The cloud can be a great investment for most organisations. It offers the promise to significantly increase capacity and agility, while simultaneously reducing costs.

Companies invest significant resource to attain a great ROI in the cloud, but if that investment isn’t secured, migrating could turn out to be a disaster.

Most cloud adopters underestimate the philosophical and technological change required to security when migrating to the cloud. It’s a problem that affects organisations of all sizes, whether they have a few or a few hundred cloud servers. So, to help these and others, we’ve put together the following list of the five most common cloud server firewall mistakes to avoid:

#1: Too many rules = Trouble

In development, you typically start with just a few rules in your cloud firewall or Amazon Security Groups. By the time you get into production, however, the list of rules and policy …

Racemi, the moving company for the cloud, announced on Thursday updates to its cloud migration software that add support for the SoftLayer CloudLayer platform. As part of the launch, Racemi has also announced special pricing of $99 per migration to CloudLayer for the next 30 days.
SoftLayer is the largest, privately held, cloud infrastructure provider in the world, with 13 data centers and 17 points-of-presence spanning the U.S., Asia and Europe.
The updates to Racemi’s Cloud Path software as a service (SaaS) and DynaCenter on-premises software now support physical and virtual server migrations to CloudLayer cloud servers built on SoftLayer’s automated infrastructure and Citrix XenServer. It’s also possible to automatically migrate cloud instances from other cloud providers to CloudLayer. This provides customers with additional flexibility and choice when it comes to migrating existing workloads to public cloud computing resources. Additional information is available at www.racemi.com/index.php/softlayer.

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Over the last five years, since the release of the first open-source version of OpenNebula in March 2008, we have been involved in many presentations, discussions and meetings where people wanted to know how OpenNebula compares with the rest of open-source Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs), mostly with Eucalyptus and OpenStack. The most common understanding is that all CMPs are competing in the same market, trying to fill the same gap. Consequently, people jump to the wrong conclusion that after years of a fierce competition, there will only be one winner, a single open-source CMP in the market. However, as discussed by Joe Brockmeier in his post “It’s Not Highlander, There Can Be More Than One Open Source Cloud”, there is room in the market for several open-source CMPs that, addressing different cloud niches, will fit together into a broad open cloud ecosystem.

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Amazon is going to use a virtual currency it calls Amazon Coins to stimulate the development and sale of games, applications and in-app virtual goods for its Kindle Fire tablet.
One Amazon Coin is worth a penny and Amazon means to shower shoppers with tens of millions of dollars in free Amazon Coins in May. Consumers can also buy their own Amazon Coins.
The scheme will only be available in the US at the Amazon Appstore and can’t be used to pay for subscription services.
Developers will still get their regular 70% cut.
Developers have to submit any new apps and have them approved by April 25 to qualify for the gimmick.

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Common community cloud conversation questions include among others:
Who defines the standards for community clouds?
The members or participants, or whoever they hire or get to volunteer to do it.
Who pays for the community cloud?
The members or participants do, think about a co-op or other resource sharing consortium with multi-tenant (shared) capabilities to isolate and keep members along with what they are doing separate.

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Professionals who work in the service field often have to juggle several tasks at once. Service techs have to make sales presentations and deal with customer service and still fix the problem they were hired for. They’re basically a one-man show that travels from site to site, the ultimate multi-tasker, with so many projects and phone calls to handle that a person can’t help but wonder how most even survive each day. But there’s something out there to help these guys out with their busy life. By working in the cloud, contractors and techs can gain an extra pair of arms to make each day count.
When your techs show up to a job they bring their toolbox and a bulky laptop. Their hands are extremely full. Everything they need to know is on that computer but it takes minutes to load, and they have to be on the phone at the same time talking to the office. If a problem should arise, they may have to leave the site and only return after obtaining the information or ordering the parts that they need. Then what happens if there are errors in that information? They have to head back again to the office. The tech wastes gas and the client wastes time. No one’s a winner here.

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Cloud security is not a paradox!

 “Is cloud computing secure?” A question that has been asked since the dawn of “the cloud” and the answer has been debated many times over. Cloud security has been a long, never-ending discussion and more often than not evidence shows businesses rarely regret taking the plunge into a cloud infrastructure.

Despite the misconception that the cloud is entirely unprotected, there has still been a phenomenal growth in the cloud market in recent years. Forrester Research predicts that the public cloud market will develop from around $40 billion today to $160 billion by 2020.

Nevertheless, moving to cloud computing can be as risky as any major change if you do not understand what the change means for your business.

The risks and issues of cloud computing

Businesses have the same concerns with cloud infrastructure as they do with conventional computing; ensuring that the company’s …

Businesses and Governments are using multiple clouds in different ways. They are moving core functions in to a controlled private or managed cloud. But they are still using public clouds for new services, content and demand spikes. Some large enterprises are becoming specialized cloud providers for smaller businesses, while traditional providers are using different clouds for different tiers of service. These trends are leading to a world of many clouds with numerous service choices from a variety of cloud vendors.

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Businesses and Governments are using multiple clouds in different ways. They are moving core functions in to a controlled private or managed cloud. But they are still using public clouds for new services, content and demand spikes. Some large enterprises are becoming specialized cloud providers for smaller businesses, while traditional providers are using different clouds for different tiers of service. These trends are leading to a world of many clouds with numerous service choices from a variety of cloud vendors.

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Gravitant has announced enhancements coming this month to its award winning cloudMatrix cloud brokerage and management platform:
Continuous cloud asset discovery and sync (starting with Amazon Web Services today with additional providers added over time), which enhances internal governance capabilities to discover and control shadow I.T. and provide alternate sourcing options.
Integration of government certified cloud providers into the cloudMatrix electronic services catalog, which enhances external governance capabilities through secure clouds.

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