Most financial services companies officially forbid the use of public cloud (aka Amazon Web Services) completely. But the forward thinkers among them — like State Street — keep their options — and minds — open about such deployment in the future. Read more »
Life is hard enough for the modern CIO, with BYOD taking over personal computing and cloud challenges making life more complicated. But there are plenty of benefits that accompany this shift, according to panelists at Structure Europe. Read more »
High-performance web applications are often hamstrung by sluggish IO. Amazon is now attacking that problem with new Provisioned IOPS block storage volumes and the ability to direct-connect those volumes to select EC2 compute instances over a 1000 Mbit/sec pipe. Read more »
At this stage, most companies know some of the benefits of cloud computing. But many still aren’t sure what applications and data should make the trip first. That’s why Rackspace and other cloud providers are providing more consultative services and lining up systems integrators. Read more »
A new flock of vendors is offering capabilities that would enable private-to-public cloud bursting, or federation between clouds, to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Joe Coyle, CTO of global integrator Capgemini, sees a lot of cloud pitches from all the major technology vendors — and God knows they all have a cloud strategy. Here’s what he thinks of the current state of the market. Read more »
Security concerns are always cited as the primary inhibitor to wider cloud adoption by businesses, but Capgemini CTO Joe Coyle says the security model for the cloud is already here and working just fine, thank you very much. Read more »
Is the greentech industry headed for a breakout year or is it retrenching for hard times to come? The first three months of 2011 provided evidence that could support both assertions, with a big rise in venture capital investment and a big drop-off in global energy financing. Solar power remained the largest green technology sector in terms of venture capital investment, while in the world of electric vehicles, GM’s Chevy Volt hybrid and Nissan’s all-electric Leaf — the first two mainstream plug-in vehicles — hit the showroom floors in significant numbers. Meanwhile the smart grid sector’s relative dearth of VC investment was more than made up for by the massive round of acquisitions. Companies mentioned in this report include NRG Energy, Microsoft, Silver Spring Networks, Tesla and BrightSource Energy. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Adding digital intelligence to the power grid is a complex and unfamiliar task for utilities, and they’re going to need a lot of hand holding. That’s going to drive the “smart grid managed services” market to more than $4.3 billion in global revenue by 2015. Read more »
