Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Many people think of Box as a cloud company. But really, it’s a collaboration company, says Vikrant Karnik, senior vice president of enterprise cloud consulting services for systems integrator Capgemini, a newly minted Box partner. Box has been a poster child for the cloud computing movement, along with companies such as DropBox, SalesForce.com and Amazon Web Services. And it’s been on a roll recently: This winter it secured a $100 million funding round to bring its total fundraising to more than $400 million. It’s expanding globally and rumored to be looking toward an IPO.

The company boasts that 200,000 businesses use Box, including newly announced customers Chevron, Toyota Motor Sales USA, Rosetta Stone and eBay. Last week it made further inroads into the enterprise by announcing a partnership with Capgemini, a company that works regularly with some of the biggest businesses in the country…

Grazed from Dallas Morning Star. Author: Editorial Staff.

Michael Dell is buoyant these days. After a marathon campaign to buy the company he founded and take it private, Dell won approval from shareholders in September and completed the $25 billion deal in October. Dell Inc., which had grown to one of the biggest computer makers in the world during 25 years as a public company, is now privately held. Michael Dell, the 48-year-old company founder and CEO, owns about three-quarters of the company and his investment ally, Silver Lake Partners, owns the rest.

The result, Michael Dell says, is a company that has plenty of resources to expand its $57 billion business and the freedom to move quickly without second guessing from stock analysts and investors. “We’re excited; we’re energized,” he said. “We’re kind of at the start of a great new journey and we have our destiny in our control. We have incredible people…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lee House.

Cloud technology has been touted as the next big frontier for business data management and is already generating powerful tremors of change in the business landscape as nearly 70% of all major companies across the world are now using cloud services and many others are looking to transition to cloud-based ERP and CRM.

Unfortunately, the boon of ultra-efficient cloud data management is also accompanied by the bane of shadow IT. Shadow IT is essentially any hardware or software that has not been officially authorized for access by the central IT department of a company. With the influx of cloud computing and BYOD policies, the sphere of influence of shadow IT has considerably expanded…

Grazed from Mobile Commerce News.  Author: Editorial Staff.

As cloud computing is gaining more and more popularity, people start asking themselves where it’s going.  Its evolution has brought data centre and supporting technology to a whole new level. Cloud computing is not just a tendency any more. It has made it’s way from discovery to becoming an essential part of the business strategy of many organizations.

And choosing the right approach means thinking about the future of this strategy. That’s why it’s important to know the advantages of the cloud platform models. Recently, the hybrid cloud environment has been in the spotlight of discussion. Is it indeed the future of data storage? Most likely…

Grazed from ProofPoint.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The cybersecurity landscape has grown increasingly complex this year. As cloud computing and bring your own device policies have taken center stage in the enterprise, hackers have adapted to the sophistication of the technologies deployed by IT departments.

Large-scale data breaches and cyberthreats hit such trusted firms as Facebook, Dropbox and Adobe, putting millions of users’ sensitive information at risk. It’s clear that data protection in the cloud is an ongoing battle – and as adoption becomes a necessity rather than an option, firms have to prepare themselves to protect their corporate clouds from an ever-changing set of threats…

Grazed from GreatResponder.  Author: Maria Dehn.

The Amazon web services announced its cutting edge cloud computing instances C3 backed by SSD storage and premium processors a few weeks back. It is seeing an unprecedented demand across all domains and regions, which is exerting a heavy pressure on the available cloud resources of the service.

Greatresponder.com – This was informed through a blog post by Jeff Barr an official of the AWS cloud computing services associated with the recently announced cutting edge instances called C3. He writes in his blog that since its launch, C3 instances have been seeing amazingly high demand for modern cloud servers, which are backed by the modern solid state disk SSD storage and premium processors 2.8 GHz Intel E5-2680 v2 ‘Ivy Bridge’ and other latest technologies. This unprecedented demand is putting extra pressure on the existing resources available for this service – sometimes, they are proving to be insufficient to the demands of the customers across all regions…

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence.  Author: James Walker.

No one group has all the expertise needed to create a perfect cloud environment – it needs expertise in application behaviour, datacentre design, network and machine virtualisation, wide area networking and so much more. Getting this all working together calls for collaboration, and the CloudEthernet Forum is the way to do it, says CEF President, James Walker

Sometimes society needs to pause, waiting for one single word or symbol that encapsulates its fundamental need, before moving on. Like a seed crystal dropped into a super-saturated solution, the word “cloud” has become the rallying cry for a range of “as a service” business models now spreading like wildfire. And yet the basic idea – that it makes economic sense to invest heavily in central resources and save money on cheaper access to those resources – has been around since the days of the mainframe computer…

Grazed from FederalTimes.  Author: Nicole Blake Johnson.

A year and a half since its designation as the Pentagon’s cloud service broker, the Defense Information Systems Agency is still working through the logistics of managing cloud services departmentwide.  More than 40requestshad been submitted to DISA for cloud services, said Jennifer Carter, DISA’s component acquisition executive. Of those, DISA has matched a dozen Defense Department customers with potential services to meet their cloud computing needs, including those offered by DISA and the private sector.

But only one of those arrangements has resulted in a contract award, according to DISA. The others are in various stages of the contracting process.  “As we move to what we would consider more full operational capability, we’ll be basically automating how we do that, and also working to establish more maturity on the cloud offerings that DISA has, as well,” Carter said of matching customers with cloud offerings…

Grazed from Eduserv.  Author: Ivan Harris.

In any relationship, breaking up is hard to do. This is frequently true when it comes to IT professionals where there can be a reluctance to walk away and move on from the in-house IT infrastructure they manage. And like any relationship which is near or past its sell by date, failing to move on when the time is right can result in a lot more pain in the longer term. So how can you tell if you and your in-house infrastructure need to go separate ways? Here are five signs you should be aware of:

1. Physical evidence: the most obvious sign is there is no room left for your IT infrastructure to grow and meet your future needs. This could be down to a lack of real estate for rack space or the inability to service the power or cooling needs of what is there already. Either way, if the only way you can grow is by major reconfiguration of people and office arrangements then it is a sure sign that you should consider cloud computing to meet your future needs…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Rebecca Merret.

Private and hybrid cloud models, IT departments acting as cloud brokers, more competition among providers and a maturity in services is where ‘as-a-service’ computing is heading in 2014, say analysts.  Michael Warrilow, research director at Gartner, says more enterprises will look to use public and hybrid cloud models next year as they realise “it’s impossible to private cloud everything”.

“We will see ever-more public cloud adoption … public [cloud] is probably going to be 70 to 80 per cent of cloud workloads,” he says.  “It is hard work to private cloud everything. You have got to be like a cloud provider but you have also got to be like traditional IT as well. So you have got to do security, service delivery, etc. People will be too ambitious. We think they should only target private cloud for the most important and relevant workloads.”…