Grazed from Gadget. Author: Editorial Staff.

A cloud-based IT delivery model can speed up application development and provide flexible environments to accommodate the dynamic and unpredictable needs of the organisation and its customers. As cloud services continue to evolve and become increasingly vital for success, it’s critical to understand the inhibitors that are leaving many unsure about how to jump into the cloud, including: managing complexity, creating or preserving IT agility, and maintaining control of valuable business data.

Complexity

Dealing with complexity is often a significant inhibitor for businesses that are considering incorporating public cloud into their IT environment. Companies often struggle with the idea of ‘How do I get started?’ Choosing from the variety of services offering different service levels, different virtualisation and compute platforms, and different data management frameworks can be a daunting task for any CIO’s team. In addition, many organisations are perplexed with how to manage elements of IT across a blend of private and public cloud resources, particularly the intricacies of managing data across disparate locations and platforms in a hybrid environment…

Grazed from AFR. Author: Paul Smith.

Adrian Di Marco, executive chairman of ASX-listed software company ­TechnologyOne, has hit out at a growing army of “false prophet” consultants and systems integrators who claim to be able to provide expert advice on cloud computing strategy, saying they waste customers’ money and are a blight on the industry.

Mr Di Marco was speaking to The Australian Financial Review to mark the signing of a new $15 million contract for TechnologyOne to provide a state-wide school administration software package to the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria. He said the deal was evidence that customers were beginning to ­recognise the value of signing on with vendors who built the software, ­implemented it and then took responsibility for managing the infrastructure…

Grazed from CIOL.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Interoute, owner operator of Europe’s largest cloud services platform, has completed ISO 20000 certification across its Prague Operations Centre and Amsterdam, Berlin and Geneva Data Centre operations.

The comprehensive scope of the ISO 20000 certification aligns to ITIL service management industry best practices applied to Interoute’s Unified Computing. The certification represents a significant milestone in Interoute’s continued efforts to provide quality and secure outsourced business technology solutions to the world’s leading organisations…

Grazed from Voxy.co.nz.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A unique-to-New Zealand version of the famous and popular Dropbox application has been created by an Upper Hutt-based company.  Layer3 has developed Filecloud, an application that does everything Dropbox does, but adds on some additional bells and whistles.  Chief executive, Hayden Kirk, says the application took six months to develop, but has been snapped up quickly by willing customers.

It’s designed to serve as a basic application with a smooth and familiar user interface for business which just want a simple file storage option, and as a sophisticated administration and document management tool for IT departments that need serious analysis and auditing of file management information…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Chris Preimesberger.

Let the positioning begin. The big, all-purpose IT vendors are beginning to confront each other about how best to use and support OpenStack cloud computing software within their own environments, even though they are hardly experts on the topic.  These guys had little or nothing to do with the development of the fast-rising data center system, yet they are quickly jumping aboard a train that appears to be built for the long haul.

Remember the oft-used line about how innovation usually happens elsewhere? Well, that’s OpenStack. It was born and raised partly in some old military buildings on the site of a former federal airfield and not in some gleaming, new Silicon Valley campus…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Don Simpson.

Whenever I get the chance to talk with our sales divisions, I always like to weave in a statement that gets their attention. During a recent meeting to discuss Professional Services, I started by saying, “The products that you resell are worthless!” After a pause for effect, I added, “Unless the customer actually uses the product.” I now had their attention.

What made me think of this was my time in the federal government as an agency CIO. Within the first few days on the job, I was briefed on a multi-million dollar software purchase that occurred more than two years prior. This agency had been spending several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on maintenance and the software was up for renewal again. However, the software was pure “shelfware,” still in shrink-wrap: There was no adoption…

Grazed from Klipfolio.  Author: PR Announcement.

 Klipfolio, a global leader in cloud-based Web and mobile dashboard solutions, today announced it has secured $1.7-million (CDN) in funding, led by the BDC Venture Capital IT Fund, Mistral Venture Partners and including several leading early-stage investor groups from both Canada and the United States including Fundfire (Ottawa), BOLDstart Ventures (New York), Acadia Woods (New York), and CommonAngels Ventures (Boston).

The Ottawa-based startup has recently grabbed the attention of industry watchers and many of the world’s most recognized brands for its real-time business dashboard, a flexible and powerful solution that allows business users to unite cloud-based and on-premise data sources to create meaningful dashboards without the cost or complexity of traditional business intelligence tools. Klipfolio has experienced dramatic year-over-year organic revenue growth and has a growing customer list that includes Fortune 500 companies…

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…