If the leadership in your organization is mature and has a good track record – rest assured that a risk-mitigated decision to dabble in the public cloud is a vote of confidence in your direction.
It’s little more than innate human nature to strive to control the environment around us. From macro-level examples, including the very democratic foundation of our governments, to things we do every day; our desire to control is evident in all aspects of our lives. Have you ever lined up in the automated check-out line at the grocery store even though a “manned” (gasp!) cashier was available? You’re not alone.

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Many have heard of OAuth but are unsure of how it might apply to their business.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Alistair Farquharson, CTO of SOA Software, will describe how OAuth can be used to facilitate certain business models and simplify the sharing of private data.
Alistair Farquharson is a visionary industry veteran focused on using disruptive technologies to drive business growth and improve efficiency and agility within organizations. As the CTO of SOA Software Alistair is helping to shape and mature the enterprise API and SOA industry. Alistair is responsible for product strategy and development for this leading Enterprise API and SOA Governance company. He spends a great deal of time and energy shaping customer and industry direction with regular conference keynote appearances, discussions with customers, and even the occasional foray into writing code. Alistair has been at the forefront of many technology waves from enterprise web architecture, through web services and SOA, and now into APIs. His expertise spans a wide range of technologies and businesses, and he brings a unique global focus to everything he does.

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Over and over again we are pummeled with statistics on how risk is growing in disproportion to security readiness.

-91% of companies have experienced at least one IT security event from an external source.

-90% of all cyber crime costs are those caused by web attacks, malicious code and malicious insiders.

-40% reported rogue cloud issues (shadow IT) experienced the exposure of confidential information as a result

-34% share passwords with their co-workers for applications like FedEx, Twitter, Staples, LinkedIn.

These are real stats from studies by like Gartner, Forrester, Ponemon, Kaspersky, Eschelon and others. But there’s one stat that really curls my hair (what little of it is left):

• Due to complexity, over 70% of organizations still not adequately securing critical systems.

Wow. It’s a staggering number. But it got me to thinking why. What is causing this universal security paralysis? Now I’m not proclaiming securipocolypse …

It turns out cloud computing could be the most useful sales associate on the floor, and you won’t have to worry about it stealing sales leads, ala “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
With the help of cloud computing, some brick-and-mortar stores are combating showrooming, a trend where consumers look at items in a store before buying them online, usually at lower prices, according to an article on Wired.com.
Clouds offer retailers a way to explore the potential of Big Data analytics to understand their customers better. In order to compete with e-tailers, retailers are tapping social networks to learn what customers are saying about them and about their competitors. Weather data is being used to influence product-purchasing decisions, and merchandise promotions are organized around social events.
In many cases, brick-and-mortar retailers are even finding new data sources. Some companies are tracking the movement of customers within stores and analyzing how many stop at displays to improve the effectiveness of merchandising. Others are considering installing license-plate cameras in parking lots to find out which customer is about to walk into the store.

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You’re getting pitched every day from your legacy enterprise software and hardware vendors about “cloud.” They’re doing an amazing job of convincing your CIO and CTO about what cloud is and how you should use it. The reality is they’re defending their shrinking market share and keeping you on the legacy treadmill for as long as they can by selling you solutions that aren’t “cloud.”
In her session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Niki Acosta, Cloud Evangelista for Rackspace, will talk through the five dirty little secrets your legacy IT vendors won’t tell you about cloud. Attendees will leave with an understanding of how you should really be thinking about building enterprise apps for the cloud while embracing the fundamental shift away from legacy IT.

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Joyent, one of the original infrastructure clouds that set up about the same time as Amazon Web Services but without Amazon’s giant fallback cushion, restructured its cloud line Thursday, adding a bunch of new instances that pretty much map to Amazon’s.

It also introduced reserved pricing plans.

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Everyone is virtualizing, but are they realizing any of the promised savings? This overview of IBM’s new virtualization optimization solutions will show you how integrated Cloud Solutions like SmartCloud Provisioning and SmartCloud Monitoring can deliver the savings virtualization promises.

Organizations are using intelligent management and analytics to provide the insight needed to optimize their virtualized infrastructure and dramatically improve availability, reduce data storage footprints and streamline patch management. In his session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13], IBM’s Dan Carr will review lessons learned from real-world experience.

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Imagine if you could take a time machine five years into the future, so that you would know which of today’s new technologies panned out and which did not.

Most companies have only started using cloud in the past two years. But there are some companies that have been using cloud for five years or more. They are “five years into the future” — they’ve learned things that companies that just…

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Saurabh Sharma, Senior Analyst, IT Solutions

Ovum’s Integration Middleware Global Market Forecast Model estimates that the spend on cloud-based integration platforms will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31% between 2012 and 2018, reaching $3.7bn by the end of 2018. Over the same period, spending on cloud-based integration platforms in the Americas and Asia-Pacific regions will grow at CAGRs of 27% and 44% respectively. The Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) cloud-based integration platforms market is expected to grow from $274m in 2013 to $905m by the end of 2018. The forecast figures exclude any spending on outsourcing services delivered on top of cloud-based integration platforms.

iPaaS is emerging as a suitable option for a wide range of integration needs

The emergence of integration-as-a-service (IaaS), the first truly cloud-based integration approach, marked the start of the “middleware-as-a-service” era. These solutions focused on enabling SaaS integration …