A survey of mid-sized companies employing less than 1,000 people found that nearly half don't understand what the cloud is.
Fielded by cloud provider Vitacore Systems, the survey found 48 percent are confused about the cloud. Despite the fact that they use Salesforce.com or Google Docs, 54 percent said they had no idea they were using a cloud service.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/06/20111 comments
Amazon Web Services (AWS) seems to be getting its house in order when it comes to compliance certifications. The company said last week it has achieved Level 1 compliance with the Payment Card Industry, or PCI, Data Security Standard.
PCI is the standard for storing, processing and transmitting credit card data. AWS lack of PCI compliance was a key barrier to those companies looking to use the cloud provider's service to handle transactions.
"Merchants and services providers with a need to certify against PCI DSS and to maintain their own certification can now leverage the benefits of the AWS cloud and even simplify their own PCI compliance efforts by relying on AWS's status as a validated service provider," said AWS lead Web services evangelist Jeff Barr, in a blog post.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/14/20100 comments
Salesforce.com put its partners, customers and competitors on notice that it doesn't want to just be known as a cloud-based CRM provider. Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff wants his company to play in the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) space and he made a number of interesting moves to help achieve that goal.
Benioff gave two consecutive keynote addresses this week at Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco where more than 23,000 stakeholders were in attendance to hear an avalanche of announcements.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/09/20103 comments
Red Hat's acquisition of Makara is aimed at helping the open-source software vendor extend its foray into platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud offerings.
The plan, announced this week, is to enable partners to build their own cloud services using its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution and JBoss middleware tuned with Makara's Cloud Application Platform.
Red Hat intends to deliver a PaaS Automation Engine that will provide automatic scaling, monitoring and high availability, according to Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's cloud business unit.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/02/20100 comments
The General Services Administration yesterday said it will move to Google Apps, a huge win for the company because it's the first federal agency to use Google Apps. The GSA's five-year, $6.7 million deal will save the GSA 50 percent in IT costs over the span of the contract, the agency said.
The GSA will move 17,000 employees and contractors in 17 locations to Google Apps including Gmail during the coming year. Apparently helping Google and its lead contractor Unisys bag this deal was the fact that Google Apps is FISMA certified.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/02/20100 comments
Amazon Web Services is on longer hosting WikiLeaks -- the 250,000-plus classified State Department documents and cables that include disclosures about the nuclear ambitions of Iran, candid comments from world leaders and numerous other revelations of confidential matters. The United States government has condemned the Wikileaks release saying it is putting lives at risk and compromising national security.
There's a lot of debate in the blogsphere as to whether Amazon yielded to political pressure and engaged in censorship by deciding yesterday to remove the documents from its site. Senator Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., while praising Amazon for removing the documents, slammed the company for hosting them in the first place. Perhaps he's unaware that anyone with a credit card can host content or applications to Amazon and other cloud services.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/02/20100 comments
Late last month Microsoft fleshed out its Windows Azure Platform with a roadmap of new capabilities and features that the company will roll out over the coming year.
Microsoft late last month fleshed out its Windows Azure Platform with a roadmap of new capabilities and features that the company will roll out over the coming year.
The improvements to Microsoft's cloud computing platform, revealed at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) held in Redmond and streamed online, are substantial and underscore the company's ambitions to ensure the Windows Azure Platform ultimately achieves a wider footprint in enterprise IT.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/15/20101 comments
Amazon Web Services recently cut the price of its cloud storage service by as much as 19 percent.
The cuts affect users of the company's S3 storage service utilizing 500 Terabytes of capacity or less. The announcement was made by Jeff Barr, Amazon's Web services evangelist in a blog post.
AWS established a new pricing tier at the 1 TByte level and removed the 50 to 100 TByte level, according to Barr, "thereby extending our volume discounts to more Amazon S3 customers," he noted. The new pricing is as follows:
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/09/20101 comments
When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in March announced that the company was "all-in" the cloud, it was a defining moment not just for Microsoft but for the entire IT industry.
That the software giant said the cloud will embody everything the company does was the clearest sign yet that there is no stopping the transformation in the way software is bought and sold.
Others such as Dell (which just announced it is buying Boomi), Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and VMware are also steering their ships in the direction of cloud computing initiatives. Of course for the likes of Amazon, Google, Rackspace and Salesforce.com, among others, the cloud already is the basis of their existence.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/01/20100 comments