Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Joe Hewitson.

Computing resources have been a quickly changing and ever-improving facet of modern business for many years. Innovations stream at breakneck pace. The rise of cloud computing has, in recent years, combined PaaS and SaaS (Platform and Software as a service) to provide a unified solution for IT groups looking for a more distributed computing resource strategy. As the data fed into these cloud platforms and applications continues to increase, the infrastructure supporting its growth will need to expand. This foundational need is exactly why many IT professionals in organizations of all sizes, including midsize companies, have begun pushing their computing infrastructure into the cloud.

Growth of IaaS

Gartner Inc., the world's leading information technology research and advisory company, has recently released a projected growth analysis of public cloud computing and its services. As reported by Forbes, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) stands out as the fastest-growing sector. Forecast with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just over 41 percent through 2016, the increase in demand for computing resources in the public cloud shows no sign of slowing down. The need for agile computing resources and scalable infrastructure has clearly caused a shift in focus for IT professionals. Playing catch up to the other two major services of the cloud, this IaaS growth proves to be a great illustration of the importance of the cloud in today's business...

In today's IT environment, more devices, a deluge of data, decreasing costs to transfer data, and server virtualization have triggered a transformation in the data center which will no doubt lead to multiple data center advancements during the next five years.  Earlier exclusively deployed by large enterprises, it is now common in the Middle East to see small and medium organizations with their own data centers. No longer are data operations handled from a server room and a switch closet.

Sufian Dweik, Regional Manager, MEMA at Brocade Communications, says that last year, network managers in the Middle East witnessed the growing popularity of Ethernet fabrics. The trends that were the driving force behind this are set to remain valid though 2013 as well. A sampling of analyst numbers reveals the true significance of these trends. According to IMS Research, 22 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020...

Grazed from Network World. Author: David Grimes.

As companies embrace cloud computing, many are finding it advantageous to use external clouds to host non-critical IT services and data while keeping business-critical applications on internal-cloud infrastructure. However, this hybrid approach can create significant management challenges. The clouds must tightly integrate with each other, and legacy systems and data and workflows must be managed across the clouds and systems. Since hybrid clouds typically involve a mix of technologies and vendors, and there is the constant need for new capabilities, the level of complexity and amount of attention required to properly manage these platforms is increasing at a rapid rate. That means the management platform for hybrid cloud solutions is a critical, if often overlooked, piece of the proverbial puzzle.

Managing the hybrid cloud involves much more than tools. After all, vendors for each separate component of cloud infrastructure provide their own "stovepipe" of managerial tools. But since there isn't a true "single-pane-of-glass" tool, you will need a more strategic perspective and framework to succeed with hybrid cloud computing. The following principles and practices can shape this meta-cloud management initiative...

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Ted Samson.

Amazon Web Services has once again found itself in the unenviable position of being the poster-boy-turned-whipping-boy for the cloud computing world due to another high-profile service disruption that severely slowed down or knocked out a handful of heavily trafficked websites and services, including Netflix, Reddit, Airbnb, imgur, Pinterest, Heroku, and Foursquare. Like clockwork, the outage has generated a healthy debate around the blogosphere as to whether this most recent downtime spells doom for the cloud in general or for Amazon in particular, or whether affected AWS users accept a share of the blame for taking the cheap route and signing up for the bare-bones, single-region AWS services to host their mission-critical services.

AWS confirmed on its status page at 11:11 p.m. PT yesterday that it had experienced "degraded performance for a small number of EBS (Elastic Beanstalk Service) volumes." The page said that the issue was restricted to a single Availability Zone within the U.S.-East-1 Region, which is in Northern Virginia...

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Calabasas-based NetSol Technologies has created a new division to tackle the cloud computing market, the firm announced this morning. NetSol said that its new division, NetSolCloudVM, will offer infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) products to the North American market.

The company said that the division will offer clients IT infrastructure on a monthly, tiered subscription. The firm did not detail what kind of infrastructure it will use for the new offering, but did say it looks to provide "private cloud performance at an elastic cloud price". The new division will be headed by Imran Haider.

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced the release of the new Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) specification. The new specification standardizes interactions between cloud environments to achieve interoperable cloud infrastructure management between service providers and their consumers and developers, enabling users to manage their cloud infrastructure use easily and without complexity.

Cloud computing allows customers to improve the efficiency, availability and flexibility of their IT systems over time. As companies have adopted cloud computing, vendors have embraced the need to provide interoperability between enterprise computing and cloud services. DMTF developed CIMI as a self-service interface for infrastructure clouds, allowing users to dynamically provision, configure and administer their cloud usage with a high-level interface that greatly simplifies cloud systems management...

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Microsoft is joining several startups in trying to entice developers to use its cloud as a specialized backend for their mobile applications. Microsoft’s Windows Azure Mobile Services joins offerings from Parse, Kinvey and Apigee in trying to establish a new infrastructure for the growing mobile ecosystem.

Microsoft just announced Windows Azure Mobile Services, a cloud offering that joins the ranks of Parse, Apigee and Kinvey in establishing a backend as a service designed for the mobile ecosystem. The goal of such a service is to provide a platform for mobile developers that will allow them to worry less about their infrastructure and only about their app...

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Gery Menegaz.

Anyone reading about the Cloud has heard the common dangerous assumption that the Patriot Act gives the government unprecedented access to your data. The misconception is that the level of access that the government has in the cloud is beyond what they would have if the data were hosted elsewhere.

Recently the European Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding, “spearheaded and vigorously advocated for the Commission's proposals to update and modernize the privacy framework in Europe through a detailed new Regulation.”...