Cloud computing continues to hold a great deal of promise for a variety of business and personal implementations. A lot of buzz has been generated this year with regards to the potential of cloud-based applications and web services as well as a few recent developments that highlight the direction in which the cloud computing phenomenon is moving.
Cloud computing becomes more attractive to businesses as companies are able to create their own private clouds, as well as hybrid clouds, and clouds including private and public space. As businesses realize that private and hybrid clouds can be built to the company’s specifications, cloud computing becomes a more valued asset to the enterprise.

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Massive data growth. An aging and inefficient data center infrastructure. A proliferation of new software and a host of costly legacy applications. These are the challenges that business and IT organizations face every day – and cloud computing is often touted as the “magic bullet” that can help businesses cuts costs, generate revenue and create new value. But if cloud is the path to business utopia, what’s stopping more organizations from making the move?
At Dell, we see the tremendous potential of the cloud – but we also know that it doesn’t mean anything if you can’t get there easily and with the least disruption to your organization. We start from one simple question: What is the business problem you’re trying to solve? From there, we help you create simple path to cloud that’s based on your strategy and goals – and that leverages your existing technology investments.

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Platfora, a start-up with an ace or two in the hole, came out of stealth mode this week with the intention of taking the finicky, balky, ornery Hadoop mainstream and disrupting the $35 billion business analytics market.
The company’s aces include Andreessen Horowitz, the young VC with the seemingly Midas touch, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, which together put $7.18 million into the new venture. Both, shall we say, have some pretty interesting contacts.
Platfora describes its user-friendly widgetry as the first scale-out in-memory business intelligence platform for Hadoop.
That’s the fancy geek description.
Its founder Ben Werther, a former Apache Cassandra and Greenplum product strategy guy, describes the solution more trenchantly.
Hadoop, he says, is like a big cardboard box carelessly filled with Big Data. His widgetry can figure out what the data is and what it means and turn it into pictures without teams of IT staff reorganizing a data warehouse. In fact it eliminates data warehouses and ETL (extract, transform, and load) software altogether. Users can question the data right after it’s collected.

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As mentioned in Part I of this series, cloud technology has introduced a viable alternative to the practice of creating secondary sites for disaster recovery (DR), promising to save IT organizations hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in infrastructure and maintenance. While the cost reduction associated with replacing dedicated DR infrastructure is intuitive, the ability of cloud solutions to meet the recovery times (RTOs and RPOs) dictated by businesses is often less well understood.
Part I suggested two key considerations in recovering IT operations from a disaster are (1) regaining access to data and (2) regaining access to applications. Today’s cloud integrated storage or cloud storage gateways can push backups or live data sets to the cloud easily and securely, enabling the first element of a cloud DR solution. With this in mind, let’s examine two strategies for application recovery using cloud-based DR:Realizing an economical alternative to traditional DR

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Cloud computing has proven to have its many advantages and now it would seem that it is also helping medical science reduce its costs.

If we take the incredible amounts of data that need to be crunched through for advanced treatment purposes, traditionally it would require a set of interlinked computers, in their thousands, to configure the human genome.

This alone would require thousands and thousands of pieces of equipment to conduct such an experiment whilst it would also take years to formulate the small gains made in mapping a strand of DNA whilst costs would continue to escalate.

Cloud hosting can however reverse this.

The multitude of computers can be in a remote location as well as all the resources, including networked data from other research centres.

Cloud computing would enable the whole process to be a lot cheaper since the medics would only pay for the space and …

On Monday, Amazon Web Services — the leading provider of cloud services — suffered an outage, and as a result, a long list of well-known and popular websites went dark. According to Amazon’s Service Health Dashboard, the outage started out as degraded performance of a small number of Elastic Bloc Store (EBS) storage units in the US-EAST-1 Region, then evolved …

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Centrify, the outfit that leverages Microsoft’s ubiquitous Active Directory, has extended its cloud-based mobile security widgetry to include Mobile Authentication Services (MAS) and deliver “Zero Sign-On” authentication to mobile apps accessing cloud services via Active Directory.
Earlier this year the company released its solution for Active Directory Group Policy-based management of mobile devices to enable Mobile Device Management (MDM). Now it’s making the other major Active Directory-provided service available – authentication – and seamlessly extending it to mobile devices and applications.
That makes Centrify the only vendor to offer both integrated MDM and MAS.
It’s got a MAS SDK so cloud, mobile and SaaS developers can integrate native and web-based mobile apps with Active Directory and it’s introducing a Mobile Technology Partner Program.

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Cloud consumers need choice because workloads are different.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, M. Srikanth, CTO of ComputeNext, will discuss how with the growth and adoption of cloud, there is a need to provide options for consumers of cloud with the ability to select and federate their workloads across heterogeneous cloud.
M. Srikanth is CTO of ComputeNext. With 13+ years in search and semantic technology and most recently an applied researcher at Microsoft Bing, he is fascinated with how search and discovery can power efficient computing in federated cloud ecosystems.

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Zetta.net has announced it is redefining traditional hybrid cloud backup with its unique, appliance-free approach featuring Smart Cloud and new Lean Local Copy technology. Zetta.net’s Smart Cloud, which integrates the functionality of backup, snapshot and replication technology, abolishes the need for a local appliance. Smart Cloud, together with the new Lean Local Copy feature, advances the hybrid cloud model to deliver fast, reliable data backup and recovery at a fraction of the cost of backup alone.
Zetta.net delivers enterprise-grade 3-in-1 backup, disaster recovery and archiving. Because the SaaS-based solution eliminates the cost and management complexities associated with appliance hardware, it is particularly attractive to small/medium businesses, enterprises with distributed office locations, and managed service providers (MSPs). Remote offices and MSPs are no longer required to purchase and manage multiple appliances across distributed locations, and any size business can now enjoy enterprise-grade data protection at an affordable price.

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