Grazed from RedHat. Author: PR Announcement.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that British Airways, a global airline and market leader in the travel industry, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on its infrastructure. Through this Red Hat technology, British Airways is benefiting from a highly available and scalable IT architecture.

As the flag carrier airline of the United Kingdom (U.K.), British Airways has operated for more than 90 years, and today is the largest airline in the U.K. based on fleet size, international flights and international destinations, flying more than 40 million passengers to 177 destinations around the globe each year. In line with the company’s growth and additional business requirements for its production environment – and, in particular, to support the production environment for its external website, BA.com – British Airways needed to expand its IT infrastructure. As consumers have shifted their airline ticket buying patterns, British Airways supports on average in excess of 450,000 visitors to BA.com per day…

Grazed from AutomatedTrader. Author: Cecelia Taylor.

Cloud computing was developed specifically to overcome issues of localization and limitations of power and physical space. Yet many data center facilities are in danger of running out of power, cooling, or physical space. Mellanox offers an alternative and cost-efficient solution. Mellanox’s new MetroX® long-haul switch system makes it possible to move from the paradigm of multiple, disconnected data centers to a single multi-point meshed mega-cloud.

In other words, remote data center sites can now be localized through long-haul connectivity, providing benefits such as faster compute, higher volume data transfer, and improved business continuity. MetroX provides the ability for more applications and more cloud users, leading to faster product development, quicker backup, and more immediate disaster recovery…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Thomas O’Toole.

Bloomberg BNA asked leading attorneys, government officials, and online experts for their views on the most important legal developments in online law during 2013 and on what policy areas they believed would be the most important to their practices in 2014. We asked that the responses be short and to the point, similar to a “tweet” or status update.

The result is the collection of brief insights published below, many of which have been lightly edited and categorized by subject matter. The comments below–each attributed to the author, the author’s law firm or organization, website, Twitter username and blog–are published for informational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Ashar Baig.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a user-led as well as user-centric phenomenon that is being embraced by CIOs in droves. They understand the new workplace reality is that the knowledge worker is now mobile; therefore, CIOs are mandating IT to make information available on external mobile devices. According to research firm Gartner, in 2013 mobile phones overtook PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

As employees ever-more mobile, they increasingly are relying on their mobile devices to meet a wide spectrum of interests and needs. And their ability to utilize smartphones and tablets to do their jobs anywhere is resulting not just in increased employee productivity but also greater organizational agility…

Grazed from ScientficComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft has named Satya Nadella, head of its cloud computing business, as the company’s next CEO. He immediately replaces Steve Ballmer, who had announced in August 2013 that he would retire from the world’s biggest software company after more than 13 years at its helm. Here’s a look at key moments in Microsoft’s history.

• 1975: Microsoft is founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
• 1980: Ballmer joins the company.
• 1981: IBM ships first personal computers running MS-DOS operating system…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Jonathan Feldman.

After speaking last week on a webinar about government cloud computing and doing some thinking-out-loud with colleagues, I’ve come to the conclusion that infrastructure-as-a-service will get bypassed by platform-as-a-service at most enterprises — because infrastructure folks will continue to act as an impediment to progress.

The benefits of cloud computing are clear: Improved agility and efficiency through dynamic provisioning; and lower labor costs and more fault tolerance through automation. The private versus public cloud debate has been over for some time. There are use cases for each. But getting IaaS into your enterprise probably won’t happen soon…

Grazed from v3.co.uk. Author: Madeline Bennett.

The availability of cloud services, and pressure to abide by rules and laws, is having a knock-on effect on firms’ storage requirements and leading to more investment in IT storage, according to the results of recent V3 reader research. Forty-one percent of IT professionals taking part in the study said they plan to spend more or the same as last year on storage during 2014. Data growth, regulatory compliance and cloud computing were cited as key drivers for businesses’ storage budget plans.

However, the research revealed that 41 percent of IT professionals "see no need" to upgrade from their current storage approach to newer approaches like converged storage, to get better value from their investments. Converged storage, where storage components and compute hardware are combined into one piece of hardware, is intended to increase the speed of access to important business data, simplify IT administration and offer better value…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Chris Bliss.

Listen: as cloud computing consultants, we drink the cloud computing koolaid. We’ve implemented cloud-based software for businesses of all sizes, across just about every industry. We’ve seen it revolutionize how businesses work. We’ve also seen security become a very real and increasingly serious concern.

Don’t worry, it’s safe!

When we first began showing cloud-based software to clients, the idea of storing your data remotely was a new concept. Like clockwork, clients were all concerned about security. Is my data safe? What happens if the software company folds? Can we be hacked? Like good cloud computing consultants everywhere, we’d listen, smile, shake our heads, and explain why clients needn’t worry, how storing your data on 3rd party servers was safer than storing it locally, how Google had armed guards…

Grazed from BGR. Author: Chris Smith.

Smartphone and tablet users might not use their devices in the most secure fashion – both when it comes to data security and device integrity. But coupling mobile devices with the available advanced services such as app ecosystems and cloud data services is a must, a new infographic from Kloudless shows, specifically when it comes to cloud-related features.

The cloud services provider’s infographic says that average smartphone users spends 95 minutes per day using their phones, whether for business or pleasure. Most interestingly, without cloud computing, average mobile users would lose 240 productive hours per year. Such productivity loss would cost users $6,800 per year and would amount to a 6-week vacation…

Grazed from InnovationEnterprise.  Author: Event Announcement.

The Big Data & Analytics Innovation Summit, to be held in Singapore, on February 27-28, 2014, provides 25+ industry case studies and over 20 hours of networking opportunities across 2 days, and brings together thought-leaders from the many industries.

As many organizations are now working with unmanageably large data sets, the importance of using and maintaining an analytics platform which can cope with this scale of information is essential. This presents both a challenge and opportunity as organizations must identify patterns and gain actionable results in order to gain a crucial advantage over competitors…