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Google has announced one terabyte of free Drive storage to every customer who buys a Chromebook, rated at around $240 (£153).

The move is the latest in a long, long series of price cuts, bluffs and double bluffs from the main cloud infrastructure players to make users part with their cash.

Describing it as “a bonus for the holiday season” Alex Vogenthaler, Google Drive group product manager, wrote in a blog post: “That’s enough space to keep more than 100,000 awkward holiday sweater pics safe and shareable in Drive.

“With that much free storage, you can use your Chromebook for work, play and pretty much everything else you’ll do this holiday season,” he added.

It is a holiday offer only – any claims must be redeemed before January 1. But let’s go through the most recent acts of this play.

Microsoft has been the clear aggressor in this market, offering unlimited OneDrive cloud storage to its Office 365 user base last month. In June, it opened up a free terabyte to those same customers. Yet if users prefer to use Dropbox from their Office accounts they can do, after the two firms announced an alliance earlier this month.

Compare and contrast with standalone storage provider Bitcasa, which ditched its $10 a month unlimited plan. This publication mused on the matter and concluded that in the face of such huge competition, Bitcasa may be right in putting up its guard and offering a niche, although as one commenter pointed out, raising question marks about its ethics in the process. Meanwhile, Box is still pushing on with its unlimited storage plans for business users, unveiled back in July.

So who’s right? Well, it’s probably AWS. If in doubt, say AWS. The firm has a huge lead in the cloud infrastructure market, according to the latest figures from Synergy Research. A recent Storagebod column from The Register also made this point, explaining: “It seems to me that if the traditional storage vendors really want to compete with the cloud vendors, they need to change their sales model completely.”

Microsoft has marked out a foothold in second place, yet its most recent outage last week had Synergy Research chief analyst John Dinsdale telling CloudTech Redmond’s response was “an awful lot less than stellar.” Points off for that, although the commenter community was indecisive, with remarks ranging from “terrible” to “much ado about nothing.”

As cloud storage has become a less valuable commodity, the larger vendors are looking to provide one size fits all solutions. This threat to the traditional cloud storage providers is noted – take collaboration tool Box Notes as a perfect example of expanding the empire.

The reality though is if you’re sold on one particular office product, then storage is hardly going to seal the deal. With this festive feast, Google is simply keeping up appearances.

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The IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Study has found the number of firms who have at least a portion of their computing infrastructure in the cloud continues to go up – but it’s the technology underneath this adoption which is the most interesting.

The latest research, which polled 1672 respondents and aimed to measure cloud computing trends among technology decision makers, found over a third (38%) were “comfortable” hosting in the cloud given the state of current cloud offerings, and 56% were still weighing up their options.

As cloud usage goes up, backlog theoretically goes down, and so this study proves. 69% of respondents have at least something in the cloud, up from 61% the year before and 57% in 2012. In comparison, only 18% say they plan to deploy within the next 12 months, down from 24% in 2013.

The signs only point up. 63% of respondents say cloud computing increases IT agility, while IT innovation (61%) and employee collaboration (56%) were also highly cited.

Yet the more interesting facet of this report is through emerging technologies. 61% of those polled admitted their organisations were looking at investing in software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) to get the most agility out of their cloud investments.

Network bandwidth delivery speed was also a key boon for cloud adoption, according to 49% of respondents. IT complexity eased for 55% of those polled, but interestingly, cloud has little to no effect on the overall IT headcount. 17% of respondents said it was increasing, 20% decreasing, and 52% said it had no impact.

Three quarters (74%) said they were either very or somewhat confident in the security of their information assets in the cloud, yet a lot of external cloud projects end up winging their way back to IT. The issues raised were lack of skillset within departments and security concerns (59%).

Nevertheless, the study shows interesting if not surprising progress for enterprise cloud. A report released earlier this month from CipherCloud and Gigaom found that while most enterprises are in the cloud, they’re reluctant about using it to develop enterprise applications.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Windstream, a leading provider of advanced network and cloud communications, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York, NY.
Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN), a FORTUNE 500 and S&P 500 company, is a leading provider of advanced network communications, including cloud computing and managed services, to businesses nationwide. The company also offers broadband, phone and digital TV services to consumers primarily in rural areas.

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Verizon Enterprise Solutions is simplifying the cloud-purchasing experience for its clients, with the launch of Verizon Cloud Marketplace, a key foundational component of the company’s robust ecosystem of enterprise-class technologies. The online storefront will initially feature pre-built cloud-based services from AppDynamics, Hitachi Data Systems, Juniper Networks, PfSense and Tervela.
Available globally to enterprises using Verizon Cloud, Verizon Cloud Marketplace provides a one-stop shop for software-based cloud resources that are certified to operate in Verizon’s cloud environments. Designed to free clients’ IT staff from the time and effort required to configure, deploy and fine-tune applications, Verizon Cloud Marketplace helps enterprises speed innovation cycles with easy, predictable deployments of new cloud-based services and applications to enable operational transformation initiatives and optimize the digital experience.

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Leysin American School is an exclusive, private boarding school located in Leysin, Switzerland. Leysin selected an OpenStack-powered, private cloud as a service to manage multiple applications and provide development environments for students across the institution.
Seeking to meet rigid data sovereignty and data integrity requirements while offering flexible, on-demand cloud resources to users, Leysin identified OpenStack as the clear choice to round out the school’s cloud strategy. Additionally, the school sought a partner to provide OpenStack infrastructure deployment and operations expertise. They ultimately selected Blue Box’s Private Cloud as a Service, powered by OpenStack, leveraging Blue Box’s Zurich, Switzerland data center.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Myles Steinhauser, a Software Development Engineer at Blue Box Group, will discuss why they chose private cloud as a service powered by OpenStack and provide an overview of why this deployment option might be attractive to other educational institutions and companies that are hyper-focused on securing student, customer, patient or member data. He’ll also dive into the details of the deployment.

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ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 20, 2014 /PRNewswire/ —  IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it is bringing a greater level of control, security and flexibility to cloud-based application development and delivery with a single-tenant version of Bluemix, IBM’s platform-as-a-service. The new platform enables developers to build applications around their most sensitive data and deploy them in a dedicated cloud environment to help them capture the benefits of cloud while avoiding the compliance, regulatory and performance issues that are presented with public clouds.

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India defies simple explanations and solutions. Yet its government, newly energized under recently elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi, presented a Comprehensive Growth Strategy document at the recent G20 Summit in Brisbane, Australia that includes a few sweeping general programs designed to contribute significantly to the G20’s stated goal of creating US$1.5 trillion in additional wealth within its membership.

It’s the sort of report that should have received more notice at a two-day summit that ended up focusing more on pesky geo-politics than its stated focus of economic and societal development.

Given is success over the past decade in building exported IT services and products to a level of $86 billion, India’s strategy as presented to the G20 outlines several programs that directly and indirectly involve the use of advanced information technology:

Development of 100 Smart Cities, comprising new satellites of major metropolitan areas an upgraded mid-sized cities, with more than $1 billion earmarked in the coming year
Expanding its Digital India program with an investment of about $80 million
Providing training in IT skills through its National Rural Internet and Technology Mission
Setting up a National Industrial Corridor Authority “with Smart Cities linked to transport connectivity, which will be a cornerstone of the strategy to drive India’s growth in manufacturing and urbanization.”
Create five more Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) campuses
Create an “investor-friendly” eBiz platform and ecosystem, as well as a new e-Visa program at nine of its international airports
Allow new single-person companies to be created at a very low cost

Then there’s the “Make in India” program, which has identified 25 different sectors that encourage foreign investment. Those of us who still remember the closed India business environment from a generation ago cannot help but be impressed with how much the nation has changed, and is continuing to change, in this area.

The Make in India initiative promises a prompt response to investor inquiries. It also plans to reach domestic companies who have “leadership in innovation and new technology” for the purpose of “turning them into global champions. The focus will be on promoting green and advanced manufacturing.”

Challenges
Our research shows that India lags a bit in the dynamism of its IT infrastructure. This can be explained by an enormous population of 1.25 billion, with hundreds of millions still in poverty. The challenge is enormous.

Even so, India ranks 62nd out of the 103 nations we survey overall, ahead of Greece, Mexico, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Africa, and Nigeria, for example. In our Goldilocks measurement – calculated to see which nations are running too hot, too cold, or just right – India is running as optimally as any nation.

The overall challenge facing India’s leaders – a calculation we make by measuring instantaneous change integrated into population size – is huge, among the world’s top 10 and greater than the overall challenge facing Nigeria, for example.

The heat, noise, and traffic encountered in urban India can be paralyzing and demoralizing to both the relatively soft Western visitor and hardened native alike. India’s centralized government in northern New Delhi has been seen as a major impediment to growth, particularly among in the more-vibrant Mumbai and Pune, and southern technology centers such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai.

So a nice government document presented alongside other nice government documents from other big nations may not impress everyone. But we see progress and hope for the world’s largest democracy, and will keep tabs in particular on how the Make in India and Smart Cities programs play out.

As always, we are able to create deep, custom looks at our findings for India as with all the 103 nations we survey.

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Cloud Expo 2014 TV commercials will feature @ThingsExpo, which was launched in June, 2014 at New York City’s Javits Center as the largest ‘Internet of Things’ event in the world.

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When people think of mainframes, they typically envision ancient, obsolete technology running arcane spaghetti code – systems that IT management would love to retire if only they could free themselves from the clutches of legacy.

While there is an element of truth in this perspective, mainframes remain to this day the workhorse of core transaction processing within many industries. In many cases the technology in these systems is modern or even surprisingly cutting edge. Furthermore, retiring mainframes may not even appear on the long-term roadmap.

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