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…

Grazed from WireService.ca. Author: PR Announcement.

"Files on the Cloud?", the art of storing and sharing files on the internet and accessible anywhere using any device such as laptops, mobile devices, tablets etc… is a trending phenomenon with incredible benefits. But with the latest reports of corporate espionage in the news, storing your files on the cloud is also an incredible risk.

If you are not familiar with the internet cloud or cloud file sharing, it is basically a means for people to store their files on the internet, and have them synchronized on all of your devices. For example, if you have several mobile products, you could use the cloud to store your pictures and have them accessible on all of your devices automatically. There’s no need to copy, paste, move etc… That means of transferring files is thing of the past. With the cloud, it just does it for you without even looking…

Grazed from eCommerceTimes. Author: Jeffrey M. Kaplan.

Computer and software companies have been battling for the hearts and minds of students for decades, and now school administrators are becoming the target of smart Software as a Service and cloud computing service providers. The most notorious examples of using classroom marketing tactics to gain a long-term strategic advantage are Apple and Google.

Apple made a concerted effort to win over a new generation of corporate end-users long before they ever entered the workplace by enticing them with brightly colored, easy-to-use eMacs. Google has been giving away Google Apps to public schools and college students for years to get them hooked on its simple collaboration tools…

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence. Author: Marcus Austin.

The scientists at IBM have invented a new technology to speed up internet data transfer rates to four times the current rates with speeds approaching 400 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) and all done at extremely low power. As Big Data and Internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, future networking standards have to support higher data rates. For example, in 1992, 100 Gigabyte of data was transferred per day, whereas today, traffic has grown to two Exabytes per day, a 20 million fold increase.

To support the increase in traffic, scientists at IBM Research and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have been developing ultra-fast and energy efficient analog-to-digital converter (ADC) technology to enable complex digital equalization across long-distance fibre channels. The speed boost is based on a device that can be used to improve transferring Big Data between clouds and data centres four times faster than current technology. At this speed 160 Gigabytes, the equivalent of a two-hour, 4K ultra-high definition movie or 40,000 songs, could be downloaded in only a few seconds…