Category: News

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

Amazon Web Services is unquestionably a disruptive technology force – prior to them essentially inventing cloud computing, organizations had to acquire and manage their own infrastructure and hence expend significant capital to grow. Since AWS and other cloud vendors popularized their model, infrastructure can be bought just like a utility. Like electricity or telecommunications, computing infrastructure costs can be closely matched to revenue.

One of the criticisms of AWS however, revolves around the fact that they have just so many different product offerings – I’ve never had the patience to count the individual SKUs that AWS offers but the number is massive. That’s great when it comes to choice, but difficult when it comes to getting a good handle on what total solutions might cost…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Cloud computing, new applications and a lot more user connectivity are all driving forces around the data center evolution. In fact, the data center has become the home of all modern technologies. Businesses are now building their entire organizational model around the capabilities of IT. Through it all, pressure continues to mount on data center operators to run high-efficiency environments capable of good power control.

Power consumption in the data center continues to be a rising trend. The need to provide redundant power systems with high reliability and availability of compute resources is a major driving force for the increase in power utilization. Some data centers use just as much power for non-compute or “overhead energy” like cooling, lighting and power conversions, as they do to power servers…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Maxwell Cooter.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and ActiveState have teamed up to offer enterprises the ability to get trained in a multitude of different cloud systems, without being tied to a particular vendor. The organisers of the IT Cloud Computing Conference (IC3) claim it will not only offer IT managers the chance to get hands-on experience of different cloud vendors, but also enable them to evaluate platforms and demonstrate proofs of concept for cloud implementations.

IC3, which will be held in San Francisco in October, will provide attendees with first-hand experience of products from Amazon, Google, Chef, Puppet and various others. A notable omission, however, is Microsoft, although ActiveState’s Bernard Golden, one of the conference trainers, said it was possible that Microsoft could still join…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Andy Greenberg.

Hackers have long used malware to enslave armies of unwitting PCs, but security researchers Rob Ragan and Oscar Salazar had a different thought: Why steal computing power from innocent victims when there’s so much free processing power out there for the taking? At the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas next month Ragan and Salazar plan to reveal how they built a botnet using only free trials and freemium accounts on online application-hosting services—the kind coders use for development and testing to avoid having to buy their own servers and storage.

The hacker duo used an automated process to generate unique email addresses and sign up for those free accounts en masse, assembling a cloud-based botnet of around a thousand computers. That online zombie horde was capable of launching coordinated cyberattacks, cracking passwords, or mining hundreds of dollars a day worth of cryptocurrency…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Curtis J. Franklin.

The cloud computing startup race shows no real sign of slowing. It seems that few weeks go by without news of a world-changing cloud or cloud service startup, and yet the world seems to roll along as before. In some cases, vendors are still trying to "cloudwash" older products and services by slapping a cloud or Something-as-a-Service label on them. With all the news and noise, how do you know which cloud service startups are worth watching? You can start with these 7 companies.

It’s important to note that "startup" can have a different meaning in the cloud world than it does in the land of bricks and mortar. Some of the companies listed here have been in existence for three or more years but have only begun to make their presence known in a big way in the last 18 months or so…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

My Digital Shield (MDS) today unveiled a new security solution that brings enterprise-level protection to small businesses. The Wilmington, Delaware-based security-as-a-service (SECaaS) provider also launched a certified channel partnership program that enables managed service providers (MSPs), solution providers and value-added resellers (VARs) to offer its new small business solution to customers.

Andrew Bagrin, MDS’s CEO, said he believes the new solution and program can provide partners with a consistent revenue stream. "The recurring revenue model is a simple upfront sell that leads to recurring revenue," he told Talkin’ Cloud. "You can have little and flat sales every month, but over time, the revenue will grow tremendously and become a consistent source of income."…

Grazed from CloudComputingInfo. Author: Editorial Staff.

OpenNebula has just released the Beta version of its OpenNebula 4.8, codename “Lemon Slice”, that finally introduces the long awaited support for public clouds providers others than Amazon AWS. Specifically we are talking about the support for Microsoft Azure, rumored for the first time in 2010 and officially announced yesterday at OSCON (O’Reilly Open Source Convention) and for IBM SoftLayer, announced in May and introduced in this release.

The support for multiple public cloud providers responds to a specific demand of many enterprises to have more freedom to choose different partners that could suite different location/performance needs according to the emerging trend of a more “open” hybrid cloud.

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Mark Hamblen.

Sprint on Wednesday announced a partnership with Google to offer the Google Apps for Business cloud service, adding that customers of the service won’t be required to use Sprint’s wireless network or Android devices. The partnership helps move Sprint well beyond it’s role as a basic wireless carrier for businesses to one that will bolster basic Google cloud service and access to Google apps with Sprint’s own hands-on professional consulting, much of it free.

The announcement comes amid widespread reports that Sprint is in discussions to buy T-Mobile and just weeks after a six-month study of wireless carrier network performance found Sprint didn’t finish first among national carriers in any of 125 U.S. cities. Sprint’s resale of Google Apps for Business kicks off officially on Aug. 18…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

iCorps Technologies , a leading IT Consulting, Managed Services and Cloud Computing Company, today announced it has been named Microsoft’s Cloud Partner of the year for the Northeast area. The award underscores iCorps’ superior partner performance, delivering Office 365 solutions to small and mid-market clients. iCorps is also leading the adoption and acceleration of the Office 365 platform for hundreds of clients, across multiple industries.

iCorps expanded its business model to include a complete Office 365 practice, focused on delivering new software as a service (SaaS) solutions to clients — enabling email, SharePoint, Lync, OneNote, OneDrive, Yammer and Azure. This cloud solution has significantly accelerated business results for iCorps’ clients…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: David Linthicum.

Legal IT Professionals’ online survey of its readership presented a split decision on about a move to the cloud. “The online news publication covering international legal information technology asked readers: ‘If your law firm’s management asked for your advice regarding moving key applications to the cloud, would you be in favour of this strategy?’

The 438 responses from legal information technology staff, lawyers and paralegals was nearly split down the middle, with 46% opposing and 45% in favour, while 9% had no opinion.” The complete survey report can be found here. The participants of this 2013 survey might be a bit more cloud-oriented these days, as more law firms find a new home for IT in the cloud…