing to buy racks of expensive servers and other equipment as a necessary first step to launching a business, today’s startups can order “virtual” IT centers consisting of only the resources they actually need…

Grazed from Vator.TV. Author: Graham Turney.

A startup founder faces a wealth of decisions every day that can profoundly affect the fate of his or her business. One such decision is choosing where to host a site or application. Until recently, that choice often appeared to be among several near identical infrastructure providers. As the cloud has matured, however, the industry has begun to recognize two broad categories in the cloud — managed and unmanaged vendors.

According to Gartner, Rackspace is the leader in the managed space. In a recent blog (included below), our CEO, Taylor Rhodes, outlined the differences between managed and unmanaged clouds and the ramifications of those differences for your business. Here’s what he outlined:…

Grazed from MBTMag. Author: Ed Talerico.

After years of debate and numerous predictions as to when cloud computing would reach widespread adoption, it seems that 2014 was the year when it finally came of age. With 69 percent of enterprises running either applications or infrastructure in the cloud today, up 12 percent from 2012, it is difficult to dispute claims that the ‘fluffy stuff’ has hit the mainstream.

The drivers behind this acceleration are three-fold. First, a reduction in the cost of cloud computing has made it increasingly difficult for companies to ignore. Research shows that most organizations rapidly realize significant cost savings that actually increase over time as a result of the many indirect costs related to on premise software…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Linthicum.

Cloud governance and security typically work together, so you can’t select the right security approaches and technology without first understanding your governance strategy. What’s more, cloud governance comes in many flavors, including service level, data level and platform level. It’s important to understand each type of governance before choosing the best option for your organization.

Service-level or API governance installs policies around access to services exposed by public or private clouds. Users who request access to cloud services have to go through a centralized mechanism that checks the requester’s authorization. This mechanism also forces compliance with predefined policies that dictate when and how to access the cloud services…

Grazed from HSToday. Author: Amanda Vicinanzo.

Although government agencies understand the benefits of migrating services to the cloud, nearly three quarters of federal cloud users remain wary of fully committing to cloud computing, according to MeriTalk, a public-private partnership focused on improving the outcomes of government IT. Meritalk’s new report, Cloud without Commitment, underwritten by Red Hat and Cisco, examined federal barriers to cloud adoption including migration, data portability, integration and future agility.

Surveying 150 public sector IT professionals, Meritalk found most federal cloud users want to migrate more services to the cloud, with nearly one in five saying they deliver some of their agency’s IT services fully or partially via the cloud. However, security and control concerns are preventing them from fully embracing the cloud…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

The future of enterprise IT is cloud, and the future of cloud is PaaS. Infrastructure is metal, plastic, and silicon. It has kinetic potential, but sits and waits to be animated. Software is ethereal – dynamic, wildly alive, and transformative. Without PaaS, the twain shall never meet. No animation, no dynamism, no computing.

With cloud computing, you can buy the use of infrastructure and you can buy software. You don’t necessarily need to know much about running the infrastructure, and you don’t need to know how the software was written. But you need to learn in great detail how to use the PaaS. You must know how to PaaS…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

If you’re an IT manager or executive, you’ve probably started your cloud journey. You’ve likely migrated applications to the cloud, or deployed cloud as your primary hosting environment. And now, you think you’re a cloud veteran. Well, you’re just getting started. Few users have discovered the full impact of cloud — but every business could benefit by doing so.

First, the cloud isn’t an IT strategy — it’s an application architecture and a new computing model. For decades, IT struggled to get closer to the user. Today, cloud computing technology makes that possible with a global computing fabric that can touch any smartphone, tablet, laptop or wearable device. But since we’ve never seen anything like cloud, IT has yet to fully exploit it…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Mike Vizard.

While interest in all things Big Data is clearly high, the ability of most organizations to actually manage it is severely limited. With that issue in mind Datapipe announced that the MSP is acquiring GoGrid, a provider of a cloud services that automates the deployment of Big Data applications. Craig Sowell, chief marketing officer for Datapipe, said that ability to test Big Data applications and then deploy them with a single click across multiple cloud computing platforms was the primary reason Datapipe made the acquisition.

Big data and the cloud

Going forward, Sowell said Datapipe anticipates that demand for Big Data applications in the cloud will grow significantly; primarily because the laws of data gravity generally result in applications being deployed as close as possible to their primary sources of data. Given the relatively low cost of storing large amounts of data in the cloud, the weight of all that data is pulling more applications into the cloud, said Sowell…

Grazed from CircleID. Author: David Eisner.

Your company can’t ignore cloud computing: Some kind of distributed-access model is now necessary to tap global markets, manage big data and get access to best-in-class software. But with increased cloud adoption comes the issue of management, since it’s no longer enough to simply spin up a cloud and hope for the best. Here are five of the top cloud management trends to watch this year — and the risks of opting out.

Standardization

According to a recent Cloud Tweaks article, there’s a growing need for cloud industry standards. Organizations such as the Cloud Security Alliance and ISO are on the forefront of this standardization effort — through 2015, expect to see SLAs and other cloud contract start adopting this change by including "typical" language and clear-cut descriptions of service availability…