Cloud Computing on Ulitzer

LONDON, February 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Award-winning British cloud provider, Memset®, today awarded a Framework Agreement for the provision of G-Cloud Services, says large system integrators are starting to loose their hold on government contracts as the G-Cloud partners are announced. One of the visions of G-Cloud is for 25% of contracts to be awarded to SMEs. Memset are delighted to see that the government appear to be trying to make good on their 25% promise, with a significant amount of SMEs named in the approved list announced by the cabinet office today. Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset said: "G-Cloud has the potential to be enormously disruptive. It heralds the breaking of large systems integrators' strangle-hold over government ICT.  In my view as tax-paying technology expert their consultancy-lead, bridge-building approach has historically delivered remark... (more)

Start-Up Encrypts Data in the Cloud

A Tel Aviv start-up called Porticor that's just hit the radar says it's got a way to secure the cloud, any cloud. Fancy that, a trustworthy cloud. And Porticor delivers its data encryption solution to IaaS and PaaS users through the cloud in minutes. Fancy that. It's supposed to solve the biggest challenge for data encryption in the cloud - storing keys. It promises that a user's data encryption key will never be exposed and that it can deliver data security across virtual disks, databases, distributed storage and file systems. All this wonderfulness, called the Porticor Virtual ... (more)

Large System Integrators Losing Their Hold on Government Contracts as G-Cloud Partners are Announced

LONDON, February 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- - SMEs like Memset Lined Up To Bring Benefits Of Cloud To Public Sector - Award-winning British cloud provider, Memset®, today awarded a Framework Agreement for the provision of G-Cloud Services, says large system integrators are starting to loose their hold on government contracts as the G-Cloud partners are announced. One of the visions of G-Cloud is for 25% of contracts to be awarded to SMEs. Memset are delighted to see that the government appear to be trying to make good on their 25% promise, with a significant amount of SMEs named in ... (more)

Cloud Is "Open" For Business: The Debate Begins

CloudScale's re-launch this week as an "open cloud" company, coupled with an announcement of an Open Cloud Alliance by giants Atos, EMC, and VMware has ignited a new controversy and debate. A previous spate of "cloudwashing" allegations are now joined by cries of "open washing" and discussion of whether there is even such a thing as "open cloud." Arguments, counter-arguments, rebuttals, and counter-rebuttals all have detailed points of contention, which I'll be studying in more detail over this long week-end. If nothing else, the new open-cloud discussion may move the public v p... (more)

Microsoft Slashes Price of Its Cloud Database

As a result, it said, of "customer feedback and evolving usage patterns," Microsoft cut the price of its cloud-ified SQL Azure database 48%-75% for databases larger than 1GB and introduced a new entry-level 100MB model. It blogged that it's noticed that many projects start small but need to grow quickly so now as the user's database grows the price per GB will decline significantly. It also said that many cloud adopters and customers with smaller workloads want an inexpensive option so that's where the 100MB option comes from. Amazon may have made them do it. GB Previous Pricing... (more)