Dave:  Don’t look now, but AWS might be a billion-dollar biz

Pitz and Fitzgerald projected AWS would account for $751 million of a total $1.2 billion for “Other” in 2011. However, this quarter’s 70 percent year-over-year increase resulted in third-quarter revenue of $407 million, bringing total “Other” revenue to $1.07 billion for the year thus far. If it grows by another 70 percent in the fourth quarter, “Other” will do $546 million for the quarter and almost $1.6 billion for 2011. If UBS’s percentages of AWS revenue to total “Other” revenue are correct, AWS might hit the billion-dollar mark this year. Last year, by comparison, “Other” grew 48 percent year over year in the third quarter, and 39 percent in the fourth quarter. Even if it doesn’t grow at all year over year in the fourth quarter, though, it will hit more than $1.3 billion for the year. In-Stat recently predictedthat Infrastructure as a Service will be a $4 billion market by 2015, but that might end up being too small a number if AWS continues its rapid revenue climb. The UBS projections, which now look low, have AWS doing close to $2.54 billion in 2014.

Bill: Cloud computing will turn IT workforce into on-tap resource

Commissioned by Dell and Intel, "The Evolving Workforce Report" (part one of a series) aims to identify and explore future trends and themes pertaining to the workplace and workforce, honing in on the role technology plays. As part of that trend -- what the report refers to as "crowdsource services" -- full-time IT departments will be supplemented or replaced by far-flung contract freelancers or teams that are thrown piecemeal projects on-the-fly in JIT (just in time) fashion.

What's more, the traditional nine-to-five schedule with employees working in at computers on their desks, in primarily siloed fashion, will continue to fade away. Instead, workers will have more flexible schedules and able to do their tasks via any number of computing devices at all hours of the day. Employee performance will gauged by output instead of hours logged.

Chris:  Researchers demo cloud security issue with Amazon AWS hijacking attack

Researchers from the Horst Goertz Institute (HGI) of the Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) in Germany have demonstrated an account hijacking attack against Amazon Web Services (AWS) that they believe affects other cloud computing products as well.

The attack uses a technique, known at XML signature wrapping or XML rewriting, that has been known since 2005 and exploits a weakness in the way Web services validate signed requests.

The flaw is located in the WS-Security (Web Services Security) protocol and enables attackers to trick servers into authorizing digitally signed SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) messages that have been altered.

David: Oracle buys RightNow for roughly $1.5 billion

Chris: IDC: Cloud computing ‘key driver’ of storage growth

• According to IDC
• Cloud computing will ensure growth in the storage sector for the next five years
• increased investment in private cloud infrastructure and the growing volumes needed by public cloud providers would lead to combined storage spending of $22.6 billion by 2015
• Public cloud storage growth = 23.6% while private cloud storage growth = 28.9%
• SaaS is the big driver, online apps store video, pics, and music
• Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems at IDC:
• "The challenge facing the storage industry will be to balance public cloud service providers' demand for low-cost hardware while boosting demand for advanced software solutions in areas such as object-based storage, automated data tiering, big data processing and advanced archiving services,"
• big data [is] “perhaps the most critical marketplace” for storage vendors for the next ten years, so they must put these technologies as a “high priority.”

• Five requirements for storage:
• Enabling more efficient delivery of information/applications to Internet-based customers

• Reducing upfront infrastructure investment levels (i.e., cutting the cost and time associated with deploying new IT and compute infrastructure)

• Minimizing internal IT infrastructure investment associated with "bursty" or unpredictable workloads

• Lowering and/or distributing the ongoing costs associated with long-term archiving of information

• Enabling near-continuous, real-time analysis of large volumes and wide varieties of customer-, partner-, and machine-generated data (Big Data)
• Chris take
• Data in those applications is coming from where?  From storage systems that are currenlty owned by the corporations that own the applications - so IDC is making a statement about out with the old and in with the new.
• My question - is this highly scalable low cost hardware going to balance out to the same industry in 5 years or is this just a cloud stimulus effect that will result in a more centralized environment with lower margins?

Dave: Gartner: Private clouds are a last resort

Dave: A problem with the cloud you never considered

Oversharing is already epidemic. But with iCloud, sharing by default could ruin everything

Bill: IT departments worldwide aren't ready for the cloud, survey finds

Are information technology departments worldwide ready for the cloud?

Despite a high level of interest in cloud computing, IT staffs within organizations say they simply are not ready for it, according to Symantec’s 2011 State of the Cloud Survey.

Less than 25 percent of the survey’s respondents say their IT employees have cloud experience and half of the respondents rated themselves as less than somewhat prepared.

As a result, most organizations are currently turning to outside resources for help. For instance, when deploying hybrid infrastructure or platform-as-a-service, about three in four respondents said they are turning to value added resellers (VARs), independent consultants, vendor professional services organizations or systems integrators.

Dave: Google Introduces Cloud Database

Google has launched a new service to make its cloud computing platform more appealing to businesses. The company on Thursday introduced a limited preview of Google Cloud SQL, a scalable, hosted MySQL database environment.

Navneet Joneja, product manager for Google Cloud SQL, says that one of the most frequent requests from Google App Engine users has been for an easy way to develop traditional database-driven applications. Using App Engine, Google's platform-as-a-service offering, in conjunction with Cloud SQL allows developers to avoid the burden of database management, maintenance, and administration.

Dave: Cloud Computing: Compliance Challenges

Too many organizations overlook regulatory compliance issues when working with cloud computing vendors, says security expert Alastair MacWillson.

When relying on cloud computing partners, many organizations tend to overlook the responsibilities they bear for ensuring ongoing compliance with mandates such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better known as HIPAA, says MacWillson of Accenture Technology Consulting.

Bill: Red Hat buys cloud storage vendor Gluster

Red Hat is acquiring privately owned storage vendor Gluster for approximately $136 million in cash to boost its cloud offerings, it said on Tuesday.

The combination of cloud computing and the explosion of unstructured data are forcing enterprises to find new ways to handle storage demands, and the acquisition of Gluster will allow Red Hat to address these challenges, according to Red Hat.

Gluster's software-only storage system lets enterprises combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute resources into a centrally managed and globally accessible storage pool, Red Hat said. Gluster's software also allows enterprises to move storage on to a public or a private cloud, or a mixture of the two, which are called hybrid cloud environments, according to its own website.

Dave: Ellison unveils new cloud, trashes Salesforce.com

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Wednesday unveiled a public cloud service that will run its Fusion Applications and others, and while doing so delivered a withering broadside against competitors, with his harshest words for Salesforce.com.

"Our cloud's a little bit different. It's both platform as a service and applications as a service," he said during a keynote address at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, which was webcast. "The key part is that our cloud is based on industry standards and supports full interoperability with other clouds. Just because you go to the cloud doesn't mean you forget everything about information technology from the past 20 years."

In contrast, Salesforce.com's Force.com platform is the "roach motel" of cloud services, amounting to "the ultimate vendor lock-in" due to its use of custom programming languages like Apex. In contrast, the Oracle Public Cloud uses Java, SQL, XML, and other standards, Ellison said.

Dave: Quake-prone Japanese area implements cloud-based disaster system

A coastal region of Japan due for a major earthquake and possible tsunamis has implemented a cloud-based disaster management system run by Salesforce.com.

Shizuoka Prefecture, on Japan's eastern coast in the central region of the country, lies curled around an undersea trough formed by the junction of two tectonic plates. It has been rocked by repeated large temblors in past centuries, collectively called "Tokai earthquakes," and the central government has warned that with underground stresses high another is imminent.

The local prefectural government began to build a new disaster management system last year, the initial version of which went live in July. It is based on Salesforce.com's platform-as-a-service offering, Force.com, which hosts hundreds of thousands of applications.

Dave: Cloud sprawl still a concern for IT directors

A new study by cloud monitoring provider, Opsview, has revealed that over two-thirds of UK organisations are still concerned about the growing threat of cloud sprawl. The issue is one that can derive in large-scale organisations, when employees deploy cloud computing-based applications without the involvement of their IT department.

Having previously been highlighted in June by fellow tech providers Avanade, Opsview’s latest survey gives a clear indication of why cloud computing is deemed so disruptive among global corporations.

Bill: Cloud computing rewrites rules for network managers

THE proliferation of cloud computing and web-based applications in the corporate environment has rewritten the ground rules of enterprise network security.                                                               
Businesses have cut costs and increased efficiency by using cloud computing, such as web-based applications that replace traditional desktop functions, and services that power operations and infrastructure.

However, by extending functions beyond the reach of the traditional network defences, organisations have exposed themselves to a new realm of security vulnerabilities.
Experts warn that applications can be outsourced, but not risk.
Further, the shift emphasises the importance of enterprises regularly auditing network and security assets.