Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Cliff Saran.

IT departments will need to ramp up skills in developing for the cloud, to support mobile apps that make use of back-end services. According to Gartner, by 2016, 40% of mobile application development projects will leverage cloud back-end services. Gartner defines cloud mobile back-end services as "a specialised form of platform as a service (PaaS) to support mobile application development".

These cloud services provide the back-end capabilities commonly required by mobile applications, such as user management, data storage, push notifications and social network integration. In addition, some cloud mobile back-end services allow developers to deploy server-side code. "Cloud mobile back-end services stand to become a key component of the application development ecosystem," said Gordon Van Huizen, research director at Gartner…

Grazed from FortMills Times. Author: Editorial Staff.

ExtraHop Networks, the leading provider of real-time IT operational intelligence, has been named a finalist in two Best of Interop categories. ExtraHop’s flagship EH8000 appliance, the industry’s first 20Gbps real-time analysis platform, has been named a finalist in the Management and Monitoring category while ExtraHop for Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been named a finalist in the Cloud Computing and Virtualization category. ExtraHop is the only finalist in two award categories. ExtraHop CEO Jesse Rothstein will also deliver a joint presentation at Interop with a leading online brokerage firm to demonstrate how the ExtraHop platform is transforming their IT operations through cross-tier visibility of all applications and infrastructure.

The EH8000 is the first all-in-one performance management solution capable of real-time, L2–L7 transaction analysis at a sustained 20Gbps of throughput for both encrypted and unencrypted traffic. ExtraHop’s software architecture makes the EH8000 the undisputed price-performance leader in the IT operations management industry, enabling companies to extract application, infrastructure, and transaction details from massive volumes of wire data with a single appliance…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

HotLink® Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for heterogeneous virtualization management, today announced it has been included in the list of "Cool Vendors" in the “Cool Vendors in Cloud Management, 2013” report by Gartner, Inc.

HotLink’s award-winning solutions, HotLink SuperVISOR and HotLink Hybrid Express, dramatically simplify IT management complexity for heterogeneous and hybrid computing infrastructure. The solutions are built on a game-changing transformation engine that enables native interoperability of all major hypervisors and public cloud platforms using existing management consoles such as VMware vCenter and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

Major changes in cloud computing have occurred in recent months. Enterprises have seen a barrage of new service offerings, ranging from cloud service brokerages to ground-breaking storage services from the big players. Services like Microsoft SkyDrive are great for automating key processes. Who doesn’t benefit from comprehensive storage and backup solutions? The dominance of the app market has spread into the cloud arena to address these needs.

While game and sports apps dominate consumer markets, the enterprise has a seemingly endless array of productivity apps to choose from. CloudLock, a leading cloud security vendor, compiled a list of the most often used cloud apps based on Google results. At the top of the list are applications used for communications and collaboration, storage, and document sharing. These will all have an impact on changes in how your organization is run in 2013. They also contribute to the phenomenon of assembling numerous cloud services into one cohesive process…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

If OpenStack is the embodiment of the community cloud model, then VMware vCloud Suite is an example of a focused, single-vendor cloud. The goal of vCloud is to create a data center that’s completely virtual — all resources, all locations. And while vCloud is neither free, open source, hypervisor-agnostic nor backed by a consortium of vendors, it could be a good choice for companies that see the benefit in commercial software’s documentation, centralized support and focused development and enhancement.

VMware vCloud Suite creates a virtual data center defined by software, and it is close to a completely transparent resource pool. It also aims to link the cloud to productivity and business agility value at all levels, unlike the positioning for most cloud computing services, which tends to focus on the public cloud or on a simple extension to virtualization. The cloud platform builds on the wide success of VMware Inc.’s virtualization products — vSphere and vMotion…

Grazed from Convey Computer. Author: PR Announcement.

Convey Computer today announced that Nimbix, a leader in accelerated high-performance cloud computing, has partnered with Convey to expand its Convey hybrid-core (HC) infrastructure, as part of “The Accelerated Genomics Cloud” (TAGC) promotion, which provides free runtime for qualified applicants. The Convey HC-2ex platform will be used in research projects for customers who take advantage of the promotion.

A total of $25,000 worth of cloud processing time will be awarded to genomics researchers to boost their bioinformatics analysis. Top award recipients will receive $1,000 of runtime each, which is enough to map up to 3 Tbases of reads, providing the ability to analyze, for example, a dozen human genomes at significant coverage. Remaining qualified applicants will receive $500 of runtime…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing has the power to change the way students learn and the way staff teach, especially in rapidly transforming regions such as Central and Eastern Europe. To prepare students for a world based on technology, education institutions across the region are adopting Microsoft Office 365 to serve a variety of their cloud computing needs.

Goals met through their focus on technology include:

• Improved communication. Office 365 enables students and staff to communicate across timezones and countries with the click of a mouse. As more and more young people become accustomed to real-time communication and “always on” technologies, Central and Eastern European schools are using Microsoft Lync Online to enrich their learning environments and student outcomes…

Grazed from ProofPoint. Author: Editorial Staff.

Every day, new types of malware and other risks emerge with the rapidly evolving IT environment, threatening data protection and forcing enterprises to consider new technologies for detection and prevention. More experts are pointing to the benefits of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, which can help resolve some of these newer threats.

In an interview with Computer Weekly, Shlomo Kramer, founder of Imperva, revealed that many organizations have maintained the same budgets for security even though the threat landscape has changed. "Most of the security spend is still allocated to network firewalls and antivirus (AV) systems, but attacks are no longer broad, notoriety-seeking and naïve; they are very targeted, sophisticated and well-funded," he stated…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Pete Babb.

"We’ve all heard of public, private, and hybrid clouds, but what happens when you connect a giant data center on a closed network and sell your cloud services exclusively to a select group of businesses with shared needs?" asks Ken Jennings (yes, the former "Jeopardy" champ). The answer is the "community cloud," which is not quite a hybrid cloud, but more of a specialized cloud available strictly for member businesses.

The NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) Technologies has built one of the first such community clouds — targeted at the financial sector, obviously — called the Capital Markets Community Platform, which provides all member companies with the horsepower needed for the billions of transactions per day they make, but its appeal is more than just raw computing capability…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Rajesh Rege.

Expected to be an inflection point for cloud computing, 2013 holds a great potential for innovation driven by a surge in demand for reliable, secure, high speed and resilient mobile and broadband networks and infrastructure. According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index, global cloud computing traffic will increase 12-fold from 130 exabytes to reach a total of 1.6 zettabytes annually by 2015.

Cloud is the fastest growing component of data center traffic, growing to more than 33 per cent of the total by 2015. A research by GigaOM expects the cloud market to grow to $158.8 billion in 2014. The opportunities will lie in both existing cloud architectures and emerging new architectures as organizations take advantage of differing deployment models…