Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

Like it or not outages are part of life in today’s technology landscape. It seems hardly a day goes by without some kind of attack, outage or interruption. From hacking to power outages to regular old fashion hardware failures, the only certainty is at some point your systems will fail. While many in the industry use the build for failure mantra, many more risk adverse enterprises still need an extra bit of assurance.

Today the MSPAlliance in partnership with Lockton Affinity, the world’s largest privately owned independent insurance broker announced the availability of a new Cloud and Managed Services Insurance. The cyber insurance is aimed at service providers who require comprehensive protection…

Grazed from Kaseya. Author: PR Announcement.

Kaseya, the only vendor to provide a complete IT systems management cloud solution, along with an on-premises solution, today announced an extensive set of new SaaS IT tools. Free versions and subscription license offerings are available, depending on user needs.

The cloud delivers a myriad of potential advantages over on-premises applications, from simplifying new software deployment and maintenance to enabling compliance and enhancing security, all contributing to significant cost savings to IT organizations. Kaseya is committed to its vision of providing the widest and most comprehensive range of automated IT systems management tools and is the industry’s only vendor to offer a complete cloud solution…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Today, VoloMetrix — an enterprise SaaS company providing Social Enterprise Intelligence applications to improve organizational responsiveness and drive productivity — announced it raised $3.3 million in a Series A financing round led by Shasta Ventures. This builds upon the initial seed investment of $1.6 million from Shasta Ventures in April 2012. The latest infusion of capital will allow the company to accelerate development of its Social Enterprise Intelligence platform, pursue new markets, and expand further into organizational functions — including IT departments — to grow the company’s existing customer base.

"Across many of their corporate functions, large organizations are looking for tools to help them better align people resources with their most important business priorities," said VoloMetrix CEO and co-founder Ryan Fuller. "This round of funding will allow us to expand the functionality of our core platform, respond to growing customer demand, and optimize SaaS modules designed to specifically address the needs of sales, engineering, and IT functions."…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudLogix, foremost provider of cloud-based Synchronized Resource Planning (SRP) solutions, announced today the official release of its newest Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool “LoadStar," a routing management application. The LoadStar routing platform manages and controls shipping, and moves shipments with approved carriers, according to the clients business rules. LoadStar makes shipping easy in an otherwise complicated supply chain world.

CloudLogix develops enabling technology for the supply chain market, focusing on allowing customers to synchronize their best-of-breed application to improve supply chain responsiveness and employ world class analytics in applications. With the SaaS approach, LoadStar adds a revolutionary twist to the supply chain industry…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Joel York.

What is SaaS? We seem to need to ask this question every couple of years, because the answer is a bit of a moving target. It was simple enough when SaaS was merely software applications pushed through a Web browser, but now we have to contend with the cloud, mobile and even social. Recently, Scott Maxwell of OpenView partners sparked an interesting debate on the topic on LinkedIn that got me pondering it again.

I’ve weighed in on the “What is SaaS?” question before, however, every time I encounter this debate, I can’t help feeling that it skirts the more important issue: Why SaaS? When trying to create a successful SaaS business model, being SaaS is interesting, but doing SaaS is essential. It’s far less important that your SaaS business model meet the exact definition of SaaS, than it is that your SaaS business model creates sustainable competitive advantage through SaaS…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Backup and management solutions for public cloud storage services vendor CloudBerry Lab has released a new version of CloudBerry Backup adding new capabilities for scheduled and real time backups to any FTP or Secure FTP.

CloudBerry Backup aims to automate encrypted and compressed data backup directly to public cloud storage such as Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Rackspace or OpenStack. The upgrade, CloudBerry Backup 3.4, includes the FTP and Secure FTP server backup storage options…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: James Stirling.

Infor and IBM have announced an agreement which will see Infor offering its enterprise application software on IBM’s public, private and hybrid SmartCloud infrastructure. Infor offers enterprise CRM, ERP, financial management, human resources and business intelligence software. The deal means that Infor’s popular applications such as Infor LN, Infor M3, Infor Lawson, and Infor HCM will be available through IBM’s cloud.

Infor said that many organisations are keen to take advantage of cloud computing to run business critical applications on the cloud, but may require around-the-clock customer service, security and high availability, as well as greater resiliency for mission-critical operations…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

Apple’s iCloud experienced technical problems for several hours early Tuesday morning, although the extent of the outage remains unclear due to lack of information from Apple.
Some of the issues appear to have been resolved, but Apple’s Game Center showed problems with user sign-ins reoccurring at 10:30 a.m. Pacific time, after issues earlier in the morning had been resolved.

Although Apple improved its Services, Stores and iCloud status page late last year, the company still does not publish much detail about the cause of service outages or the number of affected customers…

Grazed from GNC.com. Author: Michael Daconta.

The term “cloud broker” currently has two definitions that are different enough to cause confusion in the government IT community, especially in the frenetic landscape of cloud computing.
Originally, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cloud Computing Reference Architecture defined a cloud broker as an entity (person or organization) that provides intermediary-type services between a cloud consumer and multiple cloud providers. For the Defense Department, the DOD CIO specified that the Defense Information Systems Agency would fulfill the role of Enterprise Cloud Service Broker.

This is the traditional definition of a broker, akin to a stock broker or commodity broker, where an intermediary assists a customer navigate through a complex environment of many options. A better name for this may be “cloud agent.” A second definition of cloud broker pertains to a new type of software that sits on top of cloud providers to abstract, simplify and map various cloud offerings to your environment. Cloud broker software assists organizations in creating solutions in the cloud, migrating solutions to the cloud and moving solutions between clouds…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Davies.

Converting a virtualized data center to a software-defined data center enables automation and self-service. In practice, VMware’s software-defined data center concept restructures the data center’s software and the virtualization admin’s role to provide Infrastructure as a Service.

"Software-defined data center" (SDDC) is a generic term that doesn’t describe any particular vendor’s solution. However, VMware coined the term — a very new concept and one that is not even fully fulfilled by VMware’s current offering. You could implement a software-defined data center with other competitive solutions, but VMware is the only vendor using the SDDC moniker. VMware says that its software-defined data center concept is different from other cloud offerings, with a focus on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)…