Grazed from SAP.  Author: Lindsey LaManna.

Cloud computing has quickly become a driving force of unprecedented change across the IT and business landscape. Organizations are adopting the potential of the cloud to reap the benefits of business innovation and agility, and to enable new processes and insights that were previously impossible. Business and IT are transforming into “everything as a service.” Those companies that do not adopt the cloud will fall behind the pace of change. What can we do today to prepare for tomorrow?

 To find the answer to this question, I interviewed Sven Denecken, VP of Strategy for Cloud Solutions at SAP and speaker at The in Cloud 2020 Forum at SAPPHIRE NOW next week in Orlando, on a Google+ Hangout last week. Sven provided valuable insights on the impact of the cloud, what businesses can do prepare and what cloud will look like in 2020…

Grazed from SmartData Collective.  Author: Ryan Ward.

Working in the information security field, I obviously hear a lot about “the cloud” and its many security implications. There are definitely valid security concerns associated with cloud computing, but isn’t the entire industry of “information security” based on the concept of “securing information” no matter where it resides (including the cloud)? Security professionals need to accept the cloud as simply another platform that must be secured in order to protect information. Rather than talk about security controls though, I thought I would step back and first focus on the journey many organizations take to cloud adoption since security fears and IT change still appear to be hurdles.

The differences between cloud adoptions from one organization to another are very interesting to me. Working with a variety of businesses, I have learned that each takes its own approach to embracing cloud solutions without a 100% direct correlation between specific industries or size…

Grazed from InsuranceTech.  Author: Frank Petersmark.

The summer movie season is nearly upon us, and included in the many potential blockbusters is a remake of that perennially angry but always loveable creature from the deep, Godzilla. Hearing about that remake got me thinking about another classic Godzilla movie, so here’s a quiz. What do the IBM System/360 mainframe and the classic Japanese science-fiction film Mothra vs. Godzilla have in common?

The answer: they both celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2014! The production of the IBM System/360 was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and the film made its debut in Japan on April 27, 1964 before opening in America later that summer…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Elena Malykhina.

Salesforce.com announced Friday that it has received the authority to operate (ATO) on its new Government Cloud, both for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS). With the ATO, granted under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), federal agencies will have one location for all their cloud products and services.

Salesforce got the authorization from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which used the FedRAMP baseline guidelines that help agencies migrate to the cloud securely. Agencies can now use Salesforce’s commercial off-the-shelf applications, as well as the Salesforce1 platform to customize applications with additional functionality or build new applications within the cloud environment…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Nationwide cloud services provider NewCloud Networks has released its newest Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering, Desktop-as-a-Service. By combining this new service with the company’s existing cloud services, NewCloud now has the ability to offer complete-end-to-end cloud infrastructure services to midmarket businesses across the country.

Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) is a service in which the compute, storage and disk components of the individual desktop run from a data center, rather than a local machine. The desktop is accessed with any device connected to the Internet while being managed by the data center provider. NewCloud uses VMware virtualization as the platform for this revolutionary service…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Rick Robinson.

IT customers are going rogue, say industry observers. Business units and individual employees — IT’s customers within the firm — are striking their own deals for cloud access without waiting for IT assistance, or even letting them know about their arrangements. This has been a developing trend for some time, but it is now accelerating.

A new generation of consumerized offerings makes cloud adoption fast and easy, and many business units are quick to make use of cloud convenience. To respond effectively to this challenge, midsize IT can’t "just say no." They must also be able to say "yes."…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Mojgan Afshari.

Cloud computing has emerged as an innovative approach to provide computing services. It offers numerous advantages such as fast deployment, lower costs, pay for use, rapid elasticity, scalability, ubiquitous network access, and greater resiliency. One of the primary uses of cloud computing is for data storage. Cloud storage is a model of networked online storage and can store data on multiple third-party servers.

Cloud storage is an evolution of traditional hosted storage technology (FTP, WebDAV, NFS/CIFS) that involves more sophisticated APIs, namespaces, file or data location virtualization, and management tools. Wu et al. (2010) identified several benefits of using cloud storage such as ease of management, cost effectiveness, lower impact outages and upgrades, and simplified planning. So, cloud storage is convenient and offers more flexibility. According to Borgmann et al. (2012), most cloud storage providers offer two types of services:..

Grazed from WebHostingGeeks. Author: Editorial Staff.

In May of 2012, I have published a blog post and discussed the types and the evolution of the data center. In this article, I will take the discussion further and try to see what will be the impact of the cloud on the data center. There are a lot of scenarios about the data center and the cloud, you can either take a service from the cloud or move everything to a hoster.

Depending on your business strategy, your environment, legal requirements, security concerns, loss of data control issues your cloud adaptation most probably be unique to your company. Many reports have been issued by trusted companies such as Attunity, TechTarget and Gartner, which give numbers that are hard to ignore:…

Read more from the source @ http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/the-effect-of-cloud-computing-on-the-data-center/

Grazed from Economic Times. Author: Editorial Staff.

The ever-increasing demand for information and data storage will be the focus of a new centre for training researchers and seeking to develop innovative laser technology to take cloud computing to the next level. The University of Glasgow and Queen’s University of Belfast, along with 12 industry partners, are creating a centre to train an initial 50 PhD students in integrative photonics and its applicability to data storage and information processing.

The Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Photonic Integration for Advanced Data Storage will receive funding worth 8.1 million pounds, including 3 million pounds from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The remaining funds will come from the two institutions, industry partners and the Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland…

Grazed from CNBC. Author: Dhara Ranasinghe.

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 Reality 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 Reality, a global provider of data center and co-location solutions…