Grazed from TheAge. Author: Editorial Staff.

Remember when getting a new project off the ground in a large business took months of argument, analysis and testing? And that was only to create the business case, before anyone could persuade the finance department to fund it. If the project involved software development it might then take months or years for the code to actually be written, implemented and tested, and even longer before its effectiveness was known.

By then, it was possible that the reason for starting the project had been rendered redundant by changing business needs. For some businesses, that is still the way projects are managed. But now concepts perfected in the tech start-up industry, such as cloud computing and agile software development, are being adopted by large businesses such as Suncorp Bank and Vodafone Australia to get small projects off the ground in a matter of just days…

Grazed from Vaultive. Author: PR Announcement.

Vaultive today announced that the first global investment bank to adopt Microsoft’s Office 365 service has selected Vaultive to provide the data encryption required to enable the bank to migrate its global workforce to the cloud. The bank chose Vaultive after an exhaustive 6 month competitive review, citing Vaultive’s strongest level of data encryption, functionality, performance, responsiveness, and support for multiple cloud-applications.

While banks and other financial services firms have long been at the forefront of technology trends, this is not the case with cloud computing. Strict regulatory requirements, as well as security and disclosure concerns, have prevented cloud adoption. In addition, firms that operate globally are constrained from migrating to the cloud by a growing number of international data residency laws…

Grazed from Enterprise Irregulars. Author: Louis Columbus.

Microsoft’s latest study shows enterprises’ pace of cloud computing adoption continues to accelerate. Nearly half of the respondents (45%) report they have cloud-based applications running in production environments. 58% report that they selectively target new applications and projects for cloud computing.

Microsoft commissioned 451 Research to complete one of the most comprehensive global surveys to date of hosting and cloud computing, titled Hosting and Cloud Go Mainstream releasing the results earlier this month. The 74 page slide deck of results provides a wealth of insights into the current and future state of hosting and cloud computing…

Grazed from StorageReview. Author: Lyle Smith.

SanDisk has announced four new additions to its CloudSpeed Serial ATA (SATA) line: the CloudSpeed Extreme, CloudSpeed Ultra, CloudSpeed Ascend and CloudSpeed Eco SSDs. These new CloudSpeed SSDs are specifically designed to provide business-critical performance for the mixed-use, read and write-intensive application workloads that are becoming more and more important in today’s enterprise data centers and cloud computing environments.

SanDisk combines its flash management Guardian Technology Platform with the new SSDs as well as its memory technology to become the first vendor to ship 10 full drive writes per day (DWPD), 19nm-based enterprise SATA SSDs, which gives customers longer-lasting drive operation at a better value. With the new CloudSpeed nomenclature, the drive families align more closely with the SAS-interface Optimus drives…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Nuage Networks, the Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) venture focused on software-defined networking (SDN) solutions, today announced that cloud provider Numergy has selected its SDN platform for deployment within and across its datacenters as they scale to support a total of one million virtual machines.

Numergy is a cloud provider specializing in the construction and operation of cloud computing infrastructure in key European markets. According to Gartner’s Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2017, 4Q13 Update (December 2013), Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IAAS) end user spending in Western Europe is growing at 32.1% CAGR (2012-2017), and the market size will reach $5.9B by 2017. This year alone, Numergy plans to open two datacenters, with the goal of 10 additional datacenters in operation over the next three years, all with the Nuage Networks solution embedded…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Editorial Staff.

Arista Networks Inc, which makes network switches for large data centers, filed for an initial public offering on Monday, the latest in a string of cloud computing firms tapping investor enthusiasm around the technology. Arista’s filing comes a week after data storage provider Box Inc filed to raise up to $250 million in one of Silicon Valley’s most highly anticipated IPOs of the year.

Box rival Dropbox is expected to file plans for an IPO in the coming months. Santa Clara, California-based Arista listed Morgan Stanley and Citigroup as lead underwriters to the offering in its IPO filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. The company, whose competitors include Cisco Systems Inc, said it would raise $200 million from the offering, but the final size of the IPO could be different…

Grazed from FederalNewsRadio. Author: Tom Temin.

Cloud computing and mobile computing are somehow mutually reinforcing trends. But how exactly? One can exist without the other. I heard a really good answer from Rory Read, the chief executive officer of AMD. Advanced Micro Devices, the perennial No. 2 to Intel in the PC processor market, is in the midst of a bet-the-company strategy change. The PC in the traditional form of a box or a notebook, while not disappearing, has lessened in importance as a platform for innovation. So much energy is going into mobile devices — smart phones, phablets, tablets and "ultra" this, that and the other with touch screens and solid state drives.

These hardware form factors have been accompanied by a change in the way applications are programmed and architected. Apps exist independently of the data stores they draw from. That means they can synthesize output from lots of data sources from the rows and columns in relational databases to the geographic data that describes the whole world. Increasingly, Read and others believe that data will be stored in public clouds. Much of it already is when you consider how many organizations offer up their information to be available to apps…

Grazed from The Guardian.  Author: Matthew Taylor.

The vast scale of online surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden is changing how businesses store commercially sensitive data, with potentially dramatic consequences for the future of the internet, according to a new study.  A survey of 1,000 business leaders from around the world has found that many are questioning their reliance on "cloud computing" in favour of more secure forms of data storage as the whistleblower’s revelations continue to reverberate.

The moves by businesses mirror efforts by individual countries, such as Brazil and Germany, which are encouraging regional online traffic to be routed locally rather than through the US, in a move that could have a big impact on US technology companies such as Facebook and Google.  Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, said the study confirmed "anecdotal evidence that suggests US tech firms are going to be hit hard in the coming years by a global backlash against technology ‘made in America’"…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

The crew in the engine room of the Titanic really did a fantastic job of delivering top performance and keeping things running efficiently.  But the ultimate success of the voyage depended on the ship’s crew up above — steering things safely in the right direction, taking advantage of all information available to them. IT, in many ways, is tasked with running the engine room, but then gets blamed when the ship runs into trouble.

The Titanic analogy came to mind when reading Philippe Abdoulaye’s account of a hypothetical (and likely composite) company that does all the right things with IT, and gets great results with its implementation. But the company is still running aground, and everyone is looking to IT, wondering why things aren’t going as planned.  The good news is unlike the engine room crew of the ill-fated Titanic, IT leaders are in a position to influence the new course of the business — but they can’t do it alone…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Chris Preimesberger.

When IBM realized it needed to go outside to acquire a cloud services-provisioning company a couple of years ago and eventually settled in June 2013 on a lesser-known outfit in Dallas called SoftLayer, the move surprised some IT industry watchers.  After all, multinational IBM was investing a reported $2 billion into a smaller cloud-services provider—whose 28,000 customers, using about 90,000 servers, were mostly midsize companies.

On the surface, this didn’t sound like a natural fit into IBM’s big-picture enterprise strategy. Did a player such as SoftLayer have the IP, the engineering and the management wherewithal to scale up to the numerous deployments IBM was going to need?…