RightScale has made its very first acquisition.
It’s bought the free Scottish cloud cost forecasting web site ShopForCloud and renamed it PlanForCloud, fleshing out its management portfolio to help those struggling with cloud costs, which are always, as anyone will attest, complex. Terms were not disclosed.
The widgetry will help companies budget their cloud costs by giving them tools to model various architectures and usage patterns, access up-to-date pricing from cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Microsoft Azure and Rackspace, and produce detailed cost reports in just a few minutes.
The Wild Cloud: Legal Aspects of Cloud Computing
While many organizations have been making the move toward cloud computing solutions for the past several years, the fact remains that we’re really still in the early days of figuring out how all of this is going to work. Even more than that, the laws on the books that apply to cloud solutions are woefully behind. This creates a number of challenges, both for data centers and for consumers.
Questions of compliance
Businesses, for example, are facing some serious concerns when it comes to cloud solutions. A legal firm might have attorneys who store client-related documents on Google Drive or Dropbox, for example. The question of how well protected that data is isn’t always clear. In fact, it is often those in the legal arena dealing with issues of compliance that are challenging such cloud service providers, and forcing them to examine their security policies and their security solutions.
Expectations
Another important area to look at is expectations. When a consumer places a document on a cloud storage service, for instance, what does the consumer believe about that file? Does she assume that she’s the only one with access to the file? Is it possible that personnel at the cloud provider might be able to view that file?
Explicit statements from cloud providers about who can access a client’s data and when help to clarify the issue, but whether those policies meet client expectations is another issue altogether.
Geographic concerns
Yet another issue comes to light when we think about how cloud solutions physically work. For example, a given application server might reside in Europe. Suddenly, the data entered into that application isn’t subject to the laws of the United States. When cloud providers have some or all of their data center hardware located somewhere else (Iceland is a popular choice for a variety of reasons) it throws a whole set of new questions into the mix.
As time goes on, we’ll no doubt see more and more cloud computing-related laws on the books, more international agreements, and more scrutiny of cloud providers. In the interim, it’s imperative organizations address these concerns when implementing a cloud solution.
Yahoo’s New CEO Is Preggers
Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s newly hired CEO, is pregnant with her first child and due to have the baby, a boy, in three months. The due date is October 7.
Ms Mayer credits the Yahoo board with “evolved thinking” for not eliminating her when it was told of her condition.
We would just point out to Ms Mayer that historically women from European aristocrats to Chinese peasants are familiar with this kind of “evolved thinking.”
Presumably Yahoo’s new superwoman is figuring on having a full-time nurse.
Hi-Tech Cloud hub to be part of #London2012 Olympic legacy
Cloud computing will be a part of the 2012 Olympic legacy when the dedicated media centre is turned into a London City cloud hub following the games.
The £295m ($461m) Main Press Centre and International Broadcasting Centre at the Olympic Park in East London contains over 31,000 square metres of office space and includes a number of hi-tech facilities such as 1,300 internet ports with fibre optic cabling.
The highly connected building is in close proximity to the key business district of Canary Warf.
iCITY, a joint venture between data centre firm Infinity and property company Delances, has emerged as preferred bidder for the project, and says it will turn the site into a world-class centre of innovation and enterprise to deliver a lasting legacy, creating over 6600 new jobs in and around the area.
The bidding process, in which there was one other final contender, came to …
HP Gets the Onion Treatment “On That Cloud Thing Everyone Else Is Talking About”
Can’t add a thing. Just watch the video.
CIOs Must Get Up to Speed with Cloud-Based Marketing Tools
As digital marketing technologies and cloud-based marketing automation push IT systems from the back office to the front office, CIOs and IT Directors must start educating themselves about sophisticated new marketing tools, techniques and analytics, according to to Marketo, the fastest-growing provider of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) solutions.
Ten years ago, the marketing department was mainly seen as a cost centre that created the brochures. Thanks to new technologies, marketing departments today create sophisticated, analytics-based forecasts and measureable marketing-driven revenue that empowers organisations to better engage with their customers across the entire revenue cycle. However, many CIOs and IT Directors are used to internal, back office systems.
Cloud and Mobile Combine to Set ERP Free
Business management and ERP have undergone huge technological, social and economic shifts. The explosion of cloud computing, mobility of business users, Big Data demands and microscopic focus on cost cutting are changing the pace and direction of every company’s IT strategy.
Five years ago cloud computing was more expensive than on-premise, analytical data was difficult to curate and the benchmark in usability, especially on mobile devices, was set extremely low. Today’s advances in these areas create massive opportunities for large and small businesses to take advantage of the best tools, infrastructure and user interfaces modern technology has to offer.
Previously, reliable business management systems often resulted from massively complex and expensive ERP systems supported through in-house or custom developed “front-line worker” tools. Mobile technology and the impact of Big Data has not only leveled the playing field, but shifted the balance of power to the cloud. Companies such as Amazon and Google have led the way in reducing cost of and building confidence in the cloud, to such an extent that those arguments in favor of running in-house vs. cloud no longer apply.
Cloud Migration Company Announces $7 Million Funding
Racemi has closed a $7 million Series B round of venture financing to further develop and market its software for migrating workloads to cloud computing.
Racemi’s software automates migration of existing workloads to all the major cloud platforms. This means it is no longer necessary to rebuild servers from scratch in the cloud, which translates to significant time and cost savings.
The Racemi software provides flexibility to move workloads between dissimilar physical, virtual and cloud platforms in any combination or direction. For customers, this minimizes any unease over vendor lock-in, while enabling high availability or disaster recovery strategies that span providers. Racemi’s software supports both Linux and Windows, all of the major hypervisor platforms and major cloud platforms including Amazon EC2, CloudStack, GoGrid, OpenStack, Rackspace and Terremark.
Discover Your Inner Data Geek with Progress DataDirect
It’s finally summer, time to slow down, to plan, to learn and to discover your inner data geek!
Summer is also the time for blue skies and clouds. And although you may know everything you want to know about the white fluffy clouds that dot the sky, do you know enough about getting your data into and out of Salesforce.com – the most widely adopted cloud-based CRM?
Cloud applications like Salesforce.com have fundamentally changed how we think about and work with our customer data. However, these systems have also significantly complicated getting real-time reports that we rely on to make sound business decisions.
What is really needed is a solution that enables real-time reporting across Salesforce and your SQL-based on-premise systems.
The Build a Layer of Social Employee Apps Around Your SAP Core
IT departments are struggling to adapt to new economic realities and a rapidly changing technology environment that includes fundamental shifts in mobile, social, and cloud computing technologies.
The lingering effects of the downturn marked by flat-to-negative IT budgets are forcing IT departments to reassess and more accurately measure the real business value delivered by both existing and future IT investments. No system or project is out of scope as IT looks for any opportunity to squeeze additional productivity from an aging portfolio and map it to a more demanding and collaborative business environment. Organizations are rethinking traditional development platforms and architectural models in favor of solutions that offer speed, economy, and agility.