Grazed from GizMag. Author: Will Shanklin.

In the past few years, "the cloud" has revolutionized consumer tech – nearly as much as the mobile devices that it often accompanies. But how much has it changed us? Has cloud computing lived up to the tremendous hype that it promised a few short years ago? Let’s revisit 2011’s favorite buzzword, two years later.

Sneaking up on us

A couple of years ago, the tech world was abuzz about the cloud. Cloud storage service Dropbox was growing in profit and popularity. Spotify finally hit the U.S. Even Steve Jobs used his last Apple keynote to introduce iCloud. Sometime between then and now, the cloud went from being the next big thing to being something that’s so closely intertwined with computing – and our lives – that we often forget about it...

Grazed from ProfitBricks. Author: PR Announcement.

ProfitBricks, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company that completely reengineered the delivery of cloud computing, today announced that Pete Johnson, senior director of platform evangelism at ProfitBricks, will present at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) on March 27 at 5 p.m. Johnson will discuss how ProfitBricks' Cloud Computing 2.0 solution empowers gaming companies to implement lower-cost, higher performing back-end infrastructures.

During "Matching Your Costs to Your DAU: Thin Client Back-End Infrastructure Made Easy," Johnson will reveal how gaming companies no longer have to take on horizontal scaling, which is often more programmatically intense or a waste of resources. ProfitBricks offers per minute billing and live, vertical scaling without requiring a reboot, allowing users to add more CPU and RAM to existing virtual machines as DAU rises and remove them when no longer needed...

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Bart Perkins.

Moving to the cloud may reduce infrastructure costs and headaches, but clouds have their shortcomings. When they rain, millions can quickly become drenched. In the past year, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other providers experienced problems, from minor disruptions to major outages. A June 2012 headline captured the fallout: "Modern life halted as Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram go down."

The service interruptions experienced by those companies and others disappointed countless consumers, but it was worse than a disappointment for the businesses themselves. They had come to depend heavily on cloud reliability; when the cloud services they had put their trust in failed, it was as if they had ceased to exist. All the outages were temporary, of course, but revenues were lost during the downtime, and afterwards customers wrote blog posts expressing everything from disappointment to anger, with some proclaiming that they would take their business elsewhere. Organizations that depend on cloud services need to manage four areas to help ensure that their dependence isn't a liability:...

Big data used to have a specific meaning. Meant to describe cast-offs such as log files, this information was "big" because of the amount of electronic refuse created when processing, say, an e-commerce transaction. Big data used to be an exercise in digital dumpster diving.

Those days are gone. At the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference, "big data" became a proxy for social data compiled by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. A synonym for capturing sentiment, but on a grand scale. Every company had to become a "big data" company, panelists enthused...

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Krishan Lal Khatri.

Experts have started to believe that 2013 is going to be the year when enterprises are likely to cease worrying about cloud related security issues, and the market will see increasing popularity of cloud services. These speculations are based on industry surveys conducted by many reputable market analysts and technology reviews. It is predicted that year 2013 will witness growing popularity of hosted services and solutions, and more companies to migrate their prime IT assets to the cloud as they see more returns from cloud technologies.

The leading cloud computing trends for the current year are summarized below:

Cloud will remain popular platform for collaboration
Surveys suggest that enterprises will continue to use cloud for collaborative tasks such as application development, online communication, and software testing. Google and Amazon to remain leading collaboration service providers among public clouds...

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

In my days as CTO of a technology company, I often received outside advice as to how I could improve my technology. A new set of eyes is a good thing, and often the recommendations were solid ideas I implemented to improve the product.

It appears that some cloud providers, such as Google, are also open to suggestions, as Phys.org reports: "Computer scientists at the University of California at San Diego, and Google have developed a novel approach that allows the massive infrastructure powering cloud computing to run more efficiently. The new approach can make these warehouse-scale computers run as much as 15 to 20 percent more efficiently." The scholars analyzed a bunch of Google Web services, including Gmail and search, and performed two basic steps:

• Gathered live data from the Google cloud in real time
• Analyzed that data on an isolated server...

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Walter Bailey.

The world of technology is doing wonders every now and then since many past decades –a few advancements here and a few there! So what does the year 2013 have in store for the world of technology? What are some Cloud computing changes that can be experienced in 2013? Who are the vendors that will be most sought after in 2013? And what technologies will be in vogue for the year 2013? Let’s see what some experts have to say about these significant changes and developments during the year.

Mark Eisenberg

This expert gentleman thinks that the Amazon Web Services (AWS) are off for a big win in 2013. He views Microsoft as the industry leader and talks about how it would continue its legacy in 2013. Also, he believes that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will continue to dominate the industry. He feels the industry would do much better if companies start adopting rather than sitting on the sidelines discussing...

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

The global public cloud computing market will grow 18.5% in 2013 to $131 billion, up from $111 billion last year, research firm Gartner predicts. Through the next three years, cloud spending is predicted to total $677 billion, with almost half of that spending made up of cloud advertising.

While North America and Western Europe represent the two largest cloud computing markets, areas such as Asia/Pacific, Latin America and Eastern Europe represent smaller, but faster growing markets for cloud computing services. North America will be responsible for 59% of new cloud computing spending through 2016, with Western Europe accounting for 24%, Gartner says. The top segments of the cloud computing market this year break down as follows:...

We won't be discussing cloud computing in two years' time, not because the service has become obsolete, but because it will have become so ingrained in IT there will not be a need to talk about it as a concept.   That's the consensus to come out of a roundtable discussion hosted by Rackspace, which explored the impact cloud computing is having on UK businesses.

"Most of our customers don't even know they're in the cloud. They consume IT through a server, as far as they're concerned," said Raj Patel, executive deputy chairman of cloud-based accounting software provider Kashflow.   Patel added that in future cloud will be discussed as an entity which creates value for businesses, rather than just cutting costs...

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Emma Johnson.

The recent years where computers were on hype made way for faster and more productive operations; further when they became a household and a business necessity. They were a different kind of a giant leap for mankind indeed. Daily activities such as checking on your children to reviewing your business’ monthly sales were made convenient with the onset of software that are centralized on easing our most demanding tasks.

However, before you can marvel at their convenience, you first have to accomplish the overwhelming mission of handling the technical aspects of these devices that only experts can really manage. Realizing this hardship that users experience, innovations were pushed through, and the fruit was a breakthrough called Cloud computing...