Grazed from Wired. Author: Edwin Schouten.

Cloud computing is a trend towards the industrialization of IT, but this industrialization of IT services also has significant impact on the influence the consumer has on the services. Contracts are standard and cannot be tuned to meet consumers’ wishes; ”what you see is what you get.” But IT still needs to govern regulatory compliance, so how does this work with cloud services?

Cloud in the Financial Sector

I will illustrate this using the regulatory organization from my home country The Netherlands (aka Holland). Recently I was a panelist for a discussion on cloud computing in the financial sector at the national outsourcing congress where I represented the cloud providers. On the panel with me were a representative of consumers, a lawyer and a representative of DNB (De Nederlandse Bank), a public limited company responsible for safeguarding financial stability...

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Pretty much anyone watching the cloud computing market will tell you that Amazon Web Services is its 800-pound gorilla. Which means that this is a big week for the company: On Wednesday in Las Vegas, Amazon kicks off its first user conference, called AWS re: Invent.

Given the breadth of services it offers, Amazon is expected to be a major force in the cloud for the foreseeable future. But with its market-leading position comes questions about how the company runs its cloud, who is using it and what the future holds. From outages that have brought down Amazon services, to questions around the extent to which the company is seen as a trusted enterprise partner, AWS users and cloud watchers are keeping a close eye on the company...

Grazed from TheNextWeb. Author: Alex Wilhelm.

Today Microsoft’s Azure team released a number of statistics concerning its platform, touting its scale and speed. Since its birth in 2010, Microsoft claims that Azure has processed a total of 200 billion authentications for a total of 50 million active user accounts. The cloud computing and storage service now averages some 4.7 billion authentications weekly.

Azure, a product that has struggled somewhat in the shade of Amazon’s broad and popular AWS cloud computing and storage services, is fighting for mind and market share. It appears to be making progress. Chest-thumping its 9,000 requests per second, Azure claims that in the United States, the average authentication takes less than a second...

Grazed from Business Solutions. Author: Colin Jack.

It is quite easy to predict that cloud computing will remain an elevated priority for IT departments and companies in 2013. For managed service providers (MSPs) who already provide online IT service offerings, the cloud presents a way to expand offerings and increase incoming revenue. In speaking with a number of service providers, we’ve seen that offering cloud solutions can be done without a large investment of time or infrastructure by using existing virtualized assets.

There are two underlying reasons why some MSPs are successful at this and others just plod along. The first is in which services are offered and how. We have all heard the phrase, “the proof is in the pudding.”...

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

Google has added 36 new types of server to its rentable cloud infrastructure. The additions to Google Compute Engine, the company's infrastructure-as-a-service technology, were announced by Google on Monday. "At launch we offered four basic [instance types]," Barak Regev, head of Google's Cloud Platform in EMEA, told ZDNet. "If you aggregate [the 36 new instances] into brackets, you'll see they are touching the high-memory and high-CPU instances [but] the one that is most notable is the diskless file configuration."

The diskless configuration's instances let developers rent lower-cost instances for applications that do not need a dedicated disk attached to their server - an 'ephemeral' disk - but can handle a separate 'persistent' disk. Ephemeral disks are faster but do not retain data across instances. Google is also cutting the prices of its main four instances by around five percent...

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) announced disappointing Q4 2012 results today, which included bombshell claims about the Autonomy business. But amid all that disappointing news, HP's cloud computing business showed signs of hope. HP CEO Meg Whitman, during an earnings call today with Wall Street financial analysyts, said:

"We are seeing strong growth in our cloud systems business. HP CloudSystem is the industry's first complete integrated and open cloud platform that enables customers to build and manage technology services across traditional, private, managed and public cloud environments. We continue to grow our customer base which now stands at over 850 customers."...

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

VMware's Cloud Foundry and Microsoft Azure are two of the leading platform as a service (PaaS) offerings from two cloud heavyweights, but one consultant says both companies are largely ignoring the private cloud market, creating a glaring hole for customers. John Treadway, a VP at Boston-area consultancy Cloud Technology Partners, says VMware and Microsoft are holding back the entire PaaS industry by not offering commercial support for on-premise installations of the their platforms.

"I spend a lot of time with large enterprises, and we're very big proponents of the PaaS opportunity," he says, but many customers are not willing to put resources in a public cloud, off their own premise, he says. Businesses and IT shops want to control these deployments behind their own firewall. "They want to run their own internal clouds," and VMware and Microsoft don't have the tools to do that for Cloud Foundry and Azure, he says...

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Some Apple iCloud services suffered outages and/or performance issues on Nov. 18. The impacted systems included iMessage and FaceTime. Apple Insider claims iCloud has suffered roughly four outages in the past three months -- not exactly a stellar track record for Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), which focuses like a laser on end-user experience.

What's the lesson here for IT service providers and computer consultants? Some cloud skeptics will start pounding the table again for on-premises servers. But it's too late to put the cloud genie back in the bottle. Instead, IT consultants should look for ways to proactively warn their customers about potential cloud outages and emerging performance issues...

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud computing is pitched as a great solution for applications that are temporary or run on bursty workloads. What could be more temporary and bursty than a political campaign? Amazon’s Jeff Barr just revealed that President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign’s technology was running on the cloud — Amazon Web Services’ cloud, to be exact.

“The campaign’s technology team built, deployed, ran, and scaled up their applications on AWS,” Barr reports at the AWS blogsite. “The campaign used AWS to avoid an IT investment that would have run into the tens of millions of dollars.”...

Grazed from Digi International. Author: PR Announcement.

Digi International announced the purchase of Chicago-based Etherios, Inc., a salesforce.com Platinum Partner and creator of The Social Machine, a revolutionary new cloud-based method for integrating machines into core business processes via the Salesforce Service Cloud. Combining the iDigi Device Cloud with The Social Machine will enable almost any machine, anywhere in the world, to connect rapidly and easily to the Service Cloud. By enabling real-time machine interactions with organizations’ workflows, customers will be able to benefit dramatically through improved asset management, greater machine uptime and the ability to offer proactive customer service.

“Etherios is a world-class cloud computing services provider with hundreds of successful domestic and global deployments,” said Joe Dunsmore, CEO, Digi International. “We believe Digi’s deep device expertise combined with Etherios’ ability to integrate devices directly into an organization’s core business processes via the industry’s leading cloud-based CRM system can be an M2M game changer.”...