Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Mark Smith.

At Oracle’s recent cloud computing analyst summit in sunny Palm Springs, the company’s executive team insisted that it sees clear skies for its efforts in cloud computing. The summit was led vr_BTI_importance_of_cloud_computingby senior executive Thomas Kurian, who runs the entire product organization and reports directly to CEO Larry Ellison. He affirmed that Oracle intends to offer the full range of cloud computing – public, private and hybrid models – to its customers and partners.

As one of the world’s largest software suppliers Oracle has much at stake to make its database and all tools and applications available in these cloud environments, including managed cloud services. Our business technology innovation research shows this is a smart bet. Cloud computing is important or very important to 57 percent of organizations, and more than half (55%) of cloud users have been using it for more than a year. I noted in 2013 that simplifying IT and innovating in business are key to its software strategy, and Oracle’s efforts since then have executed on this outline…

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Clair Cain Miller.

Microsoft has lost customers, including the government of Brazil. IBM is spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to reassure foreign customers that their information is safe from prying eyes in the United States government. And tech companies abroad, from Europe to South America, say they are gaining customers that are shunning United States providers, suspicious because of the revelations by Edward J. Snowden that tied these providers to the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance program.

Even as Washington grapples with the diplomatic and political fallout of Mr. Snowden’s leaks, the more urgent issue, companies and analysts say, is economic. Tech executives, including Eric E. Schmidt of Google and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, are expected to raise the issue when they return to the White House on Friday for a meeting with President Obama…

Grazed from TechnologyInsights. Author: Terry Willis.

Today, almost everything is happening in the cloud – if you know it or not. It’s changing the business landscape. From storage to software to security, cloud services are taking over almost every aspect of technology. If you don’t embrace this new technology, you risk being left behind by forward thinking competitors. For a high level overview of cloud computing, review our infographic. It provides a snapshot of the many ways cloud computing is (or could be) incorporated into business operations.

What Is The Cloud?

The cloud is a metaphor for the internet that was born from diagrams depicting the internet as a cloud. These diagrams have been in use long before the term "cloud" evolved. Cloud computing then evolved from this metaphor. In a very simplified manner, cloud computing is a combination of hosted applications, data storage and remote server access through the internet. Many individuals and businesses use the cloud in some format, often without knowing. Social networks and email applications are two of the most common uses…

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence. Author: Editorial Staff.

Ever heard of data scientists? Well the Harvard Business Review named it the sexiest job of the 21st Century and it is has quickly risen to prominence in a number of industries including retail, oil and gas, telecommunications and financial services. So what has this got to do with cloud? Should we all be packing up our RESTful APIs and retraining? Not at all. Before looking at what the cloud has to offer the data scientist and IT departments that work with them, lets have a quick dash through history and give an explanation of the role.

Analysing data with computers has gone through a number of significant changes over the years, from looking at raw numbers by hand, to spreadsheets, Business Intelligence and, more recently, visualisations and complex real-time predictive analytics. One thing that has largely been consistent throughout that period has been the data and analysis taking place on-premise. For a long time this was down to technical reasons, but now that has been overcome with many vendors offering PaaS and SaaS versions of their tools and platforms, which means most of the barrier can be put down to the commercial sensitivity of data and it going outside the firewall. Will the service be reliable, safe from hackers, and adequately protected with encryption etc?…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Kevin McLaughlin.

Microsoft, by either acquiring or investing in mobile app development startup Xamarin, would help developers tap into a ton of new mobility and cloud computing opportunities, according to some partners. Xamarin’s tools make it possible to code iOS and Android apps using Microsoft’s Visual Studio and C# programming language.

In addition to letting .Net developers write code for multiple platforms, Xamarin could get iOS and Android developers on board with coding Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was famously resistant to working with rivals’ platforms, but partners think buying Xamarin would be a great way for new CEO Satya Nadella to show developers things are going to be different under his watch…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Asher Baig.

We talk about the “cloud” today just like we used to talk about the “Internet” back in 1996. Now the Internet is an integral part of our lives and we hardly even use the word—we talk about the applications and services it enables, such as web applications and services (we get more of our information from the Internet than anything else), instant messaging and Internet telephony.

Cloud is going through the similar rapid adoption. Cloud adoption is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 40 percent per year. Three years from now we won’t even talk about the “cloud”—we’ll talk about the applications and services it enables, such as Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce.com, BCDR, mobility and file sync and share…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

A survey of over 2000 respondents by Microsoft and 451 Research has shown that half of companies have deployed some form of hybrid cloud. The report, which clocks in at a mammoth 75 pages (pdf here, if you’ve got an hour or two), revealed that 989 (49%) of the 2041 execs surveyed had configured a hybrid for interoperability. Of that number:

• 60% had used an on premise private cloud alongside a hosted private cloud
• 42.1% had combined an on premise private cloud with a public cloud
• 39.6% had configured a hosted private cloud with a public cloud

The news will come as validation for Redmond, who asserted in May last year that the next two years would be the “era of the hybrid cloud.” As for cloud services used today and bought by service providers, 71% chose software as a service (SaaS), compared with hosted infrastructure services at 69%, outsourcing services at 43%, platform as a service (PaaS) at 37% and colocation services at 27%…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

The use of cloud resources is basic — so basic, in fact, that it’s difficult for me to see why others find it difficult. Despite their experience and smarts, many need help, which is why I can make a living as a cloud consultant. We all win. Unfortunately, other people also hear the cloud music and want to crash the party. As the use of the cloud broadens, these party-crashers are showing up in droves, claiming they can help you implement the cloud. Watch out for these three types of self-described but woefully unqualified cloud experts.

1. The "I’ve been doing cloud for 30 years" guy

I understand that you used time-share systems back in the day, but trying to link that experience with modern cloud-based systems is flat-out ridiculous. I’m old, too. I’ve used time-share systems. They aren’t clouds. Cloud computing is about the use of granular services that are formed and reformed into solutions…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

SoftNAS, the #1 NAS in the Cloud, today launched the SoftNAS 2.1 upgrade for SoftNAS Cloud™ for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The upgrade delivers several unique features, including the only cross-zone high availability (HA) with the first patent-pending Elastic HA™ technology on AWS Marketplace of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS Cross-Zone HA provides failover across Amazon EC2 availability zones for NFS and CIFS to provide non-stop storage operation for mission-critical applications. Elastic HA utilizes an enhanced elastic IP address to deliver up to 99.999 percent reliability and seamless automatic failover within approximately 20 seconds…

Grazed from Voicendata. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), which works on bringing advancement in enterprise cloud solutions and services, has unveiled its third annual membership survey that highlighted continued growth in adoption of cloud computing by Alliance members, and also the broad market trends, including the usage of ODCA models to guide cloud purchases.

The 2013 annual ODCA membership survey, which took into account information from 124 members, found that 31% of respondents are running at least 40% of their IT operations in an internal cloud. This number is expected to grow up to 70% of respondents by 2016. Moreover, the findings also showed that 74% of respondents who are already using or plan to use ODCA’s usage model requirements in requests for proposals (RFPs) in the next six months, an inclination from 63% in 2012…