Cloud Computing News

http://gcn.com/articles/2012/04/03/fose-cloud-brokers-emergence.aspx

A new development in cloud computing is the emergence of cloud brokers, services that let organizations choose cloud providers by the job and change providers on the fly depending on prices or services.  They can help government agencies purchase those cloud services and facilitate cross-platform integration and communication, industry experts who provide those services told an audience at the FOSE Conference and Exposition.

Dell to Buy Wyse, Grow Cloud, Virtualization Portfolio - Mon, 02 Apr 2012
UPDATED: Dell is looking to rapidly expand its desktop virtualization capabilities through the acquisition of Wyse, whose focus in recent years has shifted from hardware to software. – Dell is looking to expand its cloud and desktop virtualization capabilities by buying Wyse Technology, a thin-client pioneer that over the past several years has shifted its focus from hardware to software. Dell officials announced the deal April 2. Acquiring Wyse will enable Dell to greatly expan…

AWS Hosts Human Genetics Catalog in the Cloud - Thu, 29 Mar 2012
By hosting the human genetics catalog in the cloud, AWS gives researchers instant access to the complete 1000 Genomes Project on AWS, enabling scientists to accelerate disease research. – Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that the complete 1000 Genomes Project is now available on AWS as a publically available data set. AWS and NIH announced the news at the White House Big Data Summit on March 29. The announcement makes the larges…

SaaS Revenue to Reach $14.5 Billion in 2012: Gartner - Thu, 29 Mar 2012
The U.S. currently represents the largest opportunity for SaaS, and it is the most mature of the regional markets. – Worldwide software as a service revenue is forecast to reach $14.5 billion in 2012, a 17.9 percent increase from 2011 revenue of $12.3 billion, according to a new report from IT analytics firm Gartner. The report projected SaaS-based delivery would experience healthy growth through 2015, when wo…

Box Launches OneCloud for Enterprise Application Sharing - Wed, 28 Mar 2012
Box OneCloud provides a suite of about 30 free business applications that enable workers to access, edit, and share content from their iPhones or iPads. – Online storage and business application tools provider Box has opened a new section of its cloud with new business applications that the desktop-using public may not recognize, yet are popular among mobile device users. The 6-year-old Los Altos, Calif.-based company on March 28 launched Box On…

How Data Center Services Market Differs in Geographic Regions: Gartner - Mon, 26 Mar 2012
In North America, hosting (42 percent) and cloud IaaS have achieved the highest level of client adoption, while the markets in the rest of the world are dominated by data center outsourcing (80 percent), Gartner reported. – Depending upon where they are located in the world, enterprises are buying and using data center-related and cloud-based services very differently, researcher Gartner revealed March 26 in a new report. While there’s no question that relatively new services such as cloud computing infrastructure…

Choosing a Cloud Storage Partner: 10 Important Factors to Consider - Mon, 26 Mar 2012
Moving any system, or even parts of a system, to the cloud is tough enough on its own. Selecting the right solution provider can also be daunting. It’s true that experience can be the best teacher, but there also can be real-world costs to learning things on the job. If mistakes are made, those costs can be substantial for a company’s bottom line. That has proved harmful to many IT management careers. So when IT pros want to introduce something new into their company systems, such as a cloud storage partner, its important to do the homework first to find out how others have fared. Good advice gained by colleagues on the front line is gold. Felix Santos, director of information security at EVault, is one of those front-liners in cloud storage and serves as eWEEKs guide to picking a cloud storage partner. Heres a look at 10 steps to make finding the right partner as pain-free as possible. – …

Amazon Web Services Teams With Eucalyptus to Ease On-Prem to Cloud Migration - Thu, 22 Mar 2012
Amazon Web Services and Eucalyptus Systems team up to help enterprises with on-premise to cloud migrations. – Amazon Web Services and Eucalyptus Systems, a provider of on-premises infrastructure as a service software, announced an agreement that enables customers to more efficiently migrate workloads between their existing data centers and AWS while using the same management tools and skills across bot…

EMC Expands Cloud Services, Applications Offerings - Wed, 21 Mar 2012
EMC is offering a new portfolio of cloud applications and infrastructure services, the latest in a broad push to buttress its IT offerings. – EMC is expanding its presence in the cloud with a new portfolio of infrastructure services and applications. As part of that effort, the company will offer ways for customers to accelerate a move to desktop as a service (DaaS) and better incorporate mobile technologies. This is just the lates…

Okta Provides Cloud Single Sign-On for SaaS Apps - Wed, 21 Mar 2012
Okta is taking a cloud-based, on-demand approach to single sign-on and identity and access management (IAM) by enabling end users to access the Okta service to log in once and gain access to the software as a service (SaaS) applications that live outside the company firewall. The long-established hallmarks of good SSO tools have always been: 1) the number of applications with which the product is able to seamlessly integrate; 2) the ability of the SSO tool to gracefully handle version changes of these applications; 3) integration with existing, authoritative identity stores or directories; and 4) audit support in the form of reports that show effective access controls. Okta comes preintegrated with more than 1,200 SaaS applications and showed that it could quickly add new apps. The relatively short duration of eWEEK Labs test cycle didnt reveal how well Okta handled application version changes. However, the relatively fast turnaround on my new application request showed that the company can respond in a timely fashion. Okta currently integrates with Windows Active Directory, and I would like to see expanded support in this area. The reports generated by Okta provided good, basic access accounting in my tests. – …

Okta Boosts Single Sign-On for SaaS - Mon, 19 Mar 2012
Single sign-on identity and access management systems are moving from on-premise appliances and applications to cloud-based on-demand services. Okta can use Active Directory integration along with prebuilt integration with more than 1,200 SasS applications to ease identity management chores for IT managers. – Okta provides on-demand, single sign-on and access management for organizations that use one or more cloud or Web applications during the workday. Okta isnt great at managing the log-in process for on-premise applications. Plus, IT managers who have a mix of cloud and on-premise apps may want to c..

OpenStack supporters downplay Citrix defection - Tue, 03 Apr 2012

Top coordinators of the OpenStack project shot back at Citrix for dropping its support for the open source cloud development platform in favor of starting a separate open source project based on an Apache license.

CopperEgg updates real-time monitoring for server processes - Mon, 02 Apr 2012

If you’re interested in real-time monitoring of your server processes and seeing the overall condition of your Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X servers from a single console, you might want to take a look at the latest SaaS offering from CopperEgg, which just announced the updated version of RevealCloud 3.

4 critical trends in IT business continuity - Mon, 02 Apr 2012

In IT, failure is not an option. Not surprisingly, organizations have made it a high priority to develop and implement reliable business continuity plans to ensure that IT services are always available to internal users and outside customers.

Dell to buy thin-client company Wyse Technology - Mon, 02 Apr 2012

Dell has signed an agreement to acquire thin-client hardware and software company Wyse Technology, to expand its desktop virtualization offerings, Dell said Monday.

Instead of running the desktop OS and applications on a PC, the virtual desktop exists only in a virtual machine on a server. In some environments, this allows enterprises to more efficiently and securely manage their users and devices, according to Dell.

VMware tackles enterprise personal cloud - Mon, 02 Apr 2012

The public cloud and now even the private cloud have been pretty well defined. The personal cloud is somewhat fuzzier.

What to ask when choosing a new storage platform - Mon, 02 Apr 2012

No one likes to rip and replace. But sooner or later, you need to buy new stuff to upgrade or augment existing your storage infrastructure — and each time you need to go to school on your options as if you’d never seen a SAN before. That’s how fast the technology changes.

Dell expands virtual desktops into the cloud - Fri, 30 Mar 2012

Dell said this week it is expanding its virtual desktop offerings into the cloud through a partnership with another company.

Dell’s Simplified DaaS (Desktop as a Service) is a cloud-based virtual desktop offering targeted at companies of any size. Dell partnered on the offering with Desktone, a company that makes software to access cloud-based desktops. The product is expected to be available at some point this quarter and pricing details have not yet been released.

Red Hat: Beware of cloud ‘open-washing’ - Fri, 30 Mar 2012

Open source software company Red Hat believes that companies like VMware and Microsoft are skewing the definition of open cloud by claiming that their virtualization products are open when in fact they are closed.

Speaking at a round table conference in London this week, Scott Crenshaw, head of Red Hat’s Cloud Business Unit, said that several virtualization vendors have started to claim they are open as a marketing gimmick.

How to wrangle your virtual machines - Thu, 29 Mar 2012

Virtualization cuts hardware, power, and real estate costs by combining multiple servers, networks, and storage arrays into virtual pools. But for users like Pat O’Day, CTO at hosting and managed services provider BlueLock LLC, managing those resource pools means wrestling with multiple applications.

“There’s a backup console, the SAN has a console, antivirus has a console — everything has its own console,” says O’Day. Buying all of those applications and training staffers to use them is costly and makes it hard to tune a virtualized environment to meet changing needs.

Cloud cost calculators: Helpful or more cloud hype? - Mon, 26 Mar 2012

You’ve been to the trade shows. You’ve listened to the keynote presentations.Y ou’ve visited the vendor booths to hear the marketing and sales pitches. Great, you’ve figured out that infrastructure as a service has merit, and you’ve finally overcome the buzzwordiness of “cloud,” “public cloud,” and “IaaS.”

Oracle trots out more business intelligence apps for SAP customers - Wed, 04 Apr 201
Rather than stealing customers away, Oracle has two new products designed to help SAP customers where they are.

Counterfeit chips: A $169 billion tech supply chain headache - Wed, 04 Apr 201
The product fallout from counterfeit semiconductors can range from little things like dropped calls to much bigger issues such as plane crashes.

Yahoo lays off 2,000: Promises ‘smaller, nimbler’ company - Wed, 04 Apr 201
Yahoo has confirmed it will cut nearly 15 percent of its workforce as it plans to evolve into a once-again leading online property.

SanDisk’s sales warning morphs into ultrabook worries - Wed, 04 Apr 201
Weak NAND pricing is to blame for SanDisk’s revenue warning, but analysts also wonder about sluggish ultrabook sales too.

McAfee’s MOVE tackles ‘all types’ of virtual environment attacks - Wed, 04 Apr 201
McAfee’s new agentless solution aims to protect virtual environments from all types of attacks with help from VMware.

SugarCRM raises $33 million, eyes broader footprint - Wed, 04 Apr 201
SugarCRM said it will use the money to “continue its advancement into the enterprise market and to pursue strategic business opportunities.”

Yahoo expected to layoff 2,000 jobs ‘at market open’ - Wed, 04 Apr 201
Yahoo is expected to send more than 2,000 employees their pink slips today or this week, laying off 15 percent of its workforce. A company cultural shift, or moves towards a sell?

Desk.com beefs up features for SMBs with analytics tools - Tue, 03 Apr 201
Just a few months after rolling out, Desk.com is getting bigger and better for its business customers with some snappy new analytics tools.Owned and introduced by Salesforce.com at the end of January, Desk.com is a social and mobile help desk specifically targeted for small and mid-sized businesses. Basically, the platform organizes customer service requests from [...]

Review: Can the Nokia Lumia 900 win over business users? - Tue, 03 Apr 201
With the Nokia Lumia 900, Windows Phone 7 has arguably pulled even with Android and iPhone, but will pulling even be enough to win over business professionals?

Next Issue Media intros unique digital magazine subscription model - Tue, 03 Apr 201
Even as digital magazines finally start to catch on, Next Issue Media is already aiming to redefine the market with a dramatically different digital subscription model.For reference, Next Issue Media is an independent media venture founded by five of the major global publishing houses (Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst, News Corp., and Time) to [...]