Category: News

Grazed from TMCNet.   Author: Editorial Staff.

Heavy hitters in the cloud computing industry include the likes of tech giant IBM (News  – Alert) and retailer Amazon. They, among other prominent entities, reach out to individuals and businesses with a need for storage space, and public and private entities are flocking to the cloud like there is no tomorrow. As a recent blog post at Statesman.com indicates, even the Central Intelligence Agency has sought space for its often-highly-private data.

The post indicates that enthusiasm for the new technology is not all bad, but it also warns that such excitement for the cloud could soon fall away to the sobering face of reality. Like the wave of outsourcing that swept businesses only a few decades ago, the cloud is taking businesses along for the ride of a lifetime, yet they may find that cloud computing does not deliver all the promises of a brighter business future…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeffrey Burt.

The tech giant, which will invest $1 billion over two years in the cloud, looks to broaden the services it’s offering in its IaaS solution. Hewlett-Packard is bringing managed storage services to its Helion cloud computing platform, the latest move in its efforts to rapidly expand its infrastructure-as-a-service offerings.

HP officials this week introduced Helion Managed Storage to help organizations deal with the rapidly growing amount of data they need to store and the increasing associated costs of doing it themselves. The tech giant is offering a range of services that, like other Helion solutions, can be deployed in a hybrid fashion—on premises, in a hosted private cloud environment or in a public cloud hosted by HP or a partner…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: David Darrough.

Anyone paying attention to all the cloud technologies discussions over the last 12 to 18 month has heard of OpenStack. Companies that are looking to reap the rewards of cloud computing often will hear things such as open source, avoiding vendor lock-in, IaaS, time-to-market, flexibility, capex vs. opex and control. So where does OpenStack fit into the conversation?

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage and networking resources throughout a data center, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Herbert Lash.

A Wall Street regulator has begun to migrate its surveillance and other watchdog duties to cloud computing, which in combination with crunching big data, will dramatically boost the organization’s capabilities, two officials at the agency said. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority began using cloud computing at the beginning of this year in a roughly 30-month roll-out that will save FINRA $10 million to $20 million annually while making the agency operationally far more agile.

By moving to the cloud, FINRA will gain increased processing capacity and more space to store data, while reducing costs because the service is only used when needed, Steven Randich, chief information officer at the agency, said in an interview. Technology is key to FINRA’s mission to oversee brokerage firms, monitor the U.S. stock market and protect investors from potential fraud. Wall Street’s industry-funded watchdog monitors trading in almost 6 billion shares daily for abusive activity…

Grazed from SCMagazine. Author: Steve Gold.

Whilst this may seem a misnomer, given the cost advantages that a cloud data centre resource can deliver over its local bricks and mortar counterpart, budgets – even in the corporate cloud – are still under significant pressure. According to Ed Macnair, EMEA MD of Intermedia, the key security issue in his opinion is how to embrace the cloud without losing control of the data.

"Our research suggests that around 56 percent of companies make use of six or more SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications, whilst 76 percent of network intrusions exploit weak and stolen passwords," he told the audience, adding that – just to make life more difficult – the average business user has 25 different passwords they have to remember for internet-based services…

Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Matt Asay.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sets the pace for innovation in cloud and sets pricing. For all of the "Everything is awesome!" singing surrounding the open-source cloud-computing platform OpenStack, it still lags AWS in almost every feature that cloud customers value. Most attempts to improve OpenStack come from longtime open-source contributors like Red Hat.

But one new entrant, Tesora, is something of a johnny-come-lately to open source. Last week, Tesora announced that it was open sourcing its previously proprietary database virtualization engine as part of its commitment to OpenStack’s Trove database-as-a-service (DBaaS) project…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Aimee Chanthadavong.

Cisco Systems is confident that Australia will be the global market leader to take up its big cloud play that has been dubbed Intercloud. Speaking to a room of media this week, Cisco development and sales president Robert Lloyd said Intercloud — which the company initially announced in March as part of its US$1 billion investment to secure its position in the cloud computing market — is an "enterprise response to the multiple uses of cloud technology that is expected to unfold in the next decade".

"We have heard for a year or two about the construct of the market, and how it has been trying to respond to the complexity that has emerged in networking … [but] command line interface network units that’s expected to lead to the agility and flexibility that customers are looking for today isn’t going to be the answer," he said…

Grazed from BinaryTribune. Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle Corp. made an official statement yesterday, posting its profit and sales for the fourth quarter of the financial year that missed analysts’ forecasts. The announcement comes at a moment when the company is trying to shift its focus to providing primarily cloud-computing services and become a worthy rival of companies such as Salesforce.com Inc.

The Co-president and Chief Financial Officer of Oracle – Ms. Safra Catz said on a conference calL yesterday, cited by Bloomberg: “We’ve successfully grown the company’s revenues and earnings through every transition, whether it was many computer databases to a complete suite of products, client-server Internet, hardware engineered systems and now on-premise cloud.” Ms. Catz also added: “We are well under way with our most recent transition.”…

Grazed from BusinessNewsDaily. Author: Sara Angeles.

Considering a cloud computing solution for your small business? Here’s the million-dollar question: Should you use a public, private or hybrid cloud? After costs, scalability, security and other factors, some small businesses may find that mirroring its resources across public clouds with private environments may be the best option.

A public cloud lets you store data remotely in shared servers housed in off-site data centers, whereas a private cloud does so in on-premise servers within your own secure network. A hybrid cloud, however, gives you the benefit of both public and private clouds, letting you store regular files remotely and sensitive files in your own backyard. But for most budget- and resource-strapped small businesses, constructing their own in-house infrastructures for a private or hybrid cloud is out of the question…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Rackspace (RAX) is hoping to reduce cloud complexity by providing a new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution to its customers. The San Antonio-based cloud hosting company on Thursday said it’s rolling out the limited availability release of OnMetal Cloud Servers, a new offering designed for businesses in need of a way to spin API-driven bare metal servers without any multi-tenant challenges.

The company said OnMetal Cloud Servers are available in several sizes, powered by OpenStack and built with Open Compute hardware. Every OnMetal Cloud Servers customer also receives access to Rackspace specialists, enabling them to optimize their application architecture, identify security threats, assist with code debugging and monitor their infrastructure, Rackspace said…