Dave:  Google, Microsoft, Intel, Verizon among new cloud security registry members

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Bill: Amazon Web Services adds supercomputing service to its cloud

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Chris: Red Hat adds app lifecycle tools to PaaS preview

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Dave:  Cloud Expo Roundup

    Focus on Data
    Focus on Implementation
    Many New Products
    Cloud Success Beginning to Show

Bill: Sloppy use of Amazon cloud can expose users to hacking

Using Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) can pose a security threat to organizations and individuals alike, though Amazon's not to blame, according to researchers from Eurecom, Northeastern University, and SecludIT. Rather, third parties evidently are not following best security practices when using preconfigured virtual machine images available in Amazon's public catalog, leaving users and providers open to such risks as unauthorized access, malware infections, and data loss.

Chris: Virtual machine cloud replication and restoration to boom

By 2014, almost one in three midsize businesses will be using a recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) with the ability to backup and restore virtual machines (VMs), according to Gartner.
Gartner predicted that 30 percent of companies will use RaaS over the next few years, with the market being driven, for now, by midsize companies. The research firm defines those as having annual revenues between $150 million and $1 billion.

Today, just over 1 percent of midsize businesses use RaaS as part it their operations. The service, which allows the managed replication of VMs to a service-provider's cloud, can eliminate the need to pay as much as $100,000 a year as part of an in-house disaster recovery budget, Gartner said.

Dave:  7 ways to do big data right using the cloud

Because businesses increasingly want to capitalize on information they don't own -- for example, a financial services firm going beyond its transactional data to analyze social data to better understand what customers like and don't like -- DaaS is likely to thrive.

How should IT and business users prepare for DaaS? Here are some recommendations from consultants and other experts.

1. Create a "data mind-set"
2. Don't neglect infras tructure
3. Try before you buy, check references, and insist on SLAs
4. Build a strong governance mechanism
5. Emphasize data quality
6. Ramp up your analytics skills
7. Know when to use DaaS and how to measure results

Bill: Cloudability tracks cloud spending

Imagine plopping down your credit card to turn on compute services late at night when there's no time to get permission from your boss and then getting distracted before the weekend on another work emergency. On Monday, when you remember you signed up for the services, which you intended to use for just a short time, you discover you've racked up $5,000 in charges on your personal card.

Developers can use Cloudability, launching Wednesday in an open beta, to track all of their cloud services from one place and to sign up for alarms when they reach spending thresholds. The service also points out unused or underused services, specifying exactly how much money a user can spend by turning off the services.

Chris:  Introducing the 5-watt server that runs on cell phone chips

Can ARM wrestle its way into the server market? Calxeda and Hewlett-Packard think so. On Tuesday Calxeda launched its EnergyCore ARM server-on-a-chip (SoC), which it says consumes as little as 1.5 watts (and idles at half a watt). And HP, the world’s largest server maker, committed to building EnergyCore-based servers that will consume as little as 5 watts when running all out. Compare that to the lowest-power x86 server chips from Intel, which consume about 20 watts but deliver higher performance.

Richard Fichera, the VP and an analyst at Forrester Research, said Calxeda did its homework. “This looks to be at least three to five times more energy efficient than other chips and [energy use] is a growing concern for data centers.” Some of what Calxeda has done will be hard for competitors to replicate, he said.