Grazed from DNA.  Author: Editorial Staff.

IT industry players are not surprised with the latest layoffs estimated to be at over 15,000 employees globally by hardware manufacturer IBM or of over 1,000 employees at IBM India, and a similar development at Dell.  This churn is happening because hardware companies like IBM and Dell, which makes high-end servers and computers, have been hit because it is cheaper to outsource infrastructure as a service to Amazon or a Google. "There has been a paradigm shift in focus by corporate customers who are preferring cheaper IT infrastructure like ‘cloud’ from Amazon or Google and this is the reality," said Srinath Batni, member of the Infosys board.

Cloud computing means the ability to run a program or application on many connected computers at the same time. This is where many corporates have either migrated to or are in the process of migrating, thanks to the immense cost-benefit ratio. This, in turn, has led to higher level of redundancy among existing staffers, especially hardware engineers…

Grazed from MSPMentor.  Author: Jessica Davis.

MongoDB may or may not be on most MSPs’ radar. Yet. But the fact that one big cloud services provider is heavily promoting customer use cases for its new cloud-hosted value-added MongoDB as a service indicates that maybe it should be on your radar.

About a year after its acquisition of MongoDB as a service provider ObjectRocket, Rackspace (RAX) has begun promoting customer use cases of the service. MongoDB, an open source noSQL database (often used for big data analytics and scaling large volumes of mobile app data) came up recently in the company’s quarterly earnings call with analysts, and also in a webcast that looked at two use cases of the technology…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Katrina Manning.

Going away are the days when you had to rely on very sophisticated hardware and software to handle day-to-day operations. Those needs made it crucial to have additional IT departments. Some of these unavoidable tasks included: configuring, installing, securing, testing and even upgrading the computer programs of your business. Though costly, many IT departments still have difficulty with sharing data effectively on top of providing hacker-proof security. However, the good news is technology evolves consistently. Additionally, with the advent of cloud computing, the roles and uses for the IT department are changing, as well. Today, the cloud has quickly become a necessary element towards remaining competitive. Here are a few reasons why.

What Makes Cloud Computing Desirable?

With the cloud, service hosting is delivered through the internet. It allows for flexibility from traditional software to the Internet, which offers more convenient access. Information can be distributed and received from any location at any time. There are no constraints on data extraction. Cloud services can also be up and running much more quickly than it takes to install and to configure expensive hardware…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Todd R. Weiss.

Google is opening the daylong San Francisco-based event to a limited number of developers on-site, but will Webcast the event for other participants around the world. To help developers expand their expertise with Google’s Cloud Platform, the company will hold an all-day Google Cloud Platform Live event in San Francisco on March 25 to highlight new features, capabilities and updates that are now part of the ever-expanding cloud environment.

As part of Google Cloud Platform Live, Google is making a limited number of tickets available to interested developers for the on-site event, which will be held in the Terra Gallery and Venue, 511 Harrison St., in San Francisco, while a limited number of invites will also be distributed for "viewing parties" that will be held remotely at Google offices in Seattle and in New York City. All other interested developers around the world will be able to join the event through live broadcasts of the sessions on YouTube…

Grazed from DailyFinance. Author: Gaurav Seetharam.

In 1976, Bruce Henderson — then CEO of the Boston Consulting Group and a renowned management guru — had an insight that isn’t talked about enough. Mr. Henderson made the observation that stable, competitive markets often have just three major competitors. Yeah, just three.

Market shares for these "Big Three" tend to align in a 4:2:1 ratio — meaning that the industry leader will double the market share of its nearest competitor, which in turn does twice as much business as the next-to-nearest competitor. It’s supposed to be a naturally occurring phenomenon of mature industries…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Editorial Staff.

The cloud is transforming IT management, whether organisations are building their own private cloud infrastructures or moving their data and apps onto external public cloud networks. This HP white paper examines what is happening as a result of this transformation and some of the issues we need to overcome in order to extend the cloud’s central role further.

IT losing corporate control

Traditional IT departments are losing corporate control of their data through cloud services. At first, this was a gradual shift, but is now a seemingly widening sea change in the way a whole organisation connects to the IT department. The rise of mobile and remote working, the BYOD movement and the uptake of cloud services – including ‘self-service’ on-demand functions like HR – have fed into this relationship change, and the bottom line is that the IT department will have to adapt otherwise it will end up as a non-entity in some quarters of the business world…

Grazed from Hosting.com. Author: James Schwartz.

When it comes to your business, no detail can be overlooked. Storage in the cloud is no exception. In my last post, What is Cloud Storage?, I wrote about cloud storage in general. Here I want to go through the two main options for cloud storage, NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network).

What is Cloud Storage -NAS

NAS is generally used for file-level computer data storage but NAS provides both storage and a file system. In fact, NAS is useful for more than just general centralized storage provided to client computers in environments with large amounts of data. By providing storage services, NAS can enable simpler and lower cost systems such as load-balancing and fault-tolerant email and web server systems…

Grazed from JourneyToTheCloud. Author: Ben Stephenson.

It’s no secret that the Winter Olympics in Sochi has had its fair share of problems. From infrastructure issues, to handling incidents, to security, to amenities for athletes, it seems like anything that could go wrong has gone wrong. So, what can IT learn from what has unfolded at Sochi?

Have your infrastructure in place beforehand

There are plenty of examples from Sochi about the proper infrastructure not being in place before the games started. There was unfinished construction around the city that consisted of exposed wires, uncovered manholes and buildings that weren’t finished. Many of the hotels were also unfinished. Some didn’t have working elevators, completed lobbies, or even running water (not to mention toilets that don’t flush). There’s a great picture circulating the web of an employee spray painting the grass green outside of an Olympic venue. Even the rings at the opening ceremonies malfunctioned…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Rob Sax, John Reeher.

In 2012, a Government Accountability Office report outlined seven major challenges to adopting the Office of Management and Budget’s cloud-first policy for IT deployments. Of these, ensuring data portability and interoperability within the cloud is the most daunting due to the large number of competing cloud technologies for data storage and retrieval.

Despite the many options available, a lack of mature and open computing standards for data interoperability has hindered cloud adoption. Each technology carries the risk of cloud provider lock-in that creates impediments to easily moving data into, around and out of the cloud…

Grazed from Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Author: Ari Levy.

Rackspace Hosting Inc. co-founder Graham Weston, who took over as chief executive officer this week, is meeting with shareholders face-to-face after the company’s stock plunged on news of his predecessor’s retirement. Weston came to San Francisco, where investors gathered for Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s technology and Internet conference. The returning CEO said he’s sitting down with about a dozen shareholders to reassure them about the company and that he’s “energized.” Taylor Rhodes, Rackspace’s recently appointed president, spoke at the conference.

Rackspace shares tumbled 19 percent on Feb. 11, the day after Lanham Napier, the company’s CEO for eight years, said he’s retiring immediately. Weston, who founded San Antonio-based Rackspace in 1998 and has remained chairman, said that while the news surprised investors, he wanted to avoid following the path of Microsoft Corp., which announced Steve Ballmer’s departure as CEO without having a successor in place…