64% of IT experts feel that cloud security is a very secure place to work but 10% also think that it is not secure at all. Whereas in the recent data breaches, it is observed that it took place because of human mistakes and that cloud was not responsible for it. The latest advancements in the cloud technology like Basic6, Box View, AWS, etc. have made sure cloud is efficient for business operations. Only with the increase in cloud users and business efficiency, the security of the cloud can improve. Read more at: 

https://www.computer.org/web/computingnow/cloud/content?g=53319&type=article&urlTitle=is-cloud-security-a-safe-bet-for-your-data

Decisions on cloud use and spending involves various business units like engineering team, operations, finance etc. Key to cost cloud cost management is to make all the teams accountable for cloud expenditure. This can be done by putting data in hands of people, enacting policies and evangelizing best practices and finally incentivizing good spending behavior and habits. Michelle Boisvert, executive site editor for searchAWS.com in an article talks about cost conscious culture for managing AWS costs. She further talks about the 5 stages of cost management:
• Create visibility into cloud costs.
• Focus on allocating costs so you know who is responsible for what in the AWS bill.
• Promote efficient behavior to drive down the AWS bill.
• Implement cost saving methods
• Focus on unit cost, not overall cost to understand savings.
For more on this follow the link:  http://searchaws.techtarget.com/news/4500249787/AWS-cloud-cost-management-The-buck-stops-with-you?utm_medium=EM&asrc=EM_NLN_45439492&utm_campaign=20150720_NoSQL%20cloud%20database%20service%20targets%20developers_msargent&utm_source=NLN&track=NL-1839&src=901868

Cloud Analytics is one application that is growing very fast and will accelerate in the coming decade. According to Ashutosh Kulkarni (Sr. Vice President and General Manager, Informatica Cloud), scalability, affordable price, simplicity to offer domain specific and user-specific capabilities make cloud analytics unbeatable. The scalability of Hadoop, and the emergence of highly elastic cloud analytic services like AWS, EMR and Redshift, Microsoft Azure, and Salesforce Wave Analytics, has helped in moving IT infrastructure to the cloud and cloud integration Platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) is designed to support the scalability, reliability and security of cloud analytics. Read more at: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2924846/data-analytics/the-future-of-cloud-analytics-is-now.html

 Amazon CloudWatch Logs is a service that  helps us to watch, accumulate, and access our system, application, and practice log files from Amazon EC2 instances. e.g., we can monitor request logs for specific literal terms  or calculate the number of occurrences of a literal term at a particular location in log data (such as "404" status codes in an Apache access log). When the term we are penetrating for is found, CloudWatch Logs reports the data to an Amazon CloudWatch metric that we specify. We can then recover the linked log data from CloudWatch Logs if, for example, the count of "NullReferenceExceptions" exceeds its normal range. Following are the steps to arrange Amazon CloudWatch Logs with AWS OpsWorks. Step 1: Create Recipes. Step 2: Extend the AWS IAM Role.Step 3: Create an OpsWorks Stack. Step 4: Add a Layer. Step 5: Add an Instance. Step 6: View your Logs. Read more at: 

http://blogs.aws.amazon.com/application-management/post/TxTX72HFKVS9W9/Using-Amazon-CloudWatch-Logs-with-AWS-OpsWorks

Recently Amazon Web Services (AWS) is in the news for reducing its cloud services prices by up to forty percent and turning into a strong competitor overnight against Google and Microsoft offering similar services. The cost reduction has resulted in an intensive price war where the price has touched a rock bottom level.

The price reduction is in line with reducing waste at every opportunity as mastered by Andy Jassy, senior VP of AWS. The price reduction policy has made public cloud space very much competitive, but the other side of the coin is that the place has become jam packed too.

So, how can AWS afford to cut its prices and offer a stiff competition? Brett Winterford and Steven Kiernan from CRN write about them here: http://www.crn.com.au/News/382683,four-secrets-of-awss-low-prices.aspx .