Grazed from Whatech. Author: Editorial Staff.

According to Nick Koukoulas, managing director of BSI incorporating NCSI, both users and providers of cloud-based services have been asking for independent, technology-neutral certification to help them make more informed decisions about the services they purchase and use. He said that STAR Certification would provide organisations and consumers with a clear benchmark on which to evaluate the performance of a cloud service provider.

The CSA’s STAR Certification combines assessment for conformance to the well-established ISO/IEC 27001:2005 management system standard and the CSA’s CSA Cloud Control Matrix, a specified set of criteria that measures the capability levels of the cloud service…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Vaultas Companies (www.vaultas.com), a premier provider of collaborative and vendor / carrier neutral colocation data centers in the Upper Midwest, today announced the Grand Opening of its newest Tier III data center located in the historic Blatz Brewery Complex in downtown Milwaukee. The new 10,000 Sq. Ft. facility will meet a growing need in the region for server and data colocation, primary and backup data center, data storage, cloud computing services and application hosting.

"Now more than ever, it is critical for companies to find affordable solutions to housing and protecting the data that drives their business," said Vaultas president, John Unger. "We are excited to bring our IT vendor supported, flexible, scalable data center and cloud computing solutions to southeastern Wisconsin."…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Louis Columbus.

The five highest performing cloud computing stocks year-to-date in the Cloud Computing Index  are Qualys QLYS +5.71% (NASDAQ:QYLS), Juniper Networks JNPR +0.89% (NYSE:JNPR), Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM), F5 Networks FFIV +1.11% (NASDAQ: FFIV) and Salesforce (NYSE:CRM)

A $10K investment in Qualys on January 2^nd of this year is worth $12,253 and $10K invested in F5 Networks is worth $12,069 as of market close yesterday.   IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP share prices are included for comparison.  Qualys continues to be one of the highest-performing stocks in the index.  They specialize in cloud-based compliance and security solutions that enable enterprises to identify security risks to IT infrastructures and protect IT systems from cyber-attacks…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: John Treadway.

DevOps is an exciting and far-reaching shift in IT delivery. The promises are tempting: radically higher productivity, lower cost and more reliable systems.  So I guess it’s finally time for your IT organization to get on the development-operations (DevOps) bandwagon, right? Everybody’s doing it, so don’t delay. The big question isn’t whether, but how and where do you start?

First, go out and hire some DevOps people. Wait, wait — DevOps isn’t a job.  Okay, so you should create a DevOps group or department, right? A great team of people you can train up on DevOps led by a director of DevOps. Hold on! DevOps isn’t a department or function either…

Datadog, the SaaS-based monitoring and data analytics platform that provides a unified view of IT infrastructure today announced that it has raised $15 million in a Series B round led by OpenView Venture Partners, with follow-on investments from Index Ventures, RTP Ventures, Amplify Partners, IA Ventures and Contour Ventures. Dev Ittycheria, OpenView’s Managing Director and former Founder and CEO of BladeLogic, will join the company’s board of directors.

Datadog will use the latest financing to accelerate the development of its next-generation monitoring platform for highly scalable cloud infrastructure. The company will also be aggressively growing its engineering division and expanding its sales and marketing teams in New York and Boston to meet the increasing market demand.

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM today announced it is further expanding its operations across Africa with the opening of two new IBM Innovation Centers in Lagos, Nigeria and Casablanca, Morocco. These new centers aim to spur local growth and fuel an ecosystem of development and entrepreneurship around Big Data and Analytics and cloud computing in the region.

Approximately one in every two medium to large businesses in both South Africa and Kenya already use the cloud. In Nigeria, cloud usage is expected to more than double to 80 percent of businesses by the end of next year. At the same time, organizations around Africa are looking for ways to improve their analytics skills and more accurately tap into the data being produced by mobile devices and tablets – and, better anticipate the needs of their customers by delivering improved services…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Chris Patterson.

As businesses look to leverage cloud technology to drive growth, many times the question IT leaders within the company ask is, “Where do I start? What part of my infrastructure should I move into the cloud first?” IT leaders must pick a place to begin with cloud adoption. The decision becomes easier when teams focus on incremental adoption, starting with small, low-risk applications that can be easily tested and improved through an iterative approach before fully launching. Here are some best practices businesses should consider when getting started with cloud technology.

Identify the true problem and define a solution

The most effective method for getting started with cloud adoption is to identify the greatest pain point in a company’s IT ecosystem. The cloud solution should be targeted and architected to ease that pain point. Often times identifying the biggest IT challenge requires a deep dive into the business and its IT systems. For example, NaviSite recently worked with a company in Syracuse, N.Y. to implement a technology solution to help solve its business challenges. The company’s IT team perceived its infrastructure as the biggest challenge, and was eager to deploy a full Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution…

Grazed from Marketwire. Author: PR Announcement.

SGI, the trusted leader in high performance computing and Big Data, and Cognilytics, a global provider of Big Data and Advanced Analytics solutions and the winner of the SAP North America Partner Excellence Award 2014 for Platform Solutions, announced a partnership to help enterprises monetize their data as a strategic asset.

Combining SGI’s breakthrough HPC technology for Big Data analytics, the recently announced plan to develop a SAP HANA in-memory computing appliance, and Cognilytics’ expertise in implementing technologies such as Hadoop and SAP Platform and Analytics solutions including SAP HANA and Predictive Analysis, the partnership enables the enterprise to closely align analytics initiatives with current business models to fully capitalize on results and achieve business objectives…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

How do many enterprise IT departments approach cloud computing? Their path mirrors that of a person going through the stages of grief: denial, anger, and acceptance.

Stage 1: Ignore the problem
When retail-oriented public cloud providers began to emerge several years ago, there were those in the enterprise who needed ways to share and collaborate with colleagues on documents and files. They picked up cloud services by Box, Dropbox, Google, Apple, and others. Enterprise IT responded by "allowing" the use of these clouds, as long as it didn’t know about it — tech’s version of "don’t ask, don’t tell."

Stage 2: Overreact to the problem
More recently, many IT organizations have cracked down on the use of personal clouds, by enacting policies that explicitly forbid it, by blocking access altogether, or by doing both. Users had to go back to implementing "sneakernets," emailing files, or adopting other less-than-productive approaches. In more enterprises than you’d suspect, users commonly bring in their own mobile hotspots to get around the corporate firewalls…

Grazed from WashingtonPost. Author: Mohanna Ravindranath.

In a presentation to a room full of investors in New York on Tuesday, software giant SAP revealed plans to transition more IT services to the Internet cloud. Co-chief executive Bill McDermott described how the company will move to grow revenue from cloud services through HANA, SAP’s computing platform. We are a formidable company in every capacity, but the cloud is where we’re taking the company,” McDermott said. “Why are we doing this? Because it offers instant consumption, instant innovation, and helps companies grow.”

The company plans to reduce its hardware use by moving more applications onto the HANA platform, McDermott explained. Integrating applications onto one cloud-based platform would simplify IT needs for customers, he said. “In the end, the suite always wins. Always has, always will.”…