Grazed from IOL SciTech.  Author: Ryan Peter.

It seems that just about everyone is offering cloud storage these days and it’s something you should be using too. But how do you choose the right cloud storage option that suits you?  What is cloud storage? Well, simply put, it’s all about having a backup hard drive drive on the Internet that you can access from just about any computer that has Internet access. So instead of lugging around a USB stick (and losing it) or an external hard drive, users can copy files to their cloud storage and download them to another computer.

But cloud storage is more than just a place to leave files online. You can also use cloud storage apps to automatically back up certain folders on your hard drive so that the second you create a file in that folder it uploads to your cloud drive. So if your hard drive crashes, getting all your important files back is an absolute cinch and you don’t need to worry about backing up to an external drive every day…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Andre W. Klein.

n recent times, one of the most popular concepts mentioned in the IT environment has been, without doubt, that of Cloud Computing. This is a set of technologies based on infrastructure as well as on service, offering real advantages to important organizations whose main objective is to provide companies and/or end users with environments that are secure, flexible, personalized and dynamic.

In other words, Cloud Computing is essentially “Internet-based Computing”, which provides its users with countless virtual services and resources. In this new concept, applications are considered as services that are accessible to the user provided you have an Internet connection…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Paul Magnone.

Over the past few weeks I’ve heard many recipes for what will drive business success and yet firms large and small continue to struggle with how to jumpstart growth. Brilliant speakers at the Brandworks Conference (run by Lindsey, Stone and Briggs) in May and at the Cloud Computing and Big Data Expo and the World Innovation Forum (WIFNY) both in New York last week provided insights that must translate into action for companies looking for major growth or simply trying to do better.

Some of the most thought provoking ideas came at WIFNY including comments from Ankur Jain, founder and chair of the Kairos Society. He and a few of his colleagues lead a set of student-run businesses that work on the next innovation waves and those we can barely imagine yet. As big data, cloud and mobility ramp up, Mr Jain says “out of the box and into the next box thinking is required”. More on Mr Jain and his Kairos colleagues in future posts.  Rather than be blindsided by new trends, the following are four actionable insights on what we must exploit to grow…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Rip Empson.

In today’s world of email, social networks, SMS, chat applications and cloud services, there are plenty of ways to share share a file, folder, photo or video. And as intelligent devices and cloud computing infrastructure proliferate, and processing power and capacity improve, we expect file transfer and sharing to be speedy — and simple. Everything is about “realtime” and accessibility these days (not that we’re complaining, but thanks Twitter).

Yet, file-sharing still isn’t quite there. Even with all the options — whether it be the Skypes, Facebooks, Google Drives, WeTransfers and YouSendIts of the world or the Dropboxex, etc. — we’ve still got one eye out for a better way. (Here’s xkcd putting a fine point on it.) The file sharing service to end all file sharing services…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Netflix runs a lot of Hadoop jobs on the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform, and on Friday the video-streaming leader open sourced its software to make running those jobs as easy as possible. Called Genie, it’s a RESTful API that makes it easy for developers to launch new MapReduce, Hive and Pig jobs and to monitor longer-running jobs on transient cloud resources.

In the blog post detailing Genie, Netflix’s Sriram Krishnan makes clear a lot more about what Genie is and is not. Essentially, Genie is a platform as a service running on top of Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce Hadoop service. It’s part of a larger suite of tools that handles everything from diagnostics to service registration…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Jeff Bertolucci.

The iPad, like all mobile devices, is inherently cloud-centric. Without an Internet link to ferry data, the tablet computer’s capabilities are severely limited. And its dependence on cloud-oriented apps will only increase. Gartner predicts that 40% of mobile app projects by 2016 will leverage cloud back-end services.

Cloud-focused apps, such as storage and syncing services as well as productivity suites, have a particularly strong appeal to business users. The iPad, of course, is designed to work well with Apple’s in-house cloud services, such as iCloud and iTunes, but an increasing number of third-party apps provide attractive alternatives, particularly for enterprises managing devices from multiple vendors: iPads, Windows PCs, Android phones or tablets, and so on…

Grazed from Wall Street Cheat Sheet.  Author: James Flaherty.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) will headline a list of new clients for Oracle’s (NASDAQ:ORCL) most recent foray into cloud software.  Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Thursday hinted at the fact that his company had new alliances with their cloud technology. Microsoft then announced that on Monday they would be holding a press conference to highlight a new partnership with Oracle. According to The Wall Street Journal, the headliners for the press event are Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Oracle President Mark Hurd, and the president of Microsoft’s division with server and cloud software, Satya Nadella.

In Oracle’s earnings call Thursday, Ellison let slip that his company would be announcing new partnerships for its cloud computing software — also known as SaaS, for software as a service…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Ellen Messmer.

Trusting the cloud to handle sensitive transactions and security services isn’t for every enterprise, but organizations from banks to app developers are starting to give it a try.  Gartner predicts the global cloud computing market will grow 18.5% this year to $131 billion, with business process-as-a-service accounting for the biggest chunk of that at 28%. According to Gartner’s numbers, management, security and automation accounts for just 2.8%.

Even more traditional and conservative types of companies, such as banks, are venturing into the cloud to carry out complex processes that, in some cases, they find they can do far more efficiently outside of internal data centers…

Grazed from I.T. World Canada.  Author: Howard Solomon.

An oracle, according to one online dictionary, is a statement given by a highly regarded person that can be ambiguous or obscure.  By that measure Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison issued a few oracles on Thursday.   During a conference call with financial analysts after releasing the company’s latest results, Ellison briefly mentioned an upcoming version of its database that will more directly challenge SAP’s HANA in-memory platform.  

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Raj Sabhlok.

Companies are moving more and more of their IT functions online in the form of publicly-available cloud computing services, software-as-a-service applications and the like. That’s not really a big surprise. Where the controversies, or at least the questions, arise are in the company’s IT department.

For instance, does the rise of the public cloud render the enterprise IT department obsolete? With so much IT activity performed by third-party SaaS and cloud service providers, what activities are left for the company’s internal IT team? And what does the future look like for enterprise IT?  Spoiler alert: The answers are “no,” “plenty” and “cloudy.” Let me explain…