Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Last November a small startup called CloudCheckr launched the beta of its performance-monitoring system for Amazon Web Services. Now, it's bringing out a specialized version, CloudCheckr Gov, suitable for monitoring performance on AWS GovCloud, no mean trick because security requirements keep most independent monitors out. CloudCheckr is part of a small but thriving third-party market consisting of companies that shed more light on what's going on inside the AWS cloud. Cloudability, Cloudyn, Cloud Cruiser, Newvem, ExtraHop Networks and Uptime Software occupy this space and compete for AWS users.

CloudCheckr is an online service that provides basic AWS monitoring for free, and advanced, CloudCheckr Pro for $179 a month. CloudCheckr Gov is also priced at $179 a month. It's more than a passive monitor. It checks for up to 150 best practices in cloud workload configurations and security alignments. It can advise what should be done when it spots an exposure or shortcoming. With evident foreign interest in hacking U.S. government agencies, expertise in security and the ability to monitor GovCloud help set CloudCheckr apart...

Grazed from CiteWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

Businesses are increasingly aware that employees are bringing apps to work to make their lives easier. But most might be surprised at just how many apps are being used without their knowledge. “Cloud computing is massively disruptive to the IT industry,” said Rajiv Gupta, CEO of Skyhigh. He said that on average, Skyhigh customers say they think employees are using between 25 and 30 different cloud apps when in fact they’re using 300 to 400 services.

Skyhigh, a company that detects what apps are being used inside the firewall, said it is adding 500 new cloud services to its database of services every six weeks. That’s right -- nearly 100 new cloud apps pop up each week. Skyhigh is so confident that it will find dozens of unexpected apps in use by employees that it has promised it can find 30 cloud services unknown to the IT department in 30 minutes. If it fails, it'll pay for 30 months of Netflix for the customer...

Grazed from Huddle. Author: PR Announcement.

Today, we launched our content collaboration SaaS offering for the US government with a very loud bang…or rather band. Yes, the Huddle marching band is finally back by popular demand! As you may already be aware, we certainly haven’t been shy about taking on the big boys and going head-to-head with SharePoint in the past. And this is exactly what we did when we took our Huddle marching band to the tech dinosaur’s conference in Anaheim.

This time, at FOSE 2013 in Washington DC, the Huddle team had plenty to make a song and dance about. And what better way to celebrate than with an 80-piece marching band? So what are we celebrating, exactly? Well, this year has proven to be a phenomenal year for cloud in the government, as the public sector finally seems to be accelerating its adoption, and, for Huddle, this financial year has proven to be full of milestones for our work in government:...

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Theo Priestley.

I was recently with a client who is looking for a new BPM solution and they have a very positive outlook towards Cloud. They love it, so much so that they weren’t interested in on-premise solutions. This represents a real shift in attitude, and the company is no slouch or tadpole in size either. And this is where iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) is really coming into the fore and has to rule as a first-thought strategy when entering the cumulonimbus worlds of Cloud and SaaS.

In the last week both SoftwareAG (Integration LIVE) and TIBCO (Cloud Bus) have thrown down the gauntlet into the ring with IBM, Mulesoft and Informatica to name a scarce few who are already there. But why has it taken everyone so long ? iPaaS, without the vendor nonsense clouding the understanding (pun) is a solution provider’s service that allows cloud-cloud and cloud-premise integration for applications. It’s a step away from Cloud Brokerage which is essentially the development and maintenance of SaaS applications and their integration in the entirety. If iPaaS was a scarce offering Brokerage is even thinner on the ground (however take a look at Accenture’s play in this area recently announced in April...

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Ian Paul.

When Flickr announced its 1TB free storage giveaway on Monday, the company said it was offering you enough storage to "take a photo every hour for forty years" without filling up your allotment. Not content to wait four decades, hackers are already figuring out how to pack their Flickr storage with more than just photos and videos.

Two Github projects making the rounds on Hacker News Tuesday morning offer the ability to store any file type on Flick including documents, PDFs, and music files. Flickr currently allows only JPEG, GIF, and PNG uploads, as well as a variety of video formats including AVI, WMV, MPEG4, and OGG...

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: John Fontana.

Identity and Access as a Service is poised for a strong run at enterprises of all size, and those who have done their homework will dodge the hype and know what's right for them and what's not. By the end of 2015, Identity and Access as a Service (IDaaS) will account for 25% of all new identity and access management sales, compared with 5% in 2012, according to recent Gartner research "Are You and the IDaaS Market Ready for Each Other?"

At the end of 2012, the market was $180 million. By the end of this year, that number is expected to jump to $265 million. Small and medium-sized companies are helping drive interest. They are extending their current IAM architectures and providing access to SaaS services or internal Web-apps. Larger companies in general are looking to support both cloud and on-premises applications with IDaaS offerings...

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Matt Quin.

We’re well beyond any question about whether cloud computing is the future. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) paved the way for the idea that organizations can operate some of their most important systems in an on-premise or off-premise cloud. Small, medium and even large businesses accept that cloud computing delivers flexibility, cost and scalability that business has never had before. Companies are gravitating to cloud because it brings very short time to value and doesn’t impact the current business model.

Lower cost and less risk are very attractive propositions. How big is this move? Forrester estimates that the average company has 9.3 different SaaS applications in use. Consulting firm Cap Gemini reports that 78% of new applications are deployed into the cloud. And that’s just the applications that are being tracked. In reality, workers today are practicing BYOS (Bring Your Own Service) as they experiment with SaaS in broad ways that IT and even business managers may not know about...

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

The current fascination with deployment models in the cloud will soon give way to more practical approaches to managing tiers of private and public cloud computing resources. According to Saar Gillai, senior vice president and general manager for converged cloud at Hewlett-Packard, as cloud computing becomes more unified in the months ahead, thanks largely to open standards and APIs, hybrid clouds will simply become the new enterprise IT norm.

Gillai says all this fascination with deployment models is a temporary thing. In fact, Gillai says the deployment model is not the relevant discussion. It’s the ability to support multiple deployment models, ranging from public clouds to private clouds running on premise and every type of cloud in between, adds Gillai, which will ultimately distinguish HP from larger cloud rivals such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft...

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Editorial Staff.

The VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (an IaaS cloud alternative to Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure and Google Compute Engine) launches May 21. For VMware (NYSE:VMW) channel partners, there are at least five timely questions worth asking. Here's a preview plus some perspective from The VAR Guy.

First, the background: VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled the IaaS cloud plan back on March 13 during an EMC-VMware Strategic Forum. Fast forward to this week: Gelsinger and Bill Fathers (GM, Hybrid Cloud Services) will unwrap the new IaaS cloud for partners and customers. The big questions?...

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Ken Hess.

What's better than a cloud solution? An easy cloud solution. That's what SmartCloud Entry 3.1 is—an easy cloud solution. It's a private cloud solution that runs on your infrastructure in the privacy of your data center. Being a private cloud solution means that you can now enjoy the benefits of cloud computing in a secure environment. The best part, in my opinion, other than it being easy, is that it installs into your virtualized environment no matter which vendor's products you use.

Don't let the Entry moniker imply any limitations on the SmartCloud Entry solution, because there aren't any. Entry just means easy, not limited. SmartCloud Entry is a full-blown, full-featured, highly scalable cloud enabling solution for businesses. IBM has just taken the sting out of cloud adoption both in complexity and in affordability...