Microsoft has announced that its Windows Azure cloud infrastructure has been given the sought after FedRAMP accreditation for US federal cloud computing.

As the American government is trying to go ‘cloud first’, this represents an important milestone for Redmond – if perhaps a little late.

Back in June, competitors HP and Amazon announced that their clouds were secure after gaining federal approval, joining the likes of Akamai, AT&T and Lockheed Martin, with the first accreditation coming from Autonomic Resources back in December 2012.

Yet Microsoft claims that, unlike those other vendors, theirs is the first public cloud platform to be credited with the more specific JAB P-ATO (Joint Authorisation Board Provisional Authority to Operate) – in other words, attaining competency for both IaaS and PaaS.

“This not only opens the door for faster cloud adoption, but helps agencies move to the cloud in a more streamlined, cost-effective way,” wrote Susie Adams …

Sixty-seven percent of respondents tell Accenture/UN survey their organizations lack initiatives to align sustainability with their business goals.
Accenture and the United Nations Global Compact have released a study that shows majority of CEOs worldwide view businesses as falling short of strategies to meet sustainability requirements.

Accenture polled 1,000 CEOs and the triennial study contains interviews with 75 CEOs as well as analysis of how companies integrated sustainability into their business performance, Accenture said Friday.

Sixty-seven percent of respondents say organizations lack initiatives to align sustainability with their business goals, according to the survey.
Seventy-eight percent of responding CEOs also say sustainability leads to business growth and development of new technologies and 79 percent consider it a competitive edge.
Insufficient financial resources and tough economic conditions are among the barriers that 51 percent and 40 percent of the surveyed chief executives, respectively, say hinder their efforts to embed sustainability into their businesses.

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Zetta.net, a provider of enterprise-grade cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions, has announced two new executive appointments.

Kevin J. Laughlin has joined the company as chief financial officer (CFO), and Glenn Rawlinson as vice president of business development. The addition of Laughlin and Rawlinson to the Zetta.net management team was a direct response to the dramatic growth the company has seen as it delivers a cloud backup and disaster recovery solution with enterprise-class features to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and managed service providers (MSPs).

With three decades of experience in finance and operations, Laughlin joins Zetta.net from Sensa Products, a $150 million in revenue consumer product company where he was CFO. In this position, Laughlin transitioned Sensa to an independent operating subsidiary and built the finance function previously performed by parent company Intelligent Beauty. Prior to his position at Sensa, Laughlin held CFO positions with IT services company All Covered, and management software company International Network Services.

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“The Data Center operators do understand that quality does matter,” noted Barbara P. Aichinger, co-founder of FuturePlus Systems and VP of New Business Development, in this exclusive interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “When they experience failures they call the supplier and the Tier 2 and 3 vendors just blame somebody else, like the DIMM vendor or the software.”
Cloud Computing Journal: You seem to have some concerns about the actual cloud hardware can you explain?
Barbara P. Aichinger: Sure, my company FuturePlus Systems makes memory design validation equipment used by the engineers that design cloud hardware. These server and network equipment have technology standards that govern their design. The advantage of using standards is that you can buy one part from vendor A and another from vendor B and because they are all designed to the same standard they work together. The standards organizations that write these standards are international in nature and in most cases have a Compliance Standard associated with the technology standard. Vendors have to not only obey the standard itself but pass a test, specified by the compliance portion of the standard, that proves that their design meets the specification. This is a stamp of quality and interoperability. The problem we have today with cloud hardware is that at the very heart of all of this hardware is the JEDEC DDR Memory standard but this standard has no compliance specification per se. Thus there is no third party checking this very critical portion of the design for quality and compliance.

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Metalogix, a provider of content infrastructure software to improve the use and performance of enterprise content on Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange, File and Cloud platforms, has announced the industry’s first dynamic email management suite to transparently migrate, store, secure and protect email and file content for on premises and hybrid cloud environments. The new solutions, Metalogix Archive Manager Exchange Edition 6.0 and Metalogix Email Migrator 1.0, operate in tandem to enable enterprises to achieve a dynamically scalable email and file archive which reduces complexity, mitigates risk and improves user productivity with the flexibility and control that enables them to adapt to changing enterprise needs.

“Today’s enterprise is under constant pressure to preserve, protect and produce business content to suit ever-changing international regulatory requirements,” said Christine Taylor, analyst at Taneja Group. “Archive repositories easily reach into petabyte scales and are constantly growing. This pace will not slow down. Companies need an adaptive email management solution that optimizes and simplifies massively growing volumes of data. This includes managing compliance and data retention, storage and migration, data protection, and discovery; turning huge email archives from black holes into valuable businesses assets.”

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Inside the world’s companies and government departments, IT organizations have traditionally focused on delivering to internal customers. This has created an environment where IT is expected to align the services it delivers with age-old business processes that have evolved over years of operation, and is focused on efficiency. Delivering innovation and new ideas has become fraught with unnecessary complexity and internal politics, and strategically IT remains a back-office function.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, things have changed. IT is now front of house, delivering to consumers via online and mobile apps, whose expectations are higher. IT is part of the customer relationship and, as a result, it is expected to deliver its service promise and for problems not to occur. Social media has meant that when there are problems, they occur publicly. In the time it can take to raise a trouble ticket on a service management system, a consumer problem can surge on Twitter and reach thousands, damaging an organization’s reputation. At the same time, organizations now have access to more information about their customers and services than ever before, which provides huge potential for transforming their services.

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Growth is good, but sometimes it may not feel that way when the business you love has outgrown your ability to manage it. When Post-It notes can’t support your customers, it’s time to change. When you’re apprehensive about winning that big, new account because you don’t have the capacity to manage it, it’s time to change. Change came to Old Mill Kettle Corn, a company that manufactures healthy corn-based snacks, when McKee Foods Corporation a national snack food manufacturer approached it with a distribution offer that the company couldn’t refuse.
Old Mill Kettle Corn had never used an ERP platform or a formal food safety management system (FSMS) but with the imminent expansion and new market opportunities, management realized it was no longer feasible to use paper spreadsheets and manual processes to manage product quality, inventory, supply chain communications and other processing operations aspects.

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There is so much happening in the Cloud Computing world and everyone seems to want a piece of the cloud. Though more and more users are positive about deploying a cloud solution for their business, they are still unclear as to how much they would need to shell out for it. Many organizations are still reluctant and feel they won’t get the expected returns.
But this is not true and Cloud Computing does deliver organizations measurable benefits. Businesses that have deployed Cloud solutions have been talking about how it has helped them save their IT costs and be profitable in such tough times as well. They have achieved good returns from their investments in the Cloud and also have saved a lot.
If any organization or individual needs to ascertain how much it will cost to implement a Cloud solution they can easily do so. The cost of moving to the cloud can be estimated in two forms: i) Cost of migrating and ii) the ongoing costs.

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