Grazed from FederalTimes. Author: Editorial Staff.

U.S. federal government agencies are adopting cloud infrastructure and services at a growing pace. Over the past few years, the Department of the Interior, General Services Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Forest Service and others have moved ahead with cloud implementations, ranging in scope and size.

As they transition, many of the early adopters are discovering the benefits of implementing a hybrid cloud computing strategy. A hybrid cloud provides both on-premise and off-site resources that allow agencies to gain the cost benefits of a public or community cloud for the applications and data that are appropriate for those environments, while utilizing the security of a private cloud and managing risk for sensitive data and applications…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Docker is a hot topic this week. If you’re unfamiliar with what this technology is or what it means for your business, here’s a guide.

What is it?

Docker is both an open source project and the name of a startup that focuses on Linux Containers. Containers are the idea of running multiple applications on a single host. It’s similar to compute virtualization, but instead of virtualizing a server to create multiple operating systems, containers offer a more lightweight alternative by essentially virtualizing the operating system, allowing multiple workloads to run on a single host…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Roger Kay.

The litany of computing buzzwords has been repeated so often that we’ve almost glazed over: mobile, social, cloud, crowd, big data, analytics. After a while they almost lose their meaning. Taken together, though, they describe the evolution of computing from its most recent incarnation — single user, sitting at a desk, typing on a keyboard, watching a screen, local machine doing all the work — to a much more amorphous activity that involves a whole new set of systems, relationships, and actions.

The single user becomes a collaboration among people. The desk becomes a car, plane, back deck, conference room, or hotel. The keyboard becomes voice or data inbound from other connected systems. The screen may still be a screen, but it could be a bigger screen, or a smaller screen, and it could be a voice, or an action, or a command sent somewhere else. And the work is being done everywhere: on premise, in the cloud, by people, and by machines…

Grazed from OnBase. Author: David Jones.

I like to compare the different enterprise content management (ECM) cloud deployment types to my children playing with Legos. We have a large box of Lego pieces that my children can use to build anything. My eldest daughter loves this ground-up style of playing and can make some fascinating creations – simply by combining raw bricks and her imagination.

This compares to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in that all of the raw components to host a cloud solution are provided – servers, virtual machines, load balancers and so on. What is required is the guile and skill to combine these components (Lego bricks) with the required software tools (imagination) to create the desired effect…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Christopher O’Connell.

By September 2015, no new purchasing contracts are to go through the federal government’s Standard Procurement System (SPS). The entire legacy procurement system is slated for sunset by 2017. With the sunset of SPS, there’s an opportunity to do procurement better in the federal government. Let’s call this notion "acquisition-as-a-service."

Some agencies already seem headed in that direction. But before we turn our attention to them, here’s a hard truth: Federal procurement processes have been poorly served by technology. Acquisition is a costly and complicated business, with little uniformity among the applications that automate acquisition’s repetitive functions…

Grazed from CloudServicesWorld. Author: Claire Umney.

In an industry where collaboration and visibility are key requirements, cloud computing is a rather new business model with great potential. In their IT cloud services forecast 2013-2017, market intelligence provider, IDC, reports that on a global level only 20 percent of manufacturers, process agents and retail businesses currently use cloud computing. The same research stated that 75 percent of the companies surveyed were however looking for cloud solutions as an alternative, while projecting a growth rate of at least 7 percent for 2013. What exactly is it that’s driving supply chain professionals into the cloud?

Cost savings

The most obvious benefit of adopting cloud computing solutions is cost savings from deployment and the short implementation time frames. Unlike legacy systems, either custom–built or packaged software – there is no IT infrastructure to maintain on-site, no upfront licensing fees, and no software programmes to install and maintain…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Cade Metz.

When Google engineers John Sirois, Travis Crawford, and Bill Farner left the internet giant and went to work for Twitter, they missed Borg. Borg was the sweeping software system that managed the thousands of computer servers underpinning Google’s online empire. With Borg, Google engineers could instantly grab enormous amounts of computing power from across the company’s data centers and apply it to whatever they were building–whether it was Google Search or Gmail or Google Maps. As Sirois, Crawford, and Farner created new web services at Twitter, they longed for the convenience of this massive computing engine.

Unfortunately, Borg was one of those creations Google was loath to share with the outside world–a technological trade secret it saw as an important competitive advantage. In the end, urged by that trio of engineers, Twitter went so far as build its own version of the tool. But now, the next wave of internet companies has another way of expanding their operations to Google-like sizes. This morning, Google open sourced a software tool that works much like Borg, freely sharing this new creation with the world at large…

Grazed from ScientificComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.

HP has announced new innovations and sustainable enterprise infrastructure solutions designed to deliver the simplicity, efficiency and investment protection organizations need to bridge the datacenter technologies of today and tomorrow. Big data, mobility, security and cloud computing are forcing organizations to rethink their approach to technology, causing them to invest heavily in IT infrastructure. According to Gartner, "Datacenter hardware spending from new types of products and new types of big data deployments will reach $9.4 billion in 2014."

HP is helping enterprises create a foundation for the next generation of enterprise architecture with new solutions and services that address power and physical constraints, accelerate applications, simplify management, create efficiencies and enhance agility — while also lowering IT and operational expenses…

Grazed from Telecoms. Author: James Middleton.

US carrier AT&T has added HP’s offerings to its network-enabled cloud ecosystem, allowing customers to use their VPN to connect to the HP Helion portfolio of cloud services. AT&T said its NetBond tool creates a highly secure private path between a customer’s AT&T VPN and a cloud service provider, like HP, flexing and scaling network resources dynamically as a company’s cloud computing needs change.

The company claimed network elasticity which automatically flexes with the needs of the cloud service allow customers to save as much as 60 percent on networking costs. Moreover, the solution delivers as much as 50 per cent lower latency and three times the availability compared with the public internet, as well as isolating traffic from risks such as DDoS attacks…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Steve Burks.

Are you driving fast, making big bets on new products and services in a cloud-computing marketplace moving at blinding speed? It’s a question worth asking given just how fast recurring revenue cloud-computing services are reshaping the legacy IT landscape. Solution providers that are relying on business models that were developed in the days when on-premise IT projects were queued up like airplanes during a blizzard are never going to be able to dig out and get their businesses off the ground…

Every company should be measuring just how many new practices, products and recurring revenue services they are bringing to the market, and how many new customers they are adding each and every quarter. Think of those critical quarterly measurements as the vital signs of your business…