Grazed from Actco. Author: Brian McCafferty.

Cloud computing is making everything easier. Companies that operated IT infrastructures of their own before the cloud know firsthand how much easier it is thanks to the cloud. A brief comparison of doing business before and after the cloud will show just how much cloud computing is changing things.

Think about what it was like to set up a major business application like hosting corporate email just fifteen years ago. Setting up your company with an application like this would entail purchasing a dedicated server. You would then have to spend a significant amount of hours installing and deploying the new server and software. In addition to this, a server isn’t a piece of equipment that you can simply set up and walk away from, never to touch again. Owning a server requires maintenance, which means having an in-house technician at best, or having regular visits from a break-fix computer repair company at the least…

Grazed from CustomerThink. Author: Paul Anderson.

Gartner, Inc. has highlighted the top technological trends that will affect organizations in 2014. In the words of David Cearley – “We have identified the technologies that companies should factor into their strategic planning processes. This does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the listed technologies, but companies should look to make deliberate decisions about them during the next two years.”

He further added that the convergence of four powerful forces: social, mobile, cloud and information, will drive change in the corporate realm. Taking excerpts from the original Gartner news, below enlisted is a summarized version of seven of those technological trends which (according to Gartner) will impact every organization’s long-term plans and programs:…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Nicole Laskowski.

Is this the beginning of the end for the vaunted data scientist? That’s the clever pitch from Tableau Software, one of a handful of business intelligence vendors pushing the envelope on self-service BI tools. Because the software’s user interface offers drag-and-drop features, even users without a strong math background can build visualizations and interrogate the data, the vendor promises.

Tableau isn’t the only one with a strong self-service play. More and more vendors are offering analytical packaged applications that mask the complexity of analytics on the back end with easy-to-use features, which begs the question: Are data scientists just experiencing their 15 minutes of fame?…

Grazed from ChannelPartnersOnline. Author: Editorial Staff.

If someone were to say, “Oracle is the most comprehensive cloud provider on the planet," would you believe them? Based on the company’s track record, probably not. But make no mistake, the company that makes the above claim – Oracle itself – is getting very serious about cloud computing.

This week, the Redwood Shores, Calif., company announced the availability of two important services that will be delivered as a service over the Web: the Oracle Database Backup Service and the Oracle Storage Cloud Service. According to Oracle, the new announcements provide customers “the flexibility to easily move critical applications and data from on-premises to the cloud and vice-versa."…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

IBM inventors have patented a cloud computing security technique that enables app developers to ensure that data notifications are securely and confidentially pushed to and from mobile devices. It enables developers to create applications that can encrypt data notifications, assign them a unique message identifier (ID) that is securely transmitted to a mobile device via a third-party service provider.

Maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of data shared via mobile networks is a priority for developers, service providers and end-users, yet IBM security researchers found that insufficient security protocols in mobile applications can risk exposing details of data notifications pushed across mobile networks, potentially exposing personal or sensitive information to service providers…

Read more from the source @ http://www.ciol.com/ciol/news/212933/enabling-secure-notifications-mobile-devices-cloud

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Big data analytics are driving rapid growth for public cloud computing vendors with revenues for the top 50 public cloud providers shooting up 47% in the fourth quarter last year to $6.2 billion, according to Technology Business Review Inc. The New Hampshire-based financial and technical research firm says the broader public cloud market, beyond just the top 50 vendors, grew 25% from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the fourth quarter of 2013 to be a $15.1 billion market.

Those figures are in line with estimates from firms such as IDC, which said the cloud was a $47 billion annual industry last year and will grow to be a $107 billion annual industry by 2017. Perhaps the most surprising result in TBR’s latest figures are the extent to which public cloud providers are using big data to drive their own operations, get new customers and expand product portfolios…

Grazed from MidSizeInsider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

The gloves are off in a fight for public cloud computing dominance. In the last two weeks, several cloud leaders have announced changes to their pricing structure in a bid to woo enterprise and midsize IT professionals who still have doubts about a shared cloud solution. There is another option: IT-as-a-service (ITaaS), which leverages IT resources in cloudlike form without resorting to full-on, distributed deployment. Some experts call it the answer to public cloud computing. Can it really make peace?

A Pressurized Environment

According to an April 2 ZDNet article, lower prices combined with higher availability make public clouds an attractive option for many companies; so attractive, in fact, that IT departments may find themselves under pressure from C-suite executives and shadow IT guerrillas who desperately want cloud access. One possible answer is to meet halfway through the use of ITaaS…

Grazed from RPCMag. Author: Kurt Mackie.

Some of Microsoft’s cloud-based services have been endorsed by the European Union’s Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) as meeting EU privacy law standards. According to an announcement on Thursday by Microsoft, the 28 DPAs issued a joint letter on April 2 (PDF) signifying approval. The DPAs represent local authorities within the European Union that oversee privacy protections for data services.

Products such as "Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Windows Intune" have met privacy standards for transferring data outside the European Union, according to Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel and executive vice president of Legal and Corporate Affairs. Microsoft plans to ensure compliance by issuing standard agreements with its EU enterprise customers, starting on July 1…

Grazed from CloudEndure. Author: Editorial Staff.

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then nine infographics are worth at least nine thousand. So here are nine cloud infographics that will get you up to speed on cloud computing without getting too heavy on the text:..

To view infographics and read more from the source, visit https://www.cloudendure.com/blog/nine-cloud-computing-infographics/

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Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the finalists for the eighth annual Red Hat Innovation Awards. The awards program recognizes customers, partners and communities for their outstanding use, innovation, and extension of Red Hat technology.

The Red Hat Innovation Awards finalists are recognized in five separate categories with category winners being selected by a panel of experts and ranked based on the uniqueness, complexity, and magnitude of their Red Hat implementation. The panel of experts included: Lee Congdon, CIO, Red Hat; Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat; Carl Lehmann, research manager, Enterprise Architecture, Integration & Business Process Management, 451 Research; Laurent Lachal, cloud computing research lead, Ovum; Sean Michael Kerner, senior editor, eWEEK; and Fredric Paul, blogger, Network World and contributor, CIO, IT World, InfoWorld, and other publications…