Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Ophir Shalitin.

Modern innovations in networking technology, virtualization, Big Data processing, storage, and analysis, along with cloud computing, are giving new shape to the information technology realm of today and the future.  Organizations have, for many years, effectively sourced a number of non-core business functions to outside service providers.

Marketing, accounting, customer service, sales and administrative staffing are just a few examples of such outsourcing; today, organizations can also get computing services on demand in virtually any location, and tailor those services to their specific needs. Such "micro outsourcing" can apply to functions such as processing, storage, software, security, and support…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Dennis Smith.

In a Computer Weekly article, Archana Venkatraman discusses why Virgin Management opted for an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. We’ve seen similar successes with other companies. There are several common threads among cloud computing adoptions that ensure successful outcomes, including cost, scalability, and capability.

As with many IT projects, simply deploying on existing infrastructure is seldom an option. Upgrades are usually needed, which can include increased server bandwidth and storage capacity, and new/additional software licenses. When a change is underway – as was the case with Virgin Management during office relocation – it becomes an opportunity for IT teams to identify new ways to optimize their resources. Cloud computing represents a significant opportunity to offload new or existing workloads…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Canon Information and Imaging Solutions, Inc. (CIIS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Canon U.S.A., Inc., announces that it now resells glovia OM, a cloud based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system built on the Salesforce1 Platform. Bringing together Canon’s imaging technologies and information management expertise, CIIS provides consulting, professional services, and solutions in the areas of Business Process Automation, Sales & Marketing Automation, Records Management, Visualization & Prototyping, and Print Management.

The addition of glovia OM to the company’s portfolio enables CIIS to offer Glovia’s outstanding cloud order management solution, with Canon’s expertise and understanding of business process. "One of the main reasons why Canon is the proven market leader in office document solutions, besides our world class imaging technology, is that we have mastered the operational excellence needed to supply office equipment and document solutions" said Satoshi Nagata, president Canon Information and Imaging Solutions…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Daniel Cawrey.

IT solutions have always gone through some degree of customization, and the cloud application programming interface (API) is an up-to-date example of this. Software-based solutions for IT infrastructure mean that vendors must offer increased flexibility. A recent article on ZDNet notes the ease of using cloud API.

As is par for the course, technology for businesses continually changes. Cloud computing allows vendors to sell IT prepackaged services with a different type of delivery. Midsize organizations often have the upper hand with cloud vendors. Options have increased, and cloud software has become more powerful than ever before…

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: Joe Curtis.

IBM has admitted demand for the open source initiative Cloud Foundry is "in its infancy", but predicts the collaborative venture will catch and keep developers with the quality of its cloud computing technology. The firm signed up to the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) project last July, and just last week was announced as one of the founding members of a forthcoming independent organisation, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which will oversee the neutrality of the initiative.

Cloud Foundry has emerged as the cloud computing equivalent of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) counterpart OpenStack since its creation in April 2011, and lets developers develop and deploy applications on its PaaS platform.  IBM is just one of numerous tech firms to bet on the initiative, and last week announced a $1bn investment to develop its PaaS capabilities…

Grazed from IT-TNA. Author: Steve Wexler.

Calling it the last OpenStack you’ll ever try, the new release of Piston OpenStack 3.0 has been generating a lot of controversy, if not interest. Unveiled last week, it had to compete with sub-Arctic weather, RSA security conference, Mobile World Congress, the Winter Olympics and Russian brinkmanship in the Ukraine.

Then there was the little misunderstanding that saw Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. uninvited from next month’s Red Hat Summit, and a couple of hours later re-invited again, with an apology. Apparently somebody at Red Hat was unhappy with Piston because a Fortune 100 customer decided to change vendors. It seems that enterprise customers, never mind REALLY BIG enterprise customers, are hard to come by…

Grazed from CDT.org. Author: David Sohn.

CDT and a group of trade association allies warned the Supreme Court today that the stakes in the Aereo case go well beyond just television. In an amicus brief, we explained to the Court that the wrong approach to this case could undermine the cloud computing industry by creating new legal risks for services that store and transmit data from remote locations. We urged the Court to avoid any such approach. In the brief, we didn’t take a position on the legality of Aereo’s particular service, which enables users to watch local broadcast programming over the Internet.

CDT believes that cloud computing plays an important role in facilitating online innovation and speech. It makes powerful computing resources once available only to large entities now broadly available via shared platforms, in a manner that is efficient, secure, flexible, and scalable…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Shadow IT is a great thing until it runs into the security of cloud computing. All too often line-of-business users are establishing applications and moving data into the cloud without understanding all the security implications. The Cloud Security Alliance has put together a list of the nine most prevalent and serious security threats in cloud computing. Many of them relate in one way or another to the weaknesses implicit in Shadow IT.

The alliance bills its list as the "Notorious Nine: Cloud Computing Threats in 2013." The CSA itself was formed in 2008 on the heels of the Information Systems Security Association CISO Forum in Las Vegas. Jim Reavis, a well-known security researcher and author, issued a call for action to secure the cloud at the event, leading to the founding of the organization…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Today GridGain (www.gridgain.com) officially released its industry leading In-Memory Computing Platform through an Apache 2.0 open source license, offering the world access to its technology for a broad range of real-time data processing applications. GridGain’s open source software provides immediate, unhindered freedom to develop with the most mature, complete and tested in-memory computing platform on the market, enabling computation and transactions orders of magnitude faster than traditional technologies allow.

"The promised advances of big data combined with internet scale simply can’t happen without a transformative change in computing performance," said Abe Kleinfeld, CEO of GridGain. "In-memory computing is enabling this change by offering a major leap forward in computing power, opening doors to a new era of innovation."…

Grazed from TechRadar. Author: Editorial Staff.

Virtualisation and cloud computing technologies deliver services that perform exactly like a dedicated server; but are more reliable, flexible, scalable, offer more management features and simply cost less. As more web services and applications move over to cloud-based virtual servers, you have to wonder if this spells the end of the traditional dedicated server.

Flexibility and scalability

Dedicated servers do not scale the way a virtual machine on a good cloud platform can; they are designed to provide a set amount of resources and the only realistic way of scaling their computing power is to add additional servers and balance the load across multiple servers (which usually requires some changes to your application) or to increase the resources on the dedicated server (which will involve downtime while the physical components are changed). In contrast, scaling is what cloud hosting does best. Adding more CPU, RAM or storage can be done with zero downtime and through your own control panel. Similarly, adding additional virtual servers is also at the click of a button…