ReadWriteCloud

The French-based company Cedexis has come up with a Cloud Performance Index. It's an interesting way to measure the performance of your content delivery network or cloud-based provider, and a useful way to determine which provider you should use - or even which part of the planet you should locate your apps. Every day on its website, Cedexis will publish new country-by-country performance reports on various IT providers. The info is collected via a Javascript tag on its customers' sites. The tag is counted only if the entire page has loaded.

Skytap, a cloud service provider that claims to have more than a million hosted VMs in its cloud, today announced three new improvements to its service that will ease testing and operating collections of new virtual machines (VMs). The three features include better remote access, customizable usage reports and a new burstable rate for heavy traffic conditions.

Cloud synchronization vendor Druva announced today a new version 5.0 of its InSync software that provides a wide array of features, including the ability to remotely wipe a smartphone or tablet, geolocate and track the device, and encrypt data, too. From a single on-premises or cloud portal, IT personnel can view and manage backup, data access and data loss prevention, as well as allocate bandwidth and monitor device security, for all of the user's laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Most people think of Autodesk as the maker of AutoCAD, the design software of choice for architects, engineers and other design professionals - typically running on high-powered workstations. So why is Autodesk CEO Carl Bass so hung up on the "democratization" of technology - spreading technology to the cloud computing platforms and mobile devices?

At the company's media summit in San Francisco this morning, Bass told a crowd of journalists, analysts and customers gathered in the company's slick design gallery (see pictures below) that the combination of mobile devices, cloud computing and social collaboration is more profound than the shift to PCs.

If you are interested in Big Data you might want to keep your calendar open in late April for some interesting meetups. Every day starting with Monday April 23 will have at least one meeting going on in cities around the world on various Big Data topics including data science, data visualization and specific software development tool-related user groups around data-related businesses. There are activities scheduled in New York and San Francisco as well as Sydney Australia and London. And they have a cool logo, too.

Small businesses are learning how to leverage the power of cloud computing, and loving it. With the decreasing costs of cloud computing, and its rising capabilities, it's no wonder business owners are flocking to this new software. However, some businesses are still skeptical about integrating cloud computing, due to uncertainties in privacy and data protection. This is especially true If you're considering supporting a widespread field service population that crosses geographic boundaries. Do you know the various privacy and data security laws for Germany, for example?

Well, you could hire a bunch of lawyers, but you could also check out our infographic that summarizes the best and worst places to have a cloud-based business.

Google announced today that it's dropping its pricing on Google Cloud Storage and its integration with several enterprise storage offerings. Google's updated pricing scheme puts it roughly in line with Amazon's S3, but what else does Google have to offer except a new pricing scheme?

I spoke to Google's product manager for Cloud Storage, Navneet Joneja on Monday about the pricing change and how Google stands out in storage.

He is as great a contributor to the concept of cloud computing as any individual alive today. Today, Chris Kemp, the co-architect of the pioneering NASA Nebula project - the first to encapsulate a cloud server into a shipping crate - told a meeting of the Cloud Security Alliance Monday morning at the RSA Conference in San Francisco that OpenStack is, and will continue to be, designed to support other security architectures, but not to serve as one itself.

"OpenStack was really designed around common, open source technologies," Kemp told an overflow session, "so that if you have familiarity with securing these underlying technologies, you're going to have a fairly easy time writing security plans and implementing security and controls and monitoring around these technologies."

Has your business already begun its cloud migration... and you were the last to know about it? In a nationwide role-playing event this afternoon, managers from BMC Software paired with independent analysts and members of the media, to recreate the hypothetical situation of a pharmaceutical company that had been planning a cloud migration, only to find its R&D division had already deployed its key application - and the business assets to go with it - to the public cloud.

This is the situation more and more businesses are facing: not moving their assets out of the data center and into a public or hybrid cloud, but rather gathering up those assets that have already been moved, and bringing them back under the firewall and back into compliance.

If you run multiple cloud providers in your shop and are looking at ways to connect them with virtual networks, then vCider with its Virtual Private Cloud v2 release has something you should take a closer look at. The service can help you create private links between the different providers, just like you can use ordinary VPNs to connect external networks to be virtually inside your data center.