Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Box has acquired Streem, a cloud storage and file-sharing startup that specializes in large media files and that has developed innovative technology for streaming that type of content.

"The entire team at Streem will be joining Box to help work on the future of content management and collaboration in the enterprise," wrote Box CEO Aaron Levie in a blog post Monday…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Analytics leader SAS has developed software to help clinical researchers instantly query and analyze data in the cloud. With the new offering, biopharmaceutical organizations can improve the efficiency and productivity of clinical research and speed lifesaving therapies and devices to market.

SAS Life Science Analytics Framework combines features of SAS Drug Development and SAS Clinical Data Integration to provide a single, integrated analytics foundation for clinical research. The solution delivers three key efficiencies:

• Provides a repository optimized for data standards management.
• Eases the burden of project management through easier workflows.
• Streamlines access to analytics…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Michael Kassner.

Companies, large and small, are slowly leaning towards having a presence in the cloud. Many companies are using the stepping stone approach, leveraging a hybrid cloud-computing environment to gain experience, and to work out unforeseen operational issues. To that end, the hybrid cloud is considered the best choice, allowing companies to retain some digital resources in-house while relegating other resources to a cloud-service provider.

Companies using this approach have the ability to scale up or scale down as needed, along with knowing their most sensitive digital information is still completely under their control and behind their defenses. Security, data protection, privacy, and performance issues are areas of concern for system admins and security managers…

Grazed from ExecutiveBiz. Author: Andy Reed.

Cloud computing security company Porticor will integrate its encryption technology with the HP Atalla platform as the companies aim to help users securely pass data across public, private or hybrid clouds. Porticor’s data protection technology is built to protect the expanding fan of cloud environments and to combine data encryption with patented encryption and homomorphic management technologies to adapt to the changing landscape, the companies said Wednesday.

The companies announced their collaboration at the 2014 HP Discover event in Las Vegas. Porticor saying it is the first company to offer customers full confidentiality for cloud data. Gilad Parann-Nissany, Porticor founder and CEO, said that when migrating data to the cloud security should be anything but an inhibitor…

See more at: http://blog.executivebiz.com/2014/06/porticor-hp-form-cloud-encryption-partnership-gilad-parann-nissany-comments/#sthash.vRFsqB1R.dpuf

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

The hype in the tech world is of course always becoming more centered on the cloud. Many businesses are switching over to storing their data in the cloud, rather than in traditional hardware. What makes the cloud the perfect solution for MSPs? We turned to the Philadelphia Business Journal for some answers.

Perfect for the Mobile Professional

“Personal cloud services offer many benefits and opportunities, including, but not limited to, security, scalability and redundancy of data. If you are a mobile professional, the personal cloud may be right for you!” Everything is being geared towards mobile – email, social media, web pages, etc. Likewise, since many business professionals enjoy the option of accessing their documents from no matter where they are (home, office, on the road), the cloud is the perfect solution…

Grazed from CloudComputing Info. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft last week released a new tool which is capable of assessing your on-premise infrastructure and make recommendenations for migration of Active Directory, SharePoint or SQL Server workloads to Windows Azure, Microsoft’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution. In order for the Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment tool to run the following requirements must be met:

• Full access through firewalls or proxies are required.
• If static ports are used to access the service then access to them is required.
• Remote access (unless running locally) to WMI, the Registry and RPC.

Microsoft also has the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP), which provides similar functionality. MAP version 9.0 was released in December last year.

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Google is adding two new storage and networking features to its Google Cloud Platform ahead of its user conference next week, both designed to make its cloud offerings faster and easier when compared to competing products from Amazon Web Services or Microsoft. Google is adding persistent flash storage, which my colleague Barb Darrow has already covered, and HTTP load balancing across regions.

The load balancing is a fulfillment of the hope for automatic shifting of compute resources from data center to data center without disrupting the workload. It offers developers the opportunity to scale up compute in certain regions closest to demand and could theoretically offer a developer a chance to follow the cheapest computing costs around the globe if Google offered something like spot pricing…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Cloud computing and customer relationship management (CRM) go hand in hand, helping businesses become more productive. According to new research by Gartner, the two solutions complement one another and are being used by firms to reach business goals. Today there are a wider range of options, which smaller firms are taking advantage of to increase their competitiveness.

The Trend Upwards

Cloud Tech News recently featured a piece on Gartner’s latest research around CRM trends. Gartner found that half of all CRM tools will be hosted in the cloud by 2015, which is predicted to increase substantially to 85 percent by 2025. This surge in CRM cloud usage proves that businesses of all sizes believe in the benefits such a tool provides…

Grazed from WS02. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud computing increasingly is the preferred platform for connected businesses seeking to develop and host applications, and make APIs available to their employees, customers and partners. WSO2 addresses this demand with two public platform as a service (PaaS) offerings, WSO2 App Cloud and WSO2 API Cloud. Beta versions of the Summer 2014 releases are now available for developers to evaluate. The announcement is being made in conjunction with WSO2Con Europe 2014, which runs June 16-18, 2014 in Barcelona, Spain.

WSO2 App Cloud and WSO2 API Cloud combine robust, proven application life-cycle and API management functionality with the agility and ease of instant, self-provisioning. Registration simply requires an email address, and both services are readily available to use as a service from the WSO2 website. Throughout the beta period, both public PaaS offerings will be available at no cost. Service pricing will be announced when the Summer 2014 releases go into full production…

Grazed from CNet. Author: Charles Cooper.

Satya Nadella’s first tweet came in mid-February 2009 and it consisted of two words. "Machine learning!" he wrote. Even for Twitter’s 140 character limit, that was a brief entry and was more cryptic than the usual inaugural tweet — something along the lines of "Knicks stink" or "Springsteen rocks" — but in retrospect, it’s starting to make sense.

At the time, Nadella, who became Microsoft’s chief executive this past February, was in charge of research and development for the company’s Online Services division. It turns out that Microsoft was embedding this kind of predictive machine-learning technology into its Bing search engine to return relevant answers to user queries in ranked order…