Grazed from CGMA. Author: Joe Weinman.

Increasingly, CFOs must be aware of how focused investment in IT – including cloud technology – can drive strategic advantage for their organisations in the digital era. After all, any CFO knows how to help the company manage its bottom-line results. But leading CFOs collaborate with chief information officers and chief marketing officers to grow top-line revenue.

Many CFOs view IT as an expense to be controlled. But investments in IT can increase company profitability through revenue growth, not cost reduction, and have a higher return on average than advertising or R&D. And in today’s increasingly digital world, IT excellence is a critical imperative for enterprises to survive and thrive…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Marc Shaw.

One of the most impressive current IT trends is the rise of cloud computing, with an estimated 17.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), per IDC (2014). Service providers like Amazon, MS Azure, and Rackspace are offering public cloud hosting at rapidly decreasing prices, while bandwidth capacities are increasing exponentially.

But if you have any experience in IT whatsoever, you know the danger of computing outages, even in the cloud! In such an event, businesses lose access to data, resources, and suffer downtime, greatly impacting revenue. One way to stay safe is by knowing your own network, especially if you’ve outsourced your IT. Cloud hosting providers who offer a service layer should provide a comprehensive IT map of your network, usage, and future needs…

Grazed from Entrepreneur. Author: Ben Uretsky.

Concerns about privacy and data security often deter small and medium businesses from cloud-based solutions but most organizations are better off putting their data in the cloud. Cloud service companies offer growing businesses advanced surveillance systems, cutting-edge encryption methods, third-party certs and regular testing against attacks that few small and medium size businesses can approach in-house.

“Realistically, those companies are going to get much better security, reliability and performance with much lower costs and hassle,” says Dan Levin, COO of Box. “I’ve seen a number of small businesses lose data because it wasn’t backed up or living on an old machine slid under the desk of some manager."…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Ryan Huang.

There will be practical and commercial risks when choosing a cloud service, but these can be mitigated through due diligence by focusing on the service contract. Firstly, according to Rob Bratby, managing partner at law firm Olswang Asia, the business must understand what it needs and what it will get from the cloud service. Depending on the complexity and value of the services, businesses may prepare their own service description or start with the vendor’s version.

Ultimately the service description should comprehensively set out the business needs. "If it doesn’t, it must be challenged and any inadequacies should be dealt with. If this isn’t done, the risk is that the service contract for cloud services that may prove to be lacking later down the line. The same goes for pricing, service levels and service credits, rights to exit, rights to change the services, security plans and standards, disaster recovery arrangements and governance arrangements," added Bratby…

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Top 11 Vendors in the Global Cloud System Management Software Market is a new market research publication announced by Reportstack which is posting a CAGR of 32.51 percent from 2013-2018. The analysts pinpoint increasing adoption of hybrid cloud services as a major driver behind this growth.

“More and more enterprises are setting up private cloud infrastructure to cater to their internal computing and storage requirements. When computing requirements exceed the capacity of the private cloud, services are procured from the public cloud service providers; this adds the complication of the integration of private and public cloud, leading to the emergence of hybrid cloud infrastructure.”…

Grazed from ComputeNext. Author: Ted Navarro.

“Cloud Computing” might be one of the most overused buzzwords in the tech industry, often thrown around as an umbrella term for a wide array of different platforms, services, and systems. It’s thus not entirely surprising that there’s a great deal of confusion regarding what the term actually entails. The waters are only made muddier by the fact that – at least on the surface – the cloud shares so much in common with virtualization technology.

This isn’t just a matter of laymen getting confused by the terms tech experts are tossing around; many of those experts have no idea what they’re talking about, either. Because of how nebulous a concept we have of the cloud, even network administrators are getting a little confused…

Grazed from ComputerDealerNews. Author: Paolo Del Nibletto.

Seemingly right under the collective noses of BlackBerry leadership was a powerful internal cloud the company built several years’ ago. John Sims, the president of Global Enterprise Services for Waterloo, Ont.-based BlackBerry Ltd., told CDN that internally BlackBerry staff called it the iCloud. It was originally built for BlackBerry emails services.

Sims said that the company is now looking to leverage this cloud and its first step in develop identity services for the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). “With this we are one of the largest identity management companies in the world,” Sims said at the BlackBerry Experience show in Toronto…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Shawn Drew.

Many businesses are still struggling with the idea of entrusting their data to the cloud, but those businesses that are most concerned with security are also the most likely to keep important data in the cloud, a new study by the Ponemon Institute that focused on cloud computing security finds. Midsize businesses struggling with balancing cutting-edge technology and data security should take this information as a sign that the cloud may not be as insecure as it seems.

The Movement to the Cloud

The new report is based on survey results compiled by the Ponemon Institute and is the third in an annual series of cloud security reports. As detailed by eWEEK, the report shows some very positive signs for cloud computing security, although the technology still has a long way to go…

Grazed from ScientificComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.

Penguin Computing, experts in high performance, enterprise and cloud computing solutions, has announced the immediate availability of MATLAB Distributed Computing Server on its HPC Cloud, POD. This solution combines POD’s ease-of-use and high performance computing capabilities in the cloud with MATLAB scale-up capability to solve more demanding and complex problems.

“With over a million users and growing, MATLAB is one of the most respected tools for programming and analyzing numerical data,” said Victor Gregorio, VP/GM of Cloud Services at Penguin Computing. “Penguin Computing is proud to be partnering with MathWorks to provide MATLAB on POD, where we have enabled an HPC Cloud environment for the MATLAB community.”…

Grazed from SFGate. Author: Kristen V. Brown.

Hewlett-Packard is making a major bet on cloud computing, announcing Wednesday that it will invest $1 billion in a suite of open-source cloud products that position the Palo Alto company as a competitor to cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine.

HP’s cloud products and services, dubbed HP Helion, mark a shift away from what has been the company’s primary business, namely selling products like management software and technology hardware to corporate data centers. Instead, HP will encourage companies to build their own cloud systems, using HP’s version of the open-source cloud software OpenStack…

Read more from the source @ http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2014/05/07/hps-big-bet-on-cloud/

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