Grazed from Arnnet. Author: Nermin Bajric.

The impact of the Cloud, while undoubtedly massive in the long term, remains nebulous and hard to pin down, according to ICT experts. Yes, this ‘Cloud thing’ is making some serious noise, yet there are mixed messages wherever you look. Organisations which have overcome their fear of ‘it’ are looking to deploy, while Cloud services and solutions providers are scrambling to make ends meet in a growingly congested Australian market filled with confusion and, often, a lack of direction.

Add to that the fact that no one strategy has yet been determined as definitively successful (if there is such a thing), and it becomes a tough task. What is certain for now is that the multi-faceted Cloud market, on both the compute and services fronts, is chugging along; some components are ballooning, while others crawl…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Wyatt Kash.

GSA’s leap to cloud computing began as a billion-dollar real estate problem. As part of its mandate to provide a range of services to other federal agencies, the General Services Administration owns or leases 354 million square feet of office and warehouse space in 9,600 buildings, and it provides workspaces for more than 1 million federal workers. The problem: Half the time, those people are out in the field or working away from their desks. For a government agency that spends roughly $10 billion annually on leasing and construction costs, officials knew there had to be a smarter approach.

They moved toward a hoteling model, whereby employees check in and out of workspaces. However, that move required GSA to overhaul its IT infrastructure, says acting CIO Sonny Hashmi. Enter cloud computing. Beginning in 2010, when cloud computing was still mostly a vision for federal policy-makers, GSA officials, including Casey Coleman, the CIO at the time, crafted a multiyear strategy to migrate core agency systems to the cloud…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Wayne Rash.

Ask pretty much anybody who is in the process of moving some business operations to the cloud exactly what they think the cloud is, and the chances are you’ll get a different answer from each one. This is, as you might expect, a problem when it comes to moving critical business functions to the cloud. "The cloud doesn’t have to mean the public cloud," Margaret Dawson told eWEEK in an interview at the Interop conference here.

Dawson, who is Hewlett-Packard’s vice president of product marketing and a cloud evangelist" for the company said that the misunderstandings of what the cloud is and how it works play a significant role in slowing cloud adoption for many companies. This is because a surprisingly large number of people assume "the cloud" means the "public cloud." In reality, Dawson said, most companies don’t, and shouldn’t, use the public cloud for their operations…

Grazed from MobileInsight. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing has changed the way that people work by overhauling the manner in which computer data is stored and accessed. Essentially, “the cloud” stores data through the Internet rather than a hard drive. Through the cloud, employees can now work remotely, operate more efficiently as a team, and data can be permanently secured. Here are the five benefits of cloud computing for your field team:

1. Enhanced Collaboration

One of the largest benefits of cloud computing is the ability for your field team to access the same documents, share information, simultaneously work on projects, and provide real-world updates to other group members. By allowing information to be shared instantaneously, the days of mailing private documents, printing and scanning, or team members only working on one file at a time are over; rather, team members can multitask, assign out projects that can be viewed amongst everyone, and exchange data with the click of a button…

Grazed from Fool. Author: Tim Brugger.

With a market capitalization of over $180 billion, and a flamboyant, America’s Cup-winning CEO in Larry Ellison, it’s not often Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) flies under the radar. But it may have done just that last year, as the company quietly went about making a significant dent in one of the most cutting-edge industries around, cloud computing. Now it’s prepping for the expected growth to come from the Internet of Things, or IoT.

New research from Gartner showed software stalwarts Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) at or near the top for software sales in 2013, as measured by revenue. That’s to be expected, but what may be a bit surprising is the leap Oracle made last year compared to its software peers…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

By this point, the financial benefits of cloud computing (and cloud-based file sharing) are becoming obvious to all. But as this article points out, there are quite a few more that don’t receive the attention they probably should. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the reasons besides saving money that companies may want to transition to cloud based file sharing:

Accessibility – Next to the financial benefits, accessibility is probably the most frequently mentioned advantage. In the mobile, multi-device world we live in, accessible data is paramount to the corporate world. Most people today have smartphones, tablets, laptops and work computers (or more!) and want or need to be able to access their corporate data on all of them…

Grazed from Fool. Author: Adrian Campos.

The cloud is poised for rapid growth in the the business world. A growing number of companies are swapping traditional IT systems for affordable cloud-computing services to improve efficiency. Aware of the cloud market’s huge potential, tech giant Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) is looking forward to offering a new cloud service. The networking company plans to spend $1 billion on this project over the next two years, called Cisco Cloud Services.

At first glance, Cisco’s new venture could be regarded as yet another cloud service. However, the service that Cisco plans to provide is well-differentiated. The company plans to use OpenStack technology — an open-source cloud-computing platform for private and public clouds — to create a global intercloud, which is a network of clouds designed for high-value application workloads. Cisco will likely employ an infrastructure as a service, or IaaS, model…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Amazon Web Services hopes to entice more Hadoop users to its Elastic MapReduce service with new virtual servers, one of which has 262GB of memory and 6.4TB of storage for big-data analytics. On Tuesday, the company launched 12 new virtual servers or instances that organizations can use to run their applications using Elastic MapReduce clusters. Potential applications include Web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, financial analysis, scientific simulation and bioinformatics research.

Hadoop is an open-source platform that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers. The MapReduce framework assigns work to nodes in the cluster. Amazon’s compute-optimized c3.8xlarge virtual server is aimed at tasks such as image processing. It has 32 vCPUs (virtual CPUs), 64GB of memory, two times 320GB of SSD storage and 10Gbps network connectivity…

Grazed from CNet. Author: Stephen Shankland.

Prime numbers are endlessly fascinating to computing and math fans, and there’s an infinite supply of them. A Microsoft contest succeeds in fleshing out the list of primes that aren’t actually the largest. A contest to promote technical education and Microsoft’s cloud-computing infrastructure has turned up a previously unknown prime number more than 342,000 digits long — and a bunch of other smaller ones.

The Microsoft Prime Challenge contest winner, a US resident who goes by the username PHunterLau, also turned up at least four other primes in the contest. The object of the competition was not to find the largest prime ever, but instead to find primes within the wide swaths of unexplored territory that current prime-number search techniques don’t scrutinize…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

It’s a tradition as old as the hills, from the BBC’s scoop on spaghetti trees in 1957 to Google’s Pokemon Maps earlier today. Not surprisingly the hype around cloud has prompted a few firms to try their own spoof stories on April Fool’s Day. Here are three of CloudTech’s favourites.

Digital Science, a technology division of Macmillan Science and Education, posted worrying findings this morning that “the computing cloud is drifting towards the North Pole.”

In a blog post entitled ‘Cloud computing suffers a major blow’, the company has evidence to suggest that “global warming and the changes thus caused in the Jet Stream pose a danger to ‘the cloud’.”…