AWS has been authorized to operate under FedRAMP(U.S. government-wide general security standard) since May of 2013. Under FedRAMP, AWS has already made contracts with U.S. Military, Air-force & Navy. With the recent authorization from United States Defence Department’s cloud security standards, AWS can work with all agencies within the U.S Defence Department from now on. It’s like a new feather added to the AWS hat! Teresa Carlson, AWS’s vice president for the public sector, said the new certification could mean more than just new Defence Department business. This would let AWS work with more defence agencies to host several sensitive projects.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/amazon-web-services-gets-defense-security-authorization/2014/03/28/7959ad8a-b500-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html

Long ago, Google has integrated Hadoop on its cloud platform to provide customers a framework for storing and processing large amount of data. Earlier, the only way to get in and out of Hadoop on Cloud Platform was through Google’s Cloud Storage service. In order to run Hadoop on data within its “BigQuery SQL” and “Cloud Datastore NoSQL” databases, recently Google has launched connectors for both of these two products, complementing the existing Cloud Storage implementation.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/16/googles-cloud-platform-gets-improved-hadoop-support-with-bigquery-and-cloud-datastore-connectors/

A recent research on 1000 Information Technology executives and decision maker respondents by the cloud services company EvolveIP™ revealed that 84% of organizations that do not currently deploy Unified Communication features, are planning for, or considering the services, for their business in the next one to three years.For the study, Evolve IP defined UC as: "The concept of consolidating phone, email, fax, chat, video, and collaboration into a single unified channel, either on a device or on a computer”. The survey also examined UC components and uncovered that the most requested UC features are:

1. Audio & Web Conferencing (51%).
2. Unified Messaging (46%).
3.  IM&P Instant Messaging and Presence (40%).

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/84-of-organizations-considering-unified-communications-uc-in-the-near-future-253461811.html

Red Hat aims to reduce the search time &solution search cost for customers with its OpenShift Marketplace. Customers will be able to easily find the information, tools and community they need to discover and procure the right solution. They will be able to securely access and manage leading OpenShift application technologies from a single location. Customers and developers will be able to easily search for third-party OpenShift solutions and add-on productivity offerings, including database, email delivery services, messaging queues, application performance monitoring, all managed from a central location.As more developers use enterprise PaaS for an increasing array of applications, a key to their success is a vibrant and robust partner ecosystem. OpenShift’s current partner ecosystem uses the OpenShift Cartridge specification method to link key technologies and services into applications built on OpenShift, giving customers access to a variety of offerings from cloud industry leaders.Will Shulman, CEO and co-founder, MongoLab, said "We're extremely excited to offer fully-managed MongoDB through the OpenShift Marketplace. Red Hat users will be able to quickly integrate MongoDB into their application and focus on product development instead of operations."

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/141770/

Since its debut a year ago, Red Hat flagship application container Docker has generated much interest among technology professionals. It assists in packaging of applications in a virtual container so that it can be run across different Linux distributions. Docker containers can be easily moved across different Linux servers without the need for reconfiguration.Red hat is planning to release a variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution that is customized to run Docker with maximum efficiency. It has also initiated two community projects to help Docker make better use of new technologies in the Linux kernel and ecosystem.  One- Project Atomic, will concentrate on simplifying maintenance, reducing the footprint, adding additional layers of verification and control to Docker containers. The second community project, called GearD, will integrate Docker into its PaaS hosting software, OpenShift Origin.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.techworld.com.au/article/543014/red_hat_adds_muscle_docker_container_technology/

For many enterprises, the most recognizable model of cloud computing is the public cloud model, which provides ultimate scalability, flexibility, location independent access and is of course cost effective. But workload evaluation is important before an organization moves to the public cloud. There can be situations wherepublic cloud such as AWS costs may far exceed on-premise infrastructure costs. According to research firm Gartner, the evaluation every organization must undergo before moving into a public cloud consists of taking into account few major things. These are: number of machines an organization will run, number of hours per day or per week they'll run and the amount of storage these machines will generate. The evaluation should also include the licenses that need to be paid for on a recurring basis; how many times and how often snapshots occur; the rate of change in the data; and how much new data they are going to generate. Mike Ryan, consultant, Epitech, said that “You're paying for the elasticity of Amazon, and if you're not using that, it makes sense to bring things into your own data centre”. The scaling flexibility of public cloud is great during the growth phase, but which solution is the best from an enterprise long term perspective?

Beth Pariseau, senior news writer, SearchAWS, wrote about this aspect on her recent article. To know more, visit the following link:

http://searchaws.techtarget.com/news/2240219066/Enterprises-hit-tipping-point-in-AWS-cloud-vs-private-cloud-costs

Kinesis is a service related to real-time processing of streaming data. It buffers data into a storage system with checkpoints to absorb the data into the Redshift cloud data warehouse. Users can store and process large datasets each hour from various sources like financial transactions, social media feeds, location-tracked events etc. With Kinesis, business customers can write applications, generate alerts, and make other decisions virtually apart from retrieving the stored data back instantly. According to Amazon, Kinesis can support applications and data streams of any size while replicating across multiple availability zones. Kinesis has been positioned as an answer to big data, with a “pay-as-you-go” pricing.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/kinesis-amazon-web-servicess-answer-to-big-data-7000023223/

During 2013 December, Amazon launched Kinesis. It is a service for real-time processing of streaming data. Kinesis is designed to capture small records, which in turn forms huge amount of backend data. Amazon wanted to be able to capture all of that data, aggregate it, and put it into its AWS cloud storage service (S3), so that they could look at it at a later stage. Waite, General Manager of Data Services, AWS, said “This enables us to scale the metering service to new limits and give alerts in real time”.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/20/why-amazon-created-aws-kinesis-its-live-data-processing-service/

According to a recent research report “Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet” by Greenpeace, most of the enterprise cloud service providers are powering their services with renewable energy sources. However, the cloud giant AWS received lowest grades on energy transparency, renewable energy commitments, energy efficiency initiatives, deployment and advocacy in the report. AWS, which has more than 50 % of market share over the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market in North America and Europe, seems to be lagging behind other major cloud providers in terms of its use of green energy sources to power its data centres. According to the report, AWS “remains among the dirtiest and least transparent companies in the sector, far behind its major competitors, with zero reporting of its energy or environmental footprint to any source or stakeholder.”

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2014/04/14/aws-increasingly-isolated-as-least-green-cloud/

A recent report by Rightscale revealed details about pricing changes by IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) vendors.Cloud Service Providers AWS, Rackspace, Google and Microsoft's Azure cut prices for computing services, storage solutions and networking 25 times in 2013, up from 22 times in 2012. According to Rightscale, cloud infrastructure prices continue to fall, especially for computing services and storage solutions. AWS leads the pack in price cuts and Microsoft's Azure is reacting most to these price cuts made by AWS.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/infrastructure-as-a-service-price-cuts-accelerate-7000027581/

During 2006, Amazon Web Services started operations with 24 separate divisions. Today it has 654 operating units! Such breakthrough growth comes with bigger issues to deal, bigger problems to face. But Amazon had all the answers to grow beyond imagination. Today, Amazon is looking beyond running processor intensive applications in the cloud. The focus is now on the desktop.  In March it unveiled “AmazonWorkSpace”, a fully managed desktop computing service in the cloud. It had been running “WorkSpace” as a Beta version with some customers since November last year. It can run in such a way that an employee or a customer can log in and out of a system and use it exactly as if it was one of the company's own systems without realizing that it is running in the Amazon cloud. From an organization’s point of view, outsourcing of their day-to-day system uptime issues to a third party is going to be a big advantage.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-web-services-eyes-the-desktop-next-7000027692/

Amazon Simple Email Service is a cost effective outbound email sending service built on the reliable and scalable infrastructure that Amazon.com has developed to serve its own customer base. With Amazon SES, it is possible to send transactional emails, marketing messages, or any other type of high-quality content. Amazon offers “pay as you go” plan flexibility. Along with high deliverability, Amazon SES provides easy, real-time access to statistics and built-in notifications for bounces and complaints to help fine-tuning email-sending strategy. Each AWS account is independent in its sending procedure and can be treated as a separate entity. SES is structured around this idea. But there can be situations compelling to send contents from multiple AWS accounts.

Sam Minter, Expert, AWS, speaks about how to send contents successfully with SES through multiple AWS accounts. To read more, visit:

https://sesblog.amazon.com/post/Tx1KQ7HH36OTFW7/Can-I-use-multiple-AWS-Accounts-with-SES

It is evident that Amazon Web Services trades at a discount relative to other cloud companies despite higher sales growth.Should infrastructure as a service (IaaS) players like AWS always opt for discounting option as like application-based peers?That argument was floated by Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein, who raised his price target for Amazon shares based on a few moving parts.

To read more, visit Larry Dignan‘s article by clicking on the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-web-services-whats-it-worth-7000027433/

Amazon web services is designing tools to help users track cloud usage & spending pattern in a much easier way. Cloud tracking ability is the new front in the feature competition among cloud services. In addition to the just-launched Cost Explorer by Amazon Web Services, for example, Google unveiled a beta version of Cloud Pricing Calculator in February to estimate costs and needs for computing power, storage, memory or other resources. According to Parmita Mehta, technical program manager at AWS, there were several things the first release focused on. One is simplicity, so that sign-up can be accomplished with a single click, and the tool runs in the browser. She said, “Cost Explorer shows you your current month's spend and automatically pre-populates your last 4 months of AWS spend so you can visualize your AWS costs, and start analyzing trends and spending patterns”.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=023002KGT582

Mark Russinovich, Member, Microsoft Azure team, said he sees PaaS as “writing code that is integrated with a runtime environment, as opposed to code that is dropped into a virtual machine that's sitting on a bare-metal server, a legacy kind of server. That is the key differentiator point. The software knows something about the environment it is running in”. In a panel on "The Future of PaaS in an IaaS World" at Cloud Connect Summit, with a high level of disagreements among panel members, much has been revealed about PaaS.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/what-is-platform-as-a-service-experts-disagree/d/d-id/1141665

As industry experts suggest, PaaS solutions can make things easier and accelerate the drive towards business goals. It leads to the question that why they are not as popular as IaaS and SaaS? One has to explore the history of PaaS solutions to get the answer! PaaS, unlike IaaS and SaaS, is still relatively new and simply does not yet have the share of mind that other cloud technologies enjoy. It is also a fact that some initial PaaS offerings did not quite hit the mark, as they were too narrowly focused and not able to offer everything what organizations may have needed. PaaS solutions, particularly those developed within the open-source community, are highly modular and flexible while remaining very secure. This gives organizations the option to plug and play as necessary. PaaS solutions allow for simplified, yet powerful development, but this is where things can get a bit tricky. Too much flexibility could impede accelerated development, which is counterproductive.

Gordon Haff, from Cloud Product Strategy team, Red Hat, reveals more about PaaS in his recent article. To read, visit the following link:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/27/why-your-company-shouldnt-pass-on-paas-to-develop-new-apps/

The CloudMapper VMS application can be deployed with an Amazon Web Services AMI, on-premises or in a hybrid environment. This application can monitor 337 health metrics on AWS. Most enterprises use AWS in some way, but faced trouble capturing the cloud service's various metrics. With AWS rolling out new services and features rapidly, monitoring became more complicated. With a proper mechanism to address this issue, it took 2 long years to launch the visual monitoring system- CloudMapper.

According to the developer ScienceLogic, CloudMapper can be used for:

·         Spot expensive AWS resources;

·         Aligning security policies with virtual private clouds;

·         Uptime; 

·         Selecting the best zone to use;

·         Visibility into AWS.

To read more, visit

http://www.zdnet.com/sciencelogic-launches-cloudmapper-tracks-aws-performance-costs-7000027935/

Unified communications platforms can be seen not necessarily as end points, but as beginning points for intrusion. It is a growing concern for organizations today. According to Kevin Riley, chief technology officer, Sonus Networks, as landscape architecture surrounds Unified Communication systems, emphasizing more on security is needed. A recent survey by the CIO Playbook reveals that 31% of organizations considered security and privacy issues to be a key challenge while implementing unified communication system. This concern is because integrating platforms requires opening up ports to enable the flow of data, which means additional unwanted traffic is able to flow freely. However, organizations can take precautions, like installing session border controllers (SBCs) to close ports that are not required and protect their networks from dangerous traffic.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/feature/Striving-for-secure-unified-communications

Few years ago, Internet marketing in India would have meant designing On-Premise solutions for activities such as CRM or ERP. Products and tools from global software vendors were available, but integration and customization often meant huge expenditure. Today, with the SaaS delivery model, software and related data are centrally hosted on the cloud and can be accessed through a Web browser, resulting in better operations with significantly less expenditure. Migrating to a SaaS model makes sense for an e-commerce company, but it is also relevant for a company which deals in the age-old business like auto loans. A principal reason for such industry-wide demand of SaaS is its ability to make decisions faster. Sunil Padmanabhan, research director for Gartner in India had said recently that "SaaS is extremely real in India and there is a large critical mass in adoption”.

To read more, visit reputed journalist Rajiv Rao’s article by clicking on the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/in/reaching-for-the-cloud-indias-saas-journey-7000023820/

Private banking in Asia-Pacific is a dynamic and evolving market with regional variations in regulations and requirements. As wealth management continues to grow with more opportunities in the mass affluent market, private banks will need to rely on technology to handle the increased volume. In addition, private banks are also dedicating more resources and budget on technology solutions to support and ensure compliance with regulation changes. While there is potential for the convergence of private banking and asset management, it is still important that the technology platform can deliver a personalised client experience as wealth management is still predominantly a relationship-based business, especially so in Asia-Pacific.

Together with panellists from Bank Julius Baer and Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management, investment management solution provider Charles River has drawn some key conclusions about the industry in the Asia-Pacific region during Private Banking Asia 2014 event, held on March 19th and 20th in Singapore. To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140410005052/en/Charles-River-Discusses-Increasing-Role-Technology-Wealth#.U0dzt1VgXgw