Grazed from CMSWire.  Author:  Steve Marsh.

No longer the latest IT buzzword, cloud computing has become a reality for a growing number of organizations as they seek to reduce IT costs, expand capabilities and improve their networks.

For SharePoint users in particular the cloud offers a way to replace the administrative burden and costs of managing and maintaining on-premises SharePoint platforms. Migrating to the cloud can be somewhat complex since SharePoint migration tools are limited in functionality or non-existent…

Grazed from TechAisle.  Author: Michael O’Neil.

It is stunning to see how much corporate IT realities have changed in the last five years. Today, an increasing proportion of infrastructure is rented rather than purchased, sourced with OPEX funds from remote suppliers. Agility has become the watchword for new automation projects, and acceptable timeframes are no longer calibrated in months. End-users can source applications, infrastructure and other needed services from a wide variety of online resources. And workers are tethered to the corporate infrastructure by their smartphones and tablets, not by the cables attached to their desks.

Most of these changes are attributable in part or in whole to cloud computing. Cloud infrastructure provides the basis for OPEX-based, flexible-timeframe infrastructure rentals. SaaS providers are able to deploy new automation in hours rather than months. Mobility is not really a discrete initiative so much as it is a key attribute of ubiquitous infrastructure. And IT now competes for corporate IT influence and budgets – it is no longer the “final word” on IT/business solution strategies…

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud. Author: Sarit Sotangkur.

The photography industry has been revolutionized multiple times throughout its history. In the beginning, black and white photos were recorded on plates, then celluloid film, then color film and now digital files. In each of these revolutions, we see a fundamental shift in the way photos are captured, processed and displayed. Although we are now in the digital age, I believe the cloud has only shown us a glimpse of where digital photography will go.

The cloud as photo backup

The digital age has brought us fast, compact and non-fading image permanence, but it has also brought us crashing hard drives, hackers and computer viruses. With that in mind, backups are top priority with any professional or serious photographer. And since shipping DVDs or hard drives to your relatives for off-site backups gets old fast, backing up your photos in the cloud makes a lot of sense. That’s why many commercial backup offerings like Carbonite or Dropbox have a large focus on preserving your photos and can do so at a fairly low cost…

Grazed from ChannelPartnersOnline. Author: TC Doyle.

Video. Mobility. Cloud computing. In the world of information technology, these are just three of the hottest trends today. While each offers transformative business benefits to the organizations that invest in them, they create an institutional challenge that is giving fits to CIOs everywhere.

They produce massive amounts of data — information that must be stored, optimized and leveraged in new ways. Fortunately, the technologies and best practices used for storing, managing and leveraging data have improved significantly in the last few years. While there is no one-size-fits-all answer to solve a CIO’s problems today, there are more options and capabilities to choose from than ever…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Brian Ascher.

Software-as-a-Service and cloud computing has been transformational for the software industry, but compared to what is coming next, you ain’t seen nothing yet. First, to appreciate where we are heading a quick review of where we’ve been is in order. Back in the olden days of business software a software company sold you an application which you installed on your servers and desktops which made business processes more efficient, facilitated workflow, and sped up information retrieval. As you used it this software accumulated data such as your customer records, financial results and manufacturing statistics.

If you wanted to deeply analyze this data for trends and insights you bought Business Intelligence or Analytics packages from a different set of software vendors so you could slice and dice your data, generate reports for executives, and hopefully decipher interesting trends about your business that you would then go act on. In the early 2000s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies emerged and enabled you to “rent” business applications, rather than buy them, as your employees accessed them through the Internet and their web browsers…

Grazed from Channelnomics. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing may be the marquee player in IT services, but when it comes to giving business leaders the cold sweats, security still steals the show, at least among the cloud’s newest arrivals. In a new poll of 1,300 technology service providers offered up by PSA purveyor Autotask, the IT pros say their clients are more concerned about security than they are about even high-profile matters like MDM and cloud.

Better than half (54 percent) of those queried said security was the top clients concern, followed by support for the cloud (52 percent), mobile-device management (46 percent) and data management (45 percent). Their concerns are not unfounded. In their annual Security Threat Report for 2013, Symantec Corp. said attacks on SMBs jumped 18 percent from the year earlier…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Joseph Tsidulko.

Google is stepping up its investment in cloud computing infrastructure in a bid to drive down the costs further for enterprise customers in the midst of a price war with cloud services rivals Amazon and Microsoft. Google Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora said the search engine giant intends to pass savings from lower digital storage costs to bring more customers to Google’s infrastructure as a service offerings.

Arora made the comments Wednesday during a conference call to discuss the company’s first-quarter financial results, even as Google posted lower-than-expected earnings for its first quarter. Google reported a three percent increase in net income of $3.65 billion on a 19 percent increase in sales to $15.4 billion. Earnings per share after stock based compensation charges were $6.27, down from the $6.41 Wall Street consensus estimate…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: David Linthicum.

According to an IBM announcement, organizations that gain competitive advantages through cloud adoption reported almost double the revenue growth. The study claims these organizations have nearly 2.5 times higher gross profit growth than peer companies that are not as aggressive around the use of cloud computing. The survey was conducted with more than 800 business decision makers and users worldwide.

Thank you, “Captain Obvious.” Even if you think calling IBM a neutral third party is a bit laughable, the study rings true to me. It’s clear that the use of cloud computing has a positive benefit on the bottom line of most organizations who invest in this technology. The problem is, most organizations don’t, and, those that do, invest in the wrong places…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Cloud services providers (CSPs) involved in cloud system management have something new to be happy about. According to a report released by IT research firm TechNavio, the cloud system management market is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.51 percent.

Cloud management involves software and technologies designed for operating and delivering applications and computing services to enterprises and end-users. The report outlined several drivers impacting the market, including hybrid cloud computing and a shifting focus to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions among enterprises…

Grazed from FedTechMagazine. Author: Steve Zurier.

Cloud computing has become such a way of life at NASA over the past five or six years that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory IT team thinks of most cloud-based services as just another node on the network, say Tom Soderstrom and Jonathan Chiang, chief technology and innovation officer and IT chief engineer, respectively. In fact, Soderstrom says that whether it’s Amazon Web Services or Windows Azure, “we think that using the cloud applications can be even more secure than what we do internally.”

“Every service we sign on with has to be vetted by FedRAMP [the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program], so we know if they are on the list that they comply with the NIST 800-53 security specifications for federal installations,” Soderstrom explains. “And these vendors spend a lot of money on IT security; they are constantly patching.”…