Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Warwick Ashford.

Cloud innovation is enabling a wide range of businesses to access a secure, cost-effective means of protecting sensitive card payment data. Banks, utility companies and contact centres in particular are facing the increasing challenge of enabling card payments over the phone, while at the same time ensuring customer data is secure.

Specifically, businesses involved in card transactions need to meet the requirements of the payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS) as well as increasingly onerous data protection regulations. This has typically required costly dedicated on-premise systems that are either unable to cope with peak demands or are largely under-utilised during quiet periods…

Grazed from ProfitBricks. Author: PR Announcement.

ProfitBricks, the price/performance leader in Cloud Computing – IaaS, is pleased to announce that we have won two 2014 SIIA CODiE awards for Best Cloud Infrastructure and Best Cloud Management Solution. Winners of these prestigious awards represent the software industry’s best products, technologies and services.

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) is the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries. A SIIA CODiE Award win for Best Cloud Infrastructure and Best Cloud Management Solution is an especially prestigious honor as each award winner was reviewed by a field of industry experts, whose evaluations determined 125 finalists. SIIA members reviewed the finalists and voted to select this year’s CODiE Awards Winners…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Arista Networks, which sells 10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet switches and software for cloud-computing data centers, announced terms for its IPO on Tuesday. The Santa Clara, CA-based company plans to raise $200 million by offering 5.3 million shares at a price range of $36 to $40. At the midpoint of the proposed range, it would command a fully diluted market value of $2.8 billion.

Arista Networks, which was founded in 2004 and booked $417 million in sales for the 12 months ended March 31, 2014, plans to list on the NYSE under the symbol ANET. The company initially filed confidentially on January 31, 2014. Morgan Stanley, Citi, BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and RBC Capital Markets are the joint bookrunners on the deal. It is expected to price next week.

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Andrew Froehlich.

When designing infrastructure for corporate branch offices, you usually run up against one or more common pitfalls. Best-practice architecture documentation and common sense dictate that designing and implementing branch offices in a cookie-cutter fashion makes it much easier to manage all sites. But various factors commonly force designs to be altered to meet the needs of each individual branch.

Because of this, the architecture and, therefore, support of each branch office end up being decidedly different. Your support staff has to burn more time and resources to support disparate infrastructures — time that could be spent on more meaningful tasks. Thankfully, the growing acceptance of cloud computing allows for an opportunity to design branch office infrastructures in a far more homogeneous manner…

Grazed from CloudComputingToday. Author: Arnal Dayaratna.

On May 19, Microsoft and SAP announced that a suite of SAP applications is expected to be certified on the Azure platform by the end of Q2 2014. Specifically, Azure will certify SAP Business Suite software, SAP Business All-in-One solutions, SAP Mobile Platform, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE) and the developer version of the SAP HANA in-memory computing platform.

Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will address infrastructure problems related to certified SAP applications whereas SAP will manage application-related issues. In addition, customers will be able to deploy “pre-configured” SAP applications to the Azure cloud by means of the SAP Cloud Appliance Library tool. The agreement represents a win for both parties insofar as it extends the availability of select SAP applications while enhancing the pedigree of the Microsoft Azure platform. The real winner, however, is Microsoft Azure as it continues to add feathers to the cap of the Azure platform in an effort to remain competitive with Amazon Web Services, which already supports the deployment of SAP business applications on the AWS Cloud.

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Natalie Lehrer.

A new term has emerged in the cloud computing blogosphere and it has been aptly named “Cloudwashing.” The term is meant to play off of the popular word whitewashing. When something is so diluted that it turns white, we often call it whitewashing. When every single press release from a company includes the term cloud, we start to wonder if the term is being included arbitrarily or if companies are doing this just as a way to garner additional attention.

We encourage you to sift through press releases to see if you can spot this trend on your own. There are two schools of thought on this and each have valid points. On one hand, computing giants are moving into the general direction of the cloud being integrated into anything and everything they do. Wouldn’t it make sense for every press release put out to have something to do with cloud?…

Grazed from GlobalBankingAndFinance. Author: Ron Miller.

It might have been a buzzword within the IT industry for some years now but more recently we’ve seen the mainstream appetite for – and adoption of – cloud computing rise significantly. Whether it’s public, private or hybrid services, the promise of greater flexibility, scalability and cost-effective pricing models has been too enticing for many businesses to ignore.

The flipside, however, is that as a result of the Cloud, we’re also seeing a number of companies coming under scrutiny for their data protection and compliance policies. It’s the CIOs that are leading the charge here, as they become increasingly concerned over the security of their mission-critical data. There is the perception that many ‘cloud’ vendors (and that’s including those companies that have simply rebranded an existing solution to jump on the bandwagon) are failing to provide a comprehensive view on where data is being stored and the information security management framework that’s in place…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Syed Raza.

Cloud computing is a term used to describe a paradigm for delivery of computing services on a pay-as-you-go basis. Users utilize the internet and remote data centers to run applications and store data, thus eliminating the need for in house hardware and software. The cloud technology allows efficient computing by removing most of the upfront cost of establishing an IT infrastructure.

Sounds promising! But wait – we are not used to having someone else dictate, manage, and maintain our data as well as infrastructure. For corporations, there may be intrinsic risks, confidentiality issues, data security, and other potential areas of concern. The advantages of using the cloud, however, seems to outweigh all the potential negative components. In today’s economy, the biggest motivation perhaps is the cost savings that a company can enjoy using the cloud, therefore, cloud adoption is growing at an increasing rate each year as more and more corporations realize its potential…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Larry Dignan.

Ben Haines has been chief information officer of Box for a year and is on the front lines of figuring out multiple business technology trends such as cloud computing, recruiting the next-generation of IT talent and operating at the speed of business.

It’s also worth noting that Haines is responsible for corporate applications at Box so he doesn’t touch datacenters and building out the technical operations required to support the company’s products and services. "And that’s fine with me," says Haines…

Grazed from EnterpriseAppsToday.  Author: Tim Wilson.

For big vendors like Oracle and SAP, cloud ERP means a change in culture. But what about their customers?  ERP is changing. Large ERP vendors like Oracle and SAP are now active participants in software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-based platforms.

True, they were late to the party, mostly because they didn’t know what to do with technologies and business models that did not revolve around on-premise software. Now, however, few can deny that legacy ERP has to face the cloud…