Accenture, the IT consultancy reported this year that “cloud computing will increasingly provide banks with new lower cost operating models thanks to virtualisation, greater automation, and the ability to push more activities offshore.”

What does this mean?

In years to come, we should start seeing banks handing a lot of their online infrastructure over to managed hosting companies.

The multiple benefits of managed hosting have already started becoming apparent and many banks are taking strategic measures to incorporate more and more cloud software into their already existing legacy systems. They have started moving non-critical business components over the cloud, such as HR and procurement.

This is reducing internal IT complexity as well as costs.

Still some way to go

Many countries are wary of cloud hosting and question its security. As such, there are still many regulations as to the storage of critical data, in particular the manipulation of confidential …

Ever get the feeling that soon there’ll be so many clouds we’ll never see the sun again? Well, here’s another one.
It’s called Metacloud.
After quietly starting early last year it’s just hit the radar, turning up with an undisclosed investment from Storm Ventures and – according to Wired –former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures.
That makes some sense since Metacloud is headed by Steve Curry, who spent a dozen years at Yahoo managing its global storage operations, responsible for hundreds of petabytes of content and user data.
The other folks involved are émigrés from Ticketmaster, the third largest e-commerce system in the world, including Metacloud CTO Sean Lynch who was head of technical operations there.

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«We’re actually very bullish about PaaS as the architecture for a lot of next generation apps,» noted Brett Adam, Chief Technology Officer at rPath, in this exclusive Q&A. «But,» he continued, «we see true PaaS as it’s been popularized in the market – you may think of it as «Silicon Valley PaaS» – is too constraining for the types of applications that enterprises depend upon today.»
Q: Tell me about the Enterprise Cloud Adoption Framework. What inspired it?
Brett Adam: We’re seeing enterprise IT and traditional service providers under extraordinary pressure to transform to cloud-based delivery and business models, but there are few reliable resources to guide what is a fairly massive architectural transformation. Despite substantial opinions about how to adopt cloud, the issue of standardization wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. We believe standardization is absolutely crucial. Uniquely, this framework looks at the cloud transformation through the lens of standardization as the driver and enabler for achieving on-demand, elastic IT.

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Planning scalable environments isn’t terribly difficult, but it does require a change of perspective.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, will broaden your views to think on an Internet Scale by dissecting a video publishing application built with The SoftLayer Platform, Message Queuing, Object Storage, and Drupal. By examining a scalable modular application build that can handle unpredictable traffic, you’ll be able to grow your development arsenal and pick up a few strategies to apply to your own projects.

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Cloud computing is so alluring. The public cloud economizes infrastructure resources and creates a scalable, on-demand source for compute capacity. Additionally, the cloud can be a strategic asset for enterprises that know how to migrate, integrate and govern deployments securely.
Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak recently said, «A lot of people feel ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer,’ but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.»
In fact, over 70% of IT professionals worry about security according to an IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Study.
Boiled down, security, access and connectivity are really issues of control.
As any prudent cloud user, the application has its own unique security features, such as disk encryption and port filtering. But do these layers of security features overlap or conflict? What happens to ownership after migration? Do solutions really have to be architected before and after deployment?

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Cloud computing is one of the most strategic initiatives that enterprises will adopt over the next several years. Only an open hybrid cloud can help you unlock the full benefits of cloud economics and gain agility across your entire infrastructure – physical, virtual and public cloud resources included.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, David Kang, Cloud Practice Manager, Global Strategy and Solutions, at Red Hat, will explain how open standards, open APIs and open source software are changing the structure of an enterprise cloud.

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Impetus Technologies (www.impetus.com), an innovation-based software R&D services company, today announced that it will present and exhibit at Cloud Expo, NYC from June 11-14, 2012. Impetus offers accelerated consulting and services for architecture audit, design and implementation to build Big Data and Analytics solutions for enterprises. Enterprises today face challenges while integrating the Big Data technologies with their existing IT setup.
Vineet Tyagi, Head of Impetus Innovation Labs, will be presenting a session on June 12th and share with companies, the strategies that would help in minimizing the risks of such integration.
Vineet has also been invited to participate in a CTO panel that will discuss the emerging trends in Big Data and Cloud Computing. Impetus is hosting a workshop at the Boot camp on ‘Big Data Analytics using AWS cloud offerings like AWS, EMR and DynamoDB’.

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Virtualization and cloud computing have forever changed how organizations achieve control and visibility over both core IT elements and IT services. Now it’s time to move away from solutions that are not ready to handle the dynamic high rate of change and service delivery in the Cloud. Traditional IT configuration and compliance tools cannot monitor changes that cause compliance violations in realtime.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, George Gerchow, Director of VMware’s Center for Policy & Compliance, will show you how to capture hundreds of significant changes in Cloud Infrastructure that alter our compliance posture without having to collect data or force manual assessments. To help customers address the fundamental challenge of getting the right information to the right people over an infrastructure that they can trust, VMware has adopted a two-prong approach to ensuring control and visibility for cloud environments. For areas that are fundamental to the deployment of secure, reliable applications in virtual and cloud environments, VMware offers solutions that are purpose built and embedded in the infrastructure. VMware has also raised the bar by providing a new set of Cloud Mission Critical Controls to help customers prioritize configurations as they migrate mission critical applications to Cloud environments. In addition, VMware is enabling a security ecosystem of industry leading security partners to provide a new generation of security and compliance solutions specifically designed for cloud infrastructure.

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