Grazed from EnterpriseCIO Forum. Author: Ryan Farris.

In modern business practices, effective communication is one of the largest challenges managers face. Often managers are tasked with overseeing more employees than they can feasibly manage with the personal attention and touch they would prefer. With this being the case, often it is necessary to find ways to streamline the process and communications to effectively engage and empower employees.

Access to information and core job materials is often a core issue for employees and with managers forced to attend meetings and focus their attention elsewhere, they often find themselves having to make due and therefore are forced into a state of decreased productivity. So how can managers equip their employees with the necessary materials they need to have the autonomy and productivity they desire?…

Grazed from TheVar Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Better security and privacy for data in the cloud is the major goal behind ownCloud Enterprise Edition 6, the newly released version of the file sharing and syncing platform based on the open source project also known as ownCloud. Announced March 11 by parent company ownCloud, ownCloud Enterprise Edition 6 is the latest edition of the value-added enterprise version of the open source ownCloud file-sharing platform, which allows organizations to build clouds on internal infrastructure.

ownCloud Enterprise Edition 6 is "the first and only sophisticated file access rules engine to enhance control and govern access to files," according to the company. It hopes that functionality will appeal to customers in highly regulated industries, such as health care and finance, where data privacy and regulatory compliance are priorities…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

In today’s inter-connected global infrastructure, cloud computing has created new ways to compute and process information. Originally, we had a few cloud models that had specific use-case and solid fits. Now, the entire data center and cloud landscape has evolved. Mobility has become the new normal.

A new “on-demand” generation spans both the user and the modern organization. Small and large enterprises are all looking at various cloud services to help them grow and evolve with the needs of the industry. All of this introduced a new way to look at the cloud, and the data center that supports it…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

SkyKick ( www.skykick.com ), the easiest way to Office 365, today announced Ingram Micro Inc. IM -0.08% , the world’s largest wholesale technology distributor and a global leader in IT supply-chain and mobile device lifecycle services, has added the SkyKick Migration Suite to its cloud solution provider portfolio. Available as part of the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace ( www.ingrammicrocloud.com ), the SkyKick Migration Suite provides a new, automated way for channel partners to move their customers to Office 365.

"Migrating a customer from hosted or on-premise to cloud-based solutions can be a major undertaking for channel partners because it requires a lot of time, expertise and energy," said Renee Bergeron, Vice President of Managed Services and Cloud Computing, Ingram Micro North America. "SkyKick’s Migration Suite helps channel partners simplify the entire process and profitably move their customers’ email, calendars and more to the cloud. We’re pleased to offer SkyKick as part of the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace."…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Ribose, a start-up that redefines the way people collaborate, is the first to achieve STAR Certification from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) fully compliant to the new cloud security standard: Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) 3.0. This certification means that Ribose is committed to protecting user information to the greatest extent possible. Users can be confident their privacy and data will always be respected and protected, and that they can collaborate freely on Ribose to innovate and succeed with their teams.

Ribose is currently the only organization to achieve STAR Certification compliance under the new CCM 3.0 standard. It is one of only two organizations worldwide to achieve Gold Certification, the highest level, based on its security measures and controls as assessed by the British Standards Institution (BSI). Ribose is also the first software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud service provider to achieve STAR Certification under CCM 3.0 with SaaS services fully covered in the certification scope…

Grazed from GeekWire. Author: Taylor Soper.

All the way back in October 2011, Sundar Kannan stood in a basement of the Techstars Seattle headquarters and spent one minute pitching an idea for his new company, Computenext. The startup didn’t have much to show back then, but fast forward to today and the progress is impressive. With a team of 12 based in Bellevue and more than 50 in India, Computenext just raised $4 million of a $10 million round with plans to grow quickly and rapidly in 2014.

Kannan, who formerly worked on the Windows Azure team at Microsoft, describes the company as an “Expedia for cloud computing.” At its core, Computenext is an online brokerage firm that hosts a marketplace for businesses who are both building and seeking an array of cloud services. Computenext, which also offers its own cloud solutions for specific verticals, makes money by taking a small cut from every transaction…

Grazed from Futurity.org. Author: Kevin Stacey-Brown.

To keep data safe in the cloud, a group of computer scientists suggests doing the Melbourne Shuffle—not the dance move, but the new computer algorithm. The computing version of the Melbourne Shuffle aims to hide patterns that may emerge as users access data on cloud servers. Patterns of access could provide important information about a dataset—information that users don’t necessarily want others to know—even if the data files themselves are encrypted.

“Encrypting data is an important security measure. However, privacy leaks can occur even when accessing encrypted data,” says Olga Ohrimenko, lead author of a new paper describing the algorithm. “The objective of our work is to provide a higher level of privacy guarantees, beyond what encryption alone can achieve."…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: David Bonderud.

Cloud-based data centers suffer from an efficiency problem. Despite massive resource pools, many offer utilization rates that are no higher than 20 percent, which in turn drives up cloud costs for midsize businesses and increases server sprawl. Now, a team of researchers from Stanford University may have found a way to improve data center efficacy while still meeting strict performance goals.

No More Reservations

According to a recent Stanford News article, Associate Professor Christos Kozyrakis and doctoral student Christina Delimitrou have developed a cluster management system called Quasar that can theoretically triple server efficiency without affecting service reliability. How? It starts with a move away from the "reservation model." Used by many cloud providers, this model starts with a question to IT professionals: How much resource capacity does a specific application need? IT administrators understandably overestimate in their efforts to mitigate potential issues, but a new problem is emerging — data centers bursting with resources that no one is using…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Deborah Gage.

Secure storage and sharing of data have become sensitive topics since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last year leaked details of U.S. government snooping. But ownCloud Inc. co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Frank Karlitschek saw the danger before that.

Convinced in 2010 that new cloud computing services were a threat to security and privacy, he wrote what ultimately became ownCloud’s code, putting it into open source and gathering a community of developers around it. In 2011, ownCloud the company was formed, and it has now raised $6.3 million in Series A funding co-led by Devonshire Investors and current investor General Catalyst Partners, taking total funding to $10.1 million. Valuation is not disclosed…