Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Over the next five years, cloud computing is still the highest priority for investment, according to the latest piece of research from Compuware, alongside Research in Action. 16.5% of companies cite cloud as the most important area of their IT portfolio to strengthen, ahead of mobile IT (13.5%), business analytics, big data and in-memory (11.3%).

It’s not a surprise that cloud is pretty big news this year too. Cloud infrastructure (12.5%) is the top area of investment for IT in 2013. Renegotiation of outsourcing contracts (9.6%) and investing in big data and analytics (9.2%) rounded off the top three…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

More companies may be implementing cloud computing, but many don’t understand how their data is being secured as a result. That’s according to a new study that found security and privacy know-how needs to be improved among organizations seeking the benefits of the cloud.

Confidence in the Cloud

The study, conducted by the Ponemon Institute and Thales E-security, found that 53 percent of organizations are putting sensitive data in the cloud. The survey, featured in the Cloud Times, also found that 14 percent more companies were confident about the cloud compared to last year’s results. However, when it comes to understanding how their cloud provider is protecting that confidential data, just 30 percent of companies say they are informed enough about the topic…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

What kinds of metrics should you demand from your cloud provider or data center? In their just-released book, Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture, authors Thomas Erl, Zaigham Mahmood and Ricardo Puttini spell out some of the key varaibles that make for a successful service level agreement for cloud services.

Quality of service is essential to meet cloud consumers’ business requirements, and the following are examples Erl and his co-authors provide as ways to measure and ultimately assure this quality:

• Availability Rate Metric: "Percentage of service uptime; measured as total uptime against total time"; expressed in percentages.
• Outage Duration Metric: "Duration of a single outage"; measured by date and time outage began and ended, expressed in hours and minutes.
• Mean-Time Between Failures (MTBF) Metric: "Expected time between consecutive service failures"; measured by normal operational period duration and number of failures; expressed as average number of days…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cost savings… elasticity…. scalability…. load “bursting”…. storage on demand… These are the advertised benefits of cloud computing, and they certainly help make for a solid business case for using either third-party services or a virtualized data center. But after the agreements are signed, systems and processes are set up, and users are retrained, something unexpected happens.

The initial use cases are realized, but then additional benefits begin to emerge — sort of like the icing on the cake, but often, these unforeseen benefits provide far more value to the business than initially planned. Over the past couple of years, I have spoken with many CIOs and executives who not only talk about the unplanned challenges, but also cite pleasant surprises as well. Here are some examples of such unexpected benefits that emerge as cloud projects roll along:..

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge.  Author: Rich Miller.

This week’s Industry Perspectives represented an intersection of top-of-mind topics for data center professionals and executives. If you missed any, here they are in a neat package. Enjoy!

Are You Up in the Air with Cloud Computing Benefits? – It’s going to take some time for the entire IT world to get on board with cloud computing, but the benefits are well worth it. A mix of private and public cloud services is a great compromise for companies who are worried about security issues, writes Alan McMahon of Dell…

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

Today, e2b teknologies, a Sage Software partner and developer of cloud business applications, announces that the company will exhibit the e2b anytime apps product line this week in booth #1155 at Sage Summit 2013. The annual conference for Sage customers and partners will be held July 21-26 at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center in Washington, DC.

The product line to be exhibited at Sage Summit includes cloud business applications such as Anytime 500, Sage 500 ERP extensions for distributors and manufacturers; Anytime Collect, accounts receivable credit and collections management software; Anytime Supply Chain, integrated supply chain management system; and Anytime Commerce, a fully configurable B2B ecommerce storefront that integrates directly with Sage ERP. Product information and e2b teknologies’ representatives will be available at booth #1155 from July 21-26 to answer any questions regarding the products listed above…

Grazed from NewsWire.  Author : PR Announcement.

Napier Healthcare Solutions, a leading healthcare software provider, today announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft based on a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering which will help hospitals deploy Napier’s flagship Hospital Information System (HIS) on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform. The HIS is an integral part of Napier’s comprehensive EHRm product suite.

Hospitals of any size can benefit from Napier’s HIS on the Windows Azure platform through seamless and secure access from anywhere in the world. Built on a rock-solid foundation that powers some of the biggest businesses in the world, the platform is built to handle millions of requests per day and offer incredible stability and automatic load balancing…

Grazed from The Economist.  Author: Editorial Staff.

WHEN senior European Union officials recently went to America to seek answers about Edward Snowden’s claims of wholesale snooping, including on EU institutions, they were told to mind their own business. Didn’t the visitors know how much spying was done by their own members? Britain, too, warned the European Commission that security matters were outside its remit. The Eurocrats’ only consolation is that the world’s spooks still think them important enough to be spied on.

Yet at least one person cheered the disclosure of PRISM, which helps American spooks collect information held by big internet firms such as Google and Facebook. “Thank you, America, for PRISM, which has helped us to make a very strong data protection law in Europe,” declared Viviane Reding, the justice commissioner, whose campaign for new EU-wide rules on data privacy has unexpectedly revived. Ms Reding is a loose cannon…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Colin Steele.

Open source virtualization is still a niche technology, despite the rise of multi-hypervisor infrastructures.  Recent open source virtualization software releases have packed in new features with impressive specs, and there’s a clear appetite for VMware Inc. alternatives in enterprise data centers.

One might think these two factors would combine to provide a major boost in open source virtualization’s market share, but that hasn’t happened. Among VMware competitors, only Microsoft’s proprietary Hyper-V has benefited, according to data and several solution providers and analysts who work with multi-hypervisor clients…

Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Irmee Layo.

Open-Xchange has been in the market for more than 10 years, since it began its operations in 2005. The company was one of the pioneers of SaaS (software-as-a-service) that provided innovative, open-source and cost effective means of business management and cloud solutions. Since then, email handling and other web-based communication, document management and collaboration, contact’s listing and calendar posting and many other office productivity applications were never the same for businesses.

Open-Xchange has helped revolutionize business transactions and integrate them with social networks, mobile access and media advertisements. This was made possible via the company’s groupware cloud application and email database…