Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Anyone attending the latest industry conferences, reading the trade press, or viewing analyst reports can be forgiven for thinking that the entire world has suddenly become digitized. But we’re not quite there yet — most organizations are still in the midst of an often painful evolution to shed manual processes and stovepiped systems to bring themselves closer to the digital realm. And the benefits aren’t so clear cut yet.

Going “digital” is today’s call to arms across the business landscape, and the changes being wrought are potentially far-reaching. Becoming a digital business means employing information technology to manage operations, as well as develop and deliver new products and services. As a recent thought leadership piece released by Accenture puts it: “industrial companies are becoming customer service companies. Consumer products companies are becoming Internet companies. Energy companies are becoming information companies. And media and entertainment companies are becoming logistics companies.”…

Grazed from TheNewsReports. Author: Editorial Staff.

Despite the lacklustre response to wearable tech by consumers so far most of the companies in the smartphone and tablet industry are pressing ahead with releasing devices that are worn as well as used in 2014. In the last week Google have revealed further hints at to what these devices will be like after releasing the app developer software for an Android powered smartwatch.

Google’s smartwatch app development focuses on their own device for the market, the Motorola smartwatch that has been called the ‘Moto 360’. The specs all indicate that it will be an always-online device, with most of the computing and programmes running it doing so via cloud computing. This is inline with the direction other companies, in particular Microsoft, are taking – cloud storage and cloud computing are considered essential in the face of the low storage space available on mobile and wearable devices. The device being offered by LG, the G watch, will take a similar approach…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Sean Rhody and Kevin L. Jackson.

Cloud computing has introduced a new model of acquiring hardware and software. In reality, you aren’t acquiring anything physical, and much of the value of moving to the cloud is driven by the transition from using physical resources (hardware, software, and labor hours) to the consumption of online services (infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and software-as-a-service) that deliver similar functions.

While the technical aspect of this change seems to capture all the headlines, the financial and governance aspects are just as important — but end up on the back burner. Unfortunately, the necessary changes in management policy, acquisition processes, and organizational behavior rarely get the planning they deserve or get executed properly in advance. This disconnect can quickly derail any cloud transition…

Grazed from Health24. Author: Editorial Staff.

IBM is teaming up with the New York Genome Centre to help fight brain cancer. The company said that its Watson cloud computing system will be used in partnership with a New York-based genetic research centre mainly to help sequence DNA for the treatment of glioblastoma, the most common type of brain cancer in US adults.

New York Genome Centre, a consortium of academic, medical and industry officials, will use Watson to sequence the DNA of cancer tumours at much faster rate than would be possible if done by a human being. The DNA information would then be combined with clinical information and fed to Watson to help determine the best way to treat a particular patient…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

A survey of the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) membership found that the most popular usage model for members is infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which was noted by 86 percent of the respondents. It far outweighs any other category, including service orchestration (49 percent), virtual machine interoperability (48 percent), service catalog (39 percent) and scale-out storage (39 percent).

According to the ODCA, the survey highlights the continued growth in cloud computing adoption by the organization’s members—not a far stretch considering part of the purpose of the ODCA is to push adoption of cloud computing models. But the ODCA goes even further, noting its members are ahead of broad market trends…

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

My friend, Thomas, recently asked me: “What kind of work do you do with cloud, and how does it make the world a better place?” Wow, what a question! Should it be part of my professional goal to make the world a better place? This was an interesting idea, especially since IBM aims to “build a Smarter Planet” and, in general, smarter is better.

By keeping my eyes open, I found a scenario that not only describes cloud’s societal benefits—and includes mobile, social and big data. Thomas is a German Catholic, and one of the most exciting events in his life was the nomination of the German Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. In the picture below, you can see a split between 2005 and 2013, when a new pope was elected. In the 2005 portion of the image, almost no mobile devices such as phones or tablets are visible. People seemed to be listening to the ceremony and were not as concerned with sharing this experience with the rest of the world…

Grazed from GovExec. Author: Kimberly McCabe.

Federal acquisition professionals feel they lack expertise in cloud computing services and they are having trouble structuring contracts to buy them, according to two recent polls of subscribers to ASI Government’s Virtual Acquisition Office—an online center of research, tools and on-call support.

Because cloud computing offers agencies opportunities to reduce costs, enhance efficiency and empower innovation, it’s important for program and procurement professionals to become better cloud consumers. It helps to think about buying cloud computing as similar to purchasing water for a building…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

OnRamp, a leading Data Center operations company headquartered in Austin, TX, announced today that it will open a 42,000-square-foot Data Center in Austin with an invitation-only grand opening celebration on March 20, 2014. The facility will be the company’s second Data Center in Austin and third Data Center in the US. Design of the Data Center began in the fall of 2012.

OnRamp built the facility to meet the growing demand for its services, which include high security hosting, cloud computing, high density colocation and disaster recovery services. “We are excited to open a second, enterprise-class Data Center in Austin,” said OnRamp CEO Lucas Braun. “We’re an Austin-based company, and a large percentage of our managed and cloud hosting and high security hosting services are delivered by our teams in Austin.”…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.

Disaster recovery used to be the province of the rich and famous: Only the most deep-pocketed organizations could afford the equipment, effort and expertise needed to put together a comprehensive DR plan. In the past decade, though, virtualization has lowered the bar to disaster recovery. By running a hypervisor at a remote site, organizations can eliminate the need for exact hardware replicas at the DR site, greatly reducing costs and overhead.

Now, the public cloud has pushed DR one step further, using cloud computing advantages to remove the need for a dedicated remote location and hardware altogether. Further, the cloud’s pay-for-use model reduces monthly charges, prompting organizations to pay for protection only when they need it. Soup-to-nuts cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings, meanwhile, can also reduce the amount of on-staff expertise needed to pull off a DR initiative…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Butler.

Cloud computing was an estimated $47.4 billion industry in 2013 and is expected to more than double to $107 billion by 2017, research firm IDC predicts. The cloud’s 23.5% compound annual growth rate is five times faster than that of the broader technology market, IDC Vice President of data center and cloud Rick Villars said during the IDC Directions conference on Wednesday in Boston.

Cloud’s adoption has been driven by three major factors: scale, complexity and speed, Villars said. The cloud offers scale that regular businesses do not have, which allows them to deliver more complex services faster. The explosion of mobile devices was one of the first megatrends that significantly ramped up the need for cloud computing services…