Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

As software has grown in importance, overshadowing the once-riveting details of chips and hardware, a new language has crept into computing’s vernacular. Where once we talked in silicon yields and gigahertz speeds, we now speak of scrums and sprints, DevOps and Continuous Delivery, and most of all, workload deployments to the elastic cloud’s infrastructure. The genie in the bottle is no longer the secrets in the hardware; it’s the invisible functions of the software.

Even the terminology of software has changed. In the past, we might have declared new development had nothing to do with maintenance of the datacenter’s legacy systems. Development was novel and exciting, a thing apart. Nor did development methodologies have anything to do with production deployments. And certainly an enterprise software project could proceed and have nothing to do with the cloud…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Dimension Data, the $5.8 billion global ICT solutions and services provider, today announced that it will offer Cloud Private Network Connection (CPNC) as an add-on service for its enterprise-class Public, Private and Managed Hosting cloud offerings. CPNC services allow clients to establish a dedicated network connection between their own network and Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Platform™ (MCP) locations to provide greater control and security over their data in the cloud.

In addition to enterprises, CPNC services are ideally suited to healthcare, retail, finance and government industries looking to seamlessly and securely connect to Dimension Data cloud services without using public Internet as well as achieving greater throughput and an overall better network experience. Dimension Data offers two options for clients wanting a global, high-performance and secure method to access their Dimension Data cloud and managed hosting environments without traversing the public Internet:…

Grazed from CliQr. Author: PR Announcement.

CliQr Technologies, the leader in cloud migration and full application lifecycle management, today announced the launch of the CliQr App Store. Providing enterprises with a complete platform to enable self-service provisioning of applications on any cloud, the CliQr App Store features more than 100 of the most popular open source applications at the launch including Alfresco, Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, Blender, SugarCRM, FreeCAD, Dolibarr, Test Link, OSClass, Subversion, Omero, Chyrp, Piwik, concrete5, and many more.

It allows enterprise end users to deploy, benchmark, and manage the largest collection of applications in the industry, with each application being deployable in multi-tiered configurations in just a few clicks. The CliQr App Store empowers enterprise users with portability across one or multiple public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and HP Public Cloud and private cloud environments such as those based on VMware, OpenStack, and CloudStack all with complete manageability, cloud-agnostic auto-scaling, and IT governance…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Synergis Engineering Design Solutions , a division of Synergis Technologies, LLC and a highly rated, value-added Autodesk resellers in the Americas, today announced a partnership with Advance2000, offering complete IT solutions, to bring cloud collaboration services directly to customers. These services are secure, mobile, and scalable, enabling customers to better collaborate and resulting in greater productivity.

"Partnering with Advance2000 allows our customers to receive additional services through Synergis that will help not only in their engineering and design groups, but throughout the entire organization," said Kristen Tomasic, divisional vice president for Synergis Engineering Design Solutions. "Cloud technologies are being adopted by more and more of our customers, for renderings and sharing of information to improve productivity and better leverage resources. Our relationship with Advance2000 helps further these initiatives." The partnership will work to combine the expertise and technologies of both companies, enabling turn-key solutions to companies needing engineering design solutions and supporting services along with IT or cloud services.

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Grazed from Wired. Author: Cade Metz.

Urs Hölzle oversaw the creation of the world’s largest computer. It’s a machine that spans the globe – from The Dalles, Oregon to Hamina, Finland to Quilicura, Chile – and you use it every day. It’s called Google. In 1999, Hölzle was a computer science professor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin asked him to help rethink the hardware and software underpinning the Google search engine.

At the time, Google Search ran on about hundred computer servers in a single Northern California data center, and over the next 15 years, alongside some of the brightest minds in computer science, Hölzle would transform this tiny collection of machines into a global network of data centers that operate very much like a single system, allowing Google to operate a vast empire of web services, from Google Search to Gmail to Google Maps to Google Apps…

Grazed from from Sefaria. Author: Editorial Staff.

2013 has been called the Year of the Cloud. But just what is the cloud, and how could the construction industry benefit?   To view infographic and read more from the source, visit http://sefaira.com/infographic-cloud-computing-and-the-construction-industry/

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Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Perry Hutton.

It appears that climate change is finally starting to make itself felt, certainly across Europe and particularly the UK, which is experiencing its wettest winter on record, with widespread flooding causing chaos. Emergency agencies across the continent have been mobilised and are working to rescue affected communities, hold back floodwater and repair damaged infrastructure. The challenge for governments now is to try and shore up the defences against inevitable future flooding. If only they had prepared the defences adequately in advance, there might not be such widespread devastation now.

SOS

This situation is a perfect analogy for what the business world is experiencing with regard to the threats and occasional devastation created by BYOD, and increasingly, bring your own cloud. The corporate world has seen a flood of mobile devices, and increasingly personal cloud accounts, entering its midst. For the most part, it has been struggling to keep control…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Victor Cheung.

With Oracle’s entry into database-as-a-service and IBM’s recent acquisition of Cloudant, database-as-a-service has been a hot topic. As of March of 2014, DBaaS, an acronym of database-as-a-service, is still a term that has multiple definitions. When searching for the definition of DBaaS, the web returned multiple results and definitions. These results are consolidated here in this post.

How Experts Define “DBaaS”

Many experts have a different definition for the term Database-as-a-Service. Here are some definitions from various sources that I found insightful:

“An on-demand, secure, and scalable self-service database platform that automates provisioning and administration of databases and can be used by developers and nontechnical personnel.” – Forrester, October 2012…

Grazed from BoxFreeIT. Author: Aimy Chen.

Large companies new to cloud computing favoured cloud services that provided more business value than just cost savings, strong security and customer support, technology research firm Ovum reported. “The conversation is now about how cloud can more precisely prove its business value once actually implemented within an enterprise – beyond providing near-term return on investment (ROI) and cost savings,” said the “2014 Trends to Watch: Cloud Services” Ovum report.

Vendors needed to collaborate with clients about a mix of in-house resource development and outsourced services in other areas. For example, a business might use public cloud storage for archived data and in-house storage for operational files. Enterprises contacted in the survey indicated they were considering moving more quickly to invest in infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service (IaaS and SaaS)…

Grazed from Arnnet.  Author: Patrick Budmar.

At Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas last year, senior vice-president, Andy Jassy, made the observation that, “if you’re not planning on using the public Cloud in some significant fashion, you will be at a significant competitive disadvantage.” Jassy was probably speaking to the converted, as the conference was attended by AWS partners already invested in the Cloud.

Even so, his prediction highlighted the growing influence the Cloud has in today’s IT landscape. As for whether Jassy’s statement rings true, Brennan IT Cloud and infrastructure services director, Nicholas Hollings, said the public Cloud should be a consideration in any IT strategy. At the same time, he said the workload to be deployed should suit the benefits provided in a public Cloud…