Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

There’s a lot of discussion these days on the benefits of the cloud. It’s known for saving organizations – large and small – a great deal of time, money and headache. What may not come to mind immediately are the environmental benefits of cloud based computing. “Going Green” and reducing the corporate carbon footprint have also been fairly recent trends among companies.

Not only is it a way for businesses to make drastic changes in the preservation of our planet; it’s a good way for them to improve their public image. As an MSP, you may not have initially considered your services to be “environmentally friendly.” Well, according to this article from Sustainablebrands.com, you might want to reconsider that idea…

Grazed from SciTechToday. Author: Sue Smith.

Organizers of Interop Las Vegas have announced their finalists for the 2014 Best of Interop awards competition. The list includes a variety of business-technology products and services with a focus on computer networking, interoperability, mobility, cloud computing, and security. Technology companies that exhibit at Interop’s IT Conference & Expo are allowed to self-nominate their products and services.

Judges ultimately chose 27 finalists from some 130 submissions, across 9 different categories. This year’s categories include cloud computing, data center solutions, mobility solutions, network management, networking infrastructure, network performance, software defined networking or SDN, security solutions, and storage solutions…

Grazed from TheConversation. Author:Yijun Yu.

As the biggest ever hunt for a missing plane continues, many are beginning to wonder if we will ever know what happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. If the plane has crashed, it has been suggested that it could take up to two years to find its wreckage. But if MH370 had been fitted with technology that made use of the cloud it may never have been lost in the first place.

The cloud is a cluster of computers that provides reliable computing and storage as a service to large numbers of requests from computers with limited capabilities, such as those on board a plane or inside a mobile phone. Instead of relying on the combination of GPS, primary and secondary radar, and aircraft communications addressing and reporting systems (ACARS) to keep track of planes, we should be making sure they send regular flight information to the data centres in the cloud…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.

Nitrous.IO, which offers developers a flexible and collaborative online development environment, today announced that it has closed a $6.65 million funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The round also included participation from 500 Startups, CrunchFund, Eduardo Saverin, Golden Gate Ventures, Pershing Square Capital Management’s Bill Ackman, Viki.com CEO Razmig Hovaghi and Lion Rock Capital. (TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is a partner at CrunchFund.)

The oversubscribed round includes almost everybody who also participated in the company’s $1 million seed round, with the exception of TIBCO Software and Draper Associates. “The development community brought cloud computing to the masses, and now Nitrous.IO returns the favor!” said David Cowan, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “As a (former) coder myself, I know how great it is for developers everywhere to reclaim the hours spent every week building, maintaining and debugging localhost. In fact, I expect that in coming years Nitrous.io will save billions of expensive man­hours.”…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), the global organization where members work together to advance the deployment of enterprise cloud solutions and services that are interoperable, secure and free of vendor lock-in, today unveiled its third annual membership survey. The survey highlights continued growth in adoption of cloud computing by Alliance members, ahead of broad market trends including broad use of ODCA usage model requirements to guide cloud purchases.

The 2013 annual ODCA membership survey, which collected information from 124 members, found that 31 percent of respondents are running at least 40 percent of their IT operations in an internal cloud. This number is expected to grow to 70 percent of respondents by 2016…

Grazed from TheNewsReports. Author: Syeda S.

Microsoft has taken the lead in the likely growth in cloud computing and cloud services demands as a result of more people moving towards mobile devices. The company anticipates a lot more people will want to use online business software on their mobile devices, and have decided to meet this demand with a lower price on Office365. It seems, however, that iPhone and Android users will still have to wait a while before they can get Office on their device.

Office365 Personal, a slightly modified version of Office365 Home, will be available to licence for use on one device for US$6.99 per month or for an annual fee of US$69.99. This prices it at some US$30 lower than the Home version. This allows users to access the most popular Office apps – Word, Excel and PowerPoint – in the cloud computing space offered by Microsoft…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The journey to the cloud is actually an IT transformation that improves enterprise computing. To help clients chart their course to the cloud, Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com), has created a blueprint for IT transformation, the IT Transformation Journey, a step-by-step guide to assist IT pros in determining where they are, as well as where they’re headed. Research reveals that, by the time organizations reach the cloud stage of this journey, CIOs are reporting greater than 130 percent improvements in their ability to forecast requirements and respond to risks, overcome threats to availability and performance, and react to challenges and proactively solve IT issues.

In large part, this is because the data center is fully virtualized, converged, automated and orchestrated by the time an organization reaches this sixth and final stage – the cloud stage – of the IT Transformation Journey. The company is not only ready to realize the benefits of cloud computing, but its IT is also running at a predictable monthly cost and key personnel have been freed to focus on the ways technology can help their businesses succeed…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Newtek Business Services, The Small Business Authority, today announced the launch of its first television advertising campaign for its industry-leading cloud hosting services. The advertising campaign will focus on Newtek’s ability to provide incomparable service, with free 24/7/365 domestic support necessary to enhance the daily operations, and bolster security for its business customers. Newtek also announced that switching to the Newtek Cloud could save customers up to 60 percent in information technology ("IT") costs with its offerings at multiple price-points without sacrificing quality or availability of service around the clock. Newtek welcomes IT professionals and resellers to also utilize its Cloud on a private-label basis.

Newtek’s decade-long focus on independent business owners and resellers, and its subsequent depth of understanding have provided the insight necessary to construct a highly functional cloud environment that boasts premium security, dependability with 99.9% uptime, and lightning-fast scalable performance which allows independent business owners to control their IT costs and, at the same time, grow to their fullest potential…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Henry Kenyon.

In its ongoing efforts to reduce network and IT infrastructure costs, the US Navy wants to move most of its non-classified, publically available data to a commercially provided cloud, cut the number of Navy data centers from 150 to 25, and eliminate redundant costs including duplicative software applications.

The move reflects the Navy’s desire to cut $1.3 billion from its IT budget, and cloud-based data storage is a cost-effective option, Navy CIO Terry Halvorsen told executives at a government IT event in Washington D.C. on March 13. A substantial part of those savings would come from consolidating the Navy’s data centers and adopting cloud computing and virtualization for most of the service’s non-classified data, Halvorsen said, adding that the Navy would continue to keep mission-sensitive and critical information in its classified databases…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Web publisher Online Backup Mag is proud to announce its re-branding and re-launch as CloudWedge.com. Originally founded as a news site covering the online backup industry, it has expanded its content focus to include everything related to cloud computing technologies.

Senior editor Natalie Lerner commented, “We are excited about this opportunity to branch out and expand our former repertoire to cover the whole of the cloud. The cloud computing industry has already started to shape the way we interact with the world, and will only grow from here; we want to cover every inch of this as it unfolds.”…