What is the “Cloud”? What is “Cloud” computing? These are questions I get all the time. For the vast majority of people, the “Cloud” is a lofty term having to do something with computing or, let’s be honest, puffy cumulus wisps of moisture floating around in the sky. The truth is the “Cloud” is a marketing term made up to sell a service (note: the quotation marks around “Cloud” were to delineate that marketing term. From here on out, “Cloud” will be written sans quotation). That service, the Cloud, is computing and storage capacity as a service. In human terms, it is a system of delivering computing and storage needs via three types of computing services: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Although this is true, for most people Cloud can be broken down into two categories, Public or Private.
CSA Certification; Amazon’s Glacier; Cloud Tax and More
Amazon launched a low-cost storage service called Amazon Glacier, according to this TechCrunch article. The latest of Amazon’s cloud services, Amazon Glacier provides “secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup,” according to this Amazon Glacier overview.
Massachusetts has been grappling with how to tax cloud computing services and this month, it has decided on the conditions that make the cloud taxable, according to this NetworkWorld article. Massachusetts will collect taxes on SaaS when a license is required to run the service. Taxes won’t be collected on free, open source software.
Cloud Encryption and PCI Thoughts
There is a lot of guidance and expertise on achieving PCI compliance. In virtualized and cloud computing environments it is trickier, yet a lot of expertise is building up there as well. Witness the venerable PCI Security Standards organization and its guideline for virtualization, which includes a section on cloud computing as well. Yet in […]
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Eucalyptus Clouds Up With Appcara
Eucalyptus continues its aggressive march through the cloud computing skyscape, with an agreement with upstart Appcara to integrate Eucalyptus private IaaS with public Amazon Web Services. Appcara has said its model-basaed approach competes directly with cloud management leader Rightscale, a company with which Eucalyptus also cooperates.
Appcara’s product, AppStack, “captures and assembles the entire application environment regardless of languages and development platforms and provides 100 percent automation throughout the application lifeycle,” according to CEO John Yung. “Users have found that AppStack has reduced their DevOps effort dramatically – turning painfully manual enterprise application deployment processes into highly automated workloads.”
For Eucalyptus’s part, SVP David Butler says, “Enterprise customers turn to Eucalyptus for open, scalable and fully compatible on-premise clouds to freely manage and migrate workloads based on business demand. By leveraging Eucalyptus’ industry leading on-premise IaaS cloud sofware, and compatability with AWS APIs, Appcara can provide even the most advanced enterprise IT applications with on-demand cloud deployment, real-time configuration and advanced operations.”
I’ll be talking to both companies (among others) at VMworld next week, and will report back on what I hear.
United Apple-Google Front Stymies Kodak Patent Sale
In an unusual rapprochement, bitter rivals Apple and the Android mob including Google, Samsung, HTC and LG have teamed up to buy the Kodak patents on the cheap, according to the Wall Street Journal, a stratagem that had Kodak threatening to pull the sale only Kodak is boxed in.
Analytics for the Cloud
“Big Data” is everywhere. What does it mean? In this article we discuss the impact of cloud and big data technology have on the application performance monitoring space. The number of components, the diversity of the data, the analysis frequency and data granularity results into an extremely complex analytics and Big Data problem. We explore how each of these dimension impact the APM space and how it is shaping Netuitive Analytics product roadmap.
How Cloud Computing Made Tax Time Less Taxing (Infographic)
Streaming as a Service (Infographic)
UShareSoft Coupon Code ▸ UShareSoftVIPgold Offer as Cloud Expo Sponsor
As an exhibitor at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, UShareSoft is offering special passes to SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
To obtain this special pass, here is a quick summary of all anyone needs to do – feel free to cut and paste these instructions into any email blast you might be sending out.
Accessing Your File Server from Cloud
Here is another use case keeps coming up from customers using Gladinet Cloud. As one potential customer asked:
“We search for a solution for our team. We have a file server with Active Directory for our projects, with a team of