The Canada Cloud Network (CCN), a new industry consortium intent on establishing Canada as a world leader in the field of Cloud Computing, is pleased to announce their formal launch and the immediate availability of membership services including ‘Social Cloud PR’.

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Talk of so-called “sea change developments” and “paradigm shifts” has long been rife among the IT media and the web’s wider technology commentary channels.
Right now we’re all talking about cloud, mobile empowerment (let’s not forget the Bring Your Own Device tagline here) and virtualized computing resources as we re-align many of the mechanics that drive our collective IT resources. But does all this talk of “new compute models” leave us at risk of forgetting other large-scale departmental changes, which still have to be brought to bear by the CIO?
I’m simply talking about security here.
The CIO is now also being joined by a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer), although in many cases this turns out to be one and the same person. The CIO’s security remit now must encompass absolutely all of the people, processes and technology that impact the day-to-day running of the business and this is no small matter.

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Security concerns are the biggest thing holding back cloud adoption, but Intel says it’ll take it and its pricey $7.68 billion McAfee acquisition at least another five years to bring cloud security up to the best-in-class traditional enterprise security available now.
Not very reassuring is it.
Intel also says, “A private cloud added to your IT infrastructure is like adding another door to your house – it’s another entry point for bad guys to get in.”
Oh, great, just what we need.
Despite those sobering thoughts Intel is still expecting more than three billion connected users – that’s a B, dear, as in billion – and 15 billion connected devices to be driving more than 1,500 exabytes of cloud traffic by 2015, and IDC figures that about 20% of all digital data – roughly, say, 1,400 exabytes – a mammoth load – will be stored or processed in the cloud.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Big Data Insight Group has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Big Data Insight Group aims to provide a forum for members, from across the business and IT spectrum, to come together and exchange ideas, expertise and best practice on Big Data. Big Data Insight Group’s aim is to get beyond the technology and the hype, to understand the business value of big data and help members answer questions.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that EffectiveUI has been named Gold Sponsor of SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
EffectiveUI is a full-service user experience agency that architects and delivers custom software and applications that translate into exceptional digital experiences.
Our technology services team – the largest dedicated to user experience in the industry – has a passion for innovation and simplifying complex systems. We dive deep into technical challenges, bringing perspective to the big picture and quality to the details of every product.

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Cloud facilitates a new generation of technology and related impacts that have never been seen before. With utility computing and on demand capabilities, many organizations want to jump on the bandwagon as soon as possible. As the Chief Executive, there are some tough decisions to be made. There will be people in your organization who say that Cloud is the best thing that happened since the emergence of the internet. Others will paint a picture of gloom and doom by citing issues such as security, privacy, control over data etc. Cloud can enhance productivity by providing the infrastructure or application platforms and related tools to respond to customer needs quickly, giving organizations an edge over others that have not assessed such mechanisms, and the on-demand capabilities can lead to efficient utilization of resources. Cloud also facilitates mobility services since such services are available at a cheaper cost to the enterprise.

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HP, the public cloud’s Johnnie-come-lately, made its first public cloud services available in public beta Thursday and, to make up for lost time HP is going to charge utility prices to use the beta albeit at half what it’ll cost when it goes GA.
The widgetry, which reportedly went to private beta in September, is not the homegrown cloud of HP’s dreams that it was working on a year ago. It frankly didn’t have the technology in-house to build it and was lucky that the open source effort to produce the OpenStack public cloud infrastructure came along.
Of course, OpenStack is not supposed to be quite ready primetime yet so HP’s widgetry will stay a beta until it proves it can scale and HP can figure out its SLAs.

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Many IT decision makers feel they are more likely to have a close encounter with a flying saucer than see the completion of their company’s cloud migration in the next six months.

This was one of a number of alarming findings contained within Cisco’s 2012 Global Cloud Networking survey this week.

The company polled 1300 IT decision makers in 13 countries spanning five continents, and revealed a lack of universal confidence in the cloud among IT professionals unless a proper cloud migration strategy is adopted.

The survey included a series of irreverent comparisons designed to put “cloud deployments in perspective”, with 31% of the experts surveyed stating that they could train for a marathon or grow a mullet in less time than it would take to migrate their business fully to the cloud.

Nearly a quarter of those polled stated they would in the next six months be …

Red Hat claims that the enterprise isn’t using these newfangled platforms-as-a-service to develop software very much because they don’t meet its needs.
The enterprise is worried about compliance, enterprise architecture standards, IT governance, security, application lifecycle management, application development methodologies, organizational and process restrictions, data and compute locality and privacy restrictions. Itches other people’s PaaSs don’t scratch according to Red Hat.
Ah, but analysts like 451 Research say the enterprise PaaS market could be worth $3 billion by 2015, a mere three years away, and surpass the SaaS market. And then there’s Red Hat’s great enemy VMware with its new Cloud Foundry open source PaaS.
So to meet the opposition and give the enterprise what it wants Red Hat has been evolving its OpenShift PaaS, which it put out for as a developer preview a year ago.

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