Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Wither the information technology department? There’s been no end to speculation as of late, as employees bring their own devices to work, marketing chiefs grab more technology budget dollars, and everyone signs up and tends to their own cloud realms. Gartner, the analyst firm created by and for technology professionals, has been predicting that IT departments will be dissolved and dispersed into the business units they serve.

IT leaders recognize that the cloud parade has started without them, and that they have been sidelined to some degree. In a recent survey, a majority of those in enterprises adopting cloud, 61 percent, say business units are choosing, managing and funding their own cloud solutions. In the survey of 133 CIOs, conducted and released by 2nd Watch, only 37 percent of IT leaders estimate that they are delivering the bulk of cloud services sought by business users…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Robert Miggins.

According to Gartner analysts, more than half of IT budgets will be spent on cloud computing in the next few years. There’s no need to speculate on whether cloud adoption will continue to rise in 2014 and beyond – it will. However, exactly how cloud infrastructure is deployed and managed is up for grabs.

While both public and private cloud deployments are on the rise, it’s hybrid cloud environments that currently provide organizations with cloud computing’s best benefits – a trend that will shift in 2014 as the next generation of dedicated servers, or "smart servers," evolve to offer all of hybrid cloud’s core qualities, but manageable as one environment. Today’s hybrid cloud models are complex environments that combine a single-tenant private architecture with a multi-tenant cloud, in order to achieve private cloud’s security and performance benefits along with public cloud’s high availability and security…

Grazed from The Washington Post. Author: Mohana Ravindranath.

IBM has announced plans to commit $1.2 billion to expanding its global Internet cloud computing business – some of this will go toward opening cloud centers in various cities. The Armonk, Ny.-based company plans to launch several new cloud data centers in 13 countries – physical locations from which IBM employees can demonstrate and set up cloud offerings.

This year IBM plans to open 15 new centers in Washington, Hong Kong, London, Toronto, Dallas, and a few cities in Japan, India, China and Mexico, among others. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7.5 billion in 15 cloud-related acquisitions, including SoftLayer, a Dallas-based cloud computing infrastructure company IBM acquired for $2 billion in July…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: PR NewsWire.

The International Association of Cloud and Managed Service Providers, (MSPAlliance), has announced that MSPWorld® Spring 2014 early registration is now open. MSPWorld®, which is the leading event focused on managed services and cloud computing, will take place in Orlando, FL, March 26-28, 2014 at the Marriott World Center.

Early registration is now available for $49 per delegate and will end on January 31, 2014. Normal registration fees are $99 per delegate. "MSPWorld® 2014 will continue its legacy of providing cutting edge content from the leading practitioners and pioneers of cloud and managed services," noted MSPAlliance CEO and founder, Charles Weaver. "We anticipate a great event and look forward to gathering with colleagues and executives from around the world at this must-attend conference."…

Grazed from Voxy. Author: Editorial Staff.

A New Zealand IT company has rolled out a unique version of Microsoft’s Office 365 which it claims will save small business users thousands of dollars. Upper Hutt-based Layer3 has designed a Kiwi-ised Microsoft Office 365 portal that it claims is the next step in cloud computing.

Not only will it enable users to ditch their small business server, but they’ll also be able to ditch their expensive Microsoft user licenses. CEO, Hayden Kirk, claims Layer3’s offering will create significant cost-savings and efficiency gains for smaller companies. "Not only are we supplying the document storage facilities, but the unique bit is that we’re also supplying all the Windows programs and applications that you need to work on your documents and manage your systems…

The cloud market is in a state of unrest. There are cloud computing, cloud storage, cloud enablement, cloud management and cloud services offerings, among others. This has pushed many organizations to spend 2013 trying to wade through the choices available for their IT needs, and these organizations are no doubt more confused now than when they started. The approaches to deploying the cloud are countless, and 2013 saw more messages on the benefits of the cloud than ever before, but those messages often contradicted one another. The good news is that 2014 is here, and that 12-month span will be the pivotal period where enterprises, not the cloud companies, determine the real direction of the cloud.

Why Some Enterprises Aren’t Sold on the Cloud…Yet

Grazed from MSPAlliance.  Author: Event Announcement.

MSPWorld® the World’s Premier Managed Services and Cloud Computing Event, is coming to Orlando, Florida! The event will take place March 27-28, 2014, at the Orlando World Center Marriott. Since its inception, MSPWorld has been the only event with a single, vendor-agnostic focus of supporting Managed Service providers and their respective ecosystems.

MSPWorld is an MSPAlliance event and is the ONLY event in the managed services industry brought to you by MSPs. In other words, MSPWorld is driven by those that have had actual real-world experiences and successes in the managed services industry AS a managed service provider. Frequent MSPWorld attendees include senior analysts from Forrester Research, Gartner, influential members of the IT channel and business consumer press and other business executives that have a keen interest in the managed services and cloud market. And remember, MSPWorld is open to non-members as well…

Grazed from The Washington Post. Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon’s cloud computing service plays host to some of the most prolific malware distributors on the Internet, security researchers have discovered. Of the 10 sites that pump out malware most frequently, four are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) – including the number one site, download-instantly.com, according to a threat report published Wednesday by the IT security firm Solutionary.

The report comes a week after we learned that hackers allegedly used Amazon’s cloud hosting solution as a platform for a botnet that scraped personal information from potentially millions of LinkedIn subscribers. Cloud computing is becoming an attractive way for online criminals to launch attacks against businesses and consumers because of its low cost. It allows users to instantly set up an array of virtual servers that can be ordered to perform both legitimate and abusive functions…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Daniel Burrus.

Most technologies aren’t really "tools," as many people call them. They’re "enablers." Let’s take the Internet, for example. The Internet doesn’t do anything by itself. It’s what’s connected to it – what you do with it – that makes it powerful. In that same way, the cloud is really an enabler. The cloud itself has no value. It’s what you do with the cloud that makes it valuable. As I like to say, "It’s not the tool that matters; it’s how you use it."

The cloud, which refers to companies using remote servers that store data and allow users to access information from anywhere, takes three different evolutionary forms. Most of us first started using a public cloud provided by companies such as Microsoft, Google, or Apple, where we stored documents remotely on their servers, or we used a cloud service like Flickr to store and share photos…

Grazed from IBM. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM has launched new architecture for its x86-based servers to improve availability in cloud computing and data analytics. The architecture named sixth generation enterprise X6 Architecture integrates eXFlash memory-channel storage, a DIMM-based storage providing up to 12.8 terabytes of ultrafast flash storage close to the processor to reduce write latency which helps in improving processing performance in analytics software applications.

IBM says for memory-hungry applications, X6 delivers three times the scalable memory of current competitors’ and IBM x86-based systems to support cloud and analytics. The X6 architecture eliminates the need for external SAN/NAS storage units. X6 architecture supports multiple generations of CPUs. Server models supported by this new architecture currently include the System x3850 X6 four-socket system, System x3950 X6 eight-socket system, and the IBM Flex System x880 scalable compute nodes.