Grazed from CloudWorldSeries.  Author: PR Announcement.

South African enterprises are being squeezed as they struggle to meet demands for increased collaboration and faster access to applications and information while maintaining compliance in an increasingly stringent regulatory environment. Further restraints arise from facets such as high power costs, environmental awareness, and growing security concerns as well as business continuity and disaster recovery issues.

South African enterprises are influenced by the global trend for customer, partner, and employee relationships becoming increasingly open and collaborative. Particular attention is given to:…

Contributed Article.  Author: Karen Miranda, ERP Consultant.

No one knows the importance of data backups than someone who has lost all of their data because they failed to put these measures in place, and if this is something that interests you, it might be a good idea to turn to a cloud partner for this specific purpose. Why opt for the services of a cloud company instead of the onsite option? The advantages are numerous, and getting to know each one can guide you in making the right decision.

Cost Effective

One of the biggest benefits of opting for a cloud partner to assist you with backups is that this is actually one of the most cost effective methods on the market. The alternative is to conduct all of your backups on your own, but this means investing in a costly server (or servers) so that you have enough space to store everything. Instead of going through all this trouble, you can simply opt for cloud storage that is quick, simple and will cost you a fraction of what you would have had to paid in the event that you took care of everything yourself…

Cloudera, a leader in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop, today announced that it has acquired Gazzang, the big data security experts, to dramatically strengthen its security offerings, building on the roadmap laid out last year when Cloudera first delivered Sentry. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The addition will immediately deliver enterprise-grade data encryption and key management, addressing head on the challenges associated with securing and processing sensitive and legally protected data within the Hadoop ecosystem. Thus fulfilling a requirement in myriad compliance regulations like HIPAA-HITECH, PCI-DSS, FERPA and the EU Data Protection Directive.

While Cloudera customers will continue to have a choice of a broad range of cross-platform data protection methods available from Cloudera partners, Cloudera now offers encryption for all data-at-rest stored inside the Hadoop cluster – using an approach that is transparent to applications using the data, thereby minimizing the costs associated with enabling encryption.

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Patrick Thibodeau.

The White House plan to cut carbon dioxide pollution by 30% seeks to meet its goals, in part, through efficiency improvements. This could put further pressure on data centers to improve efficiency, many of which are powering servers that are doing very little work or none at all.

For instance, a recent Uptime Institute survey asked enterprise data professionals: "What percentage of your servers are likely comatose?" About 60% of respondents said the number of comatose servers was under 5%. But nearly 25% put at least 10% of their servers were into that category…

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: Duncan MacRae.

A panel of IT experts and information security practitioners warned that SME’s need more education when it comes to cloud computing and cybersecurity. Commenting on the rising adoption of the cloud among businesses amid growing concerns about data security, Catalin Cosoi, chief security strategist at Bitdefender, said: "Years ago, firms were used to having their own data centres and keeping control of information. With cloud computing, businesses are uncertain about who has ultimate control of the management of this data and how secure this information is. With more education, however, SMEs will see that this problem is quite easy to solve."

Désiré Athow, industry journalist, outlined some of the key challenges that organisations face in terms of cloud migration. "To put it bluntly, an SME has other things to take care of other than just learning theories behind cloud computing," he explained. "They don’t necessarily understand how much of a transition it may be from their current system to a cloud-based one…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Guy Currier.

Cloud computing and converged infrastructures are enticing prospects for businesses, especially as they come with significant cost benefits once implemented. However, there are still many businesses wary of fully migrating to the cloud – mostly for security reasons. To reconcile these concerns, organizations are turning to the hybrid cloud – a combination of resources both on the company premises, and online.

With the frequent usage of private technology devices for business purposes, users are now increasingly accessing beyond-the-firewall services without the knowledge of company IT departments. Security approaches, therefore, are being reconsidered and at the forefront is to generate one based on identity. This may fare better for organizations in the long run because of flexibility of access and use, opening up avenues for multiple services from multiple providers — as well as generating lower investment costs in building security architecture…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Solace Systems announced today two new message routers and a major new version of its operating system, SolOS 7.0, that together meet the diverse data movement demands of today’s enterprise applications and emerging big data systems, cloud computing architectures and internet of things initiatives.

Each of these systems needs an efficient way to move large amounts of information over different kinds of networks with unique requirements in terms of latency, throughput, guaranteed delivery, fault tolerance and more. Solace’s hardware-based platform lets companies replace a wide range of discrete data movement technologies (such as messaging middleware, open source, web streaming, transaction management, WAN optimization, etc.) with a powerful application-aware network. Application aware-networks make it easier and less expensive to move data between applications while offering greater capacity, performance and robustness than other solutions…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking, today announced that Cavium’s ThunderX, family of workload optimized processors will support next generation of Xen virtualization. In addition, Cavium has joined the Xen Project as an Advisory Board member. The Xen Project technology is a Collaborative Project hosted by The Linux Foundation.

The ThunderX family of processors from Cavium delivers integrated virtualization support for both compute and I/O centric workloads. The Xen optimization for the ARMv8 architecture has proven to be the high performance hypervisor technology that can deliver the full set of virtualization features with optimal performance required by scalable cloud deployments and applications. The support for what we believe will be the largest multi-core ARMv8 implementation and multi-socket cache coherency in Thunder takes the Xen virtualization capability to a whole new level of performance and features…

Grazed from MoneyControl. Author: Editorial Staff.

As the use of big data, cloud computing and virtualization grows, so is the allocation of budgets to data centers among corporates. Almost half of the respondents in a 2014 Digital Realty survey of data center trends in the Asia-Pacific published in May said they expect their budgets to increase by 5-10 percent over the next 12 months.

"The increase in data center budgets is directly related to the growth in data that organizations are generating as well as the adoption of the analysis of big data and that’s really shifted the way companies are looking at data centers," said William Stein, the interim CEO and CFO of Digital Realty, a global provider of data center and co-location solutions…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Spencer Ante.

International Business Machines Corp. IBM appears to have sidestepped any government penalty over its accounting treatment for cloud computing. The computer maker said the Securities and Exchange Commission’s division of enforcement has concluded its investigation into how IBM reports cloud-computing revenue, according to a company filing with the SEC.

Based on the information to date, the division doesn’t intend to recommend any enforcement action by the SEC against IBM, the filing says. A SEC spokeswoman declined to comment. Last July, IBM disclosed that the SEC was investigating the way it reported its sales in its cloud-computing business, according to a filing detailing its second-quarter results…