Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Alex Barrett.

Until recently, IT pros responsible for servers, network components, storage infrastructure and applications could be forgiven for not thinking much about the future of desktops that run Windows. What happened on the desktop stayed on the desktop. But like a distant war that is suddenly being fought on native soil, Microsoft’s struggles to revitalize and preserve its venerable desktop business are having an impact in the data center.

The assault on the Windows desktop is intense. Microsoft’s OS business is under fire from Apple and consumer devices. The profitable Office productivity applications are under attack by countless new Software as a Service (SaaS), mobile and Web apps. Even back-end services such as Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory are no longer safe from incursions by cloud-based products…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: James Furbush.

Aside from pricey legacy identity and access management vendors like Oracle, Novell and CA, a new breed of SaaS products has popped up in recent years to help organizations better integrate mobile endpoints and SaaS apps into their environments through single sign-on. This movement is turning "a once-boring enterprise niche into something sexy," said Gregg Kreizman, an identity access management analyst at Gartner, Inc., a Stamford, Conn.-based research firm.

As is often the case with enterprise technology, both types of identity management vendors — which exist to serve distinct market needs — have started offering similar feature sets as one another to provide customers a full range of governance, provisioning and de-provisioning, group policy, and single sign-on access…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey Nelson.

If you’re thinking about switching your business to the cloud, it’s good to know a few pieces of cloud-cabulary so you don’t get lost in the shuffle. Like all IT and most major companies, where there’s a product, there’s an acronym. And cloud has quite a few. This post gives a quick and dirty overview of the what, why, and who of software as a service.

What is Software as a Service?

Before I start, let me say one thing: there’s no such thing as an actual cloud your documents float in and when you need them you make it rain (that’d be pretty cool though, a bunch of corporate executives doing the rain dance to get last quarters financial report?) So what is it? Webopedia defines it as the model where applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network. This network is typically the internet…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Editorial Staff.

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB) alluded to a database backup offering earlier in 2013, and now the company has delivered, offering a database backup solution as an add-on to its BusinessPremier plan for small businesses. For Carbonite’s resellers, the new offering expands the breadth of offerings they can deliver to their end user customers, enabling them to back up databases ranging from MySQL to SQL to Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint and Oracle, as well as Hyper-V in the virtual environment, said David Hauser, senior director, Channel Development.

“We’re also able to back up local, open and locked files [such as] Outlook PST files, and it also has the capability of a Windows system state,” he said. “These are the databases that the majority of small businesses use and this is where the vast majority of demand has come from, so we think it’s a very good fit.”…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Platform as a Service offers advantages over managing your own development infrastructure and allows more time to focus on designing and coding. While PaaS may be the preferred choice for new projects, it may not be a good fit for existing, legacy development efforts. Here are five things to consider before moving your legacy development projects to Platform as a Service (PaaS).

1. How will you use PaaS?

Different companies have different uses for PaaS to suit their IT environments and goals. First you must figure out how to incorporate PaaS into your organization. Some services allow you to move computation easily to the cloud while maintaining other functions on local resources. For example, Pi Cloud provides an application program interface (API) for copying your local Python code to the cloud and running it there, while your development tools and code repositories can stay local…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Platform as a Service vendors initially distinguished themselves by the languages they supported, such as Java or .NET, but they have evolved to support multiple languages — and also data stores, messaging services, application services and portability with Infrastructure as a Service. Developers have a wide range of PaaS options from which to choose. While it might appear that PaaS vendors are quite similar, there are many differences.

Consider what types of controls, if any, developers have over infrastructure configuration. Ideally, the PaaS provider manages implementation details, but sometimes developers need more control. It’s also important to consider the supporting services offered, such as relational and NoSQL databases. And if you are concerned about vendor lock-in, assess how difficult it will be to move to another PaaS provider once you have developed your application to use the services your current PaaS offers. To keep up with changes in the market, take a look at these key features to keep in mind when choosing a PaaS for multiple project development…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

The Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has launched a second Special Interest Group (SIG), this time focusing on cloud operations and management. The move comes a little over a week since the industry body, which aims to promote trust, security and transparency in the cloud computing sector, launched an SIG to focus on cloud security issues.

CIF claims the new SIG – which will be chaired by Lee Fisher, Abiquo’s vice president of products – has been set up in order to help both cloud providers and end users develop better cloud strategies. These should, the organisation says, properly define service goals and success criteria, plot migration paths for legacy technologies and processes and identify agnostic and ‘future proof’ technologies…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

The OpenStack Foundation issued its Grizzly release Thursday with 230 new features for running production-level cloud computing, but the most important additions dealt with the new area of software-defined networking. The OpenStack compute component can now support multiple hypervisors, including VMware ESX Server, open source KVM and Xen and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. "With Grizzly, there’s no advantage of one hypervisor over another," said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, the cloud services supplier that first got the OpenStack project going in collaboration with NASA. OpenStack has been known up until the Grizzly release for primarily supporting KVM, the open source hypervisor that’s found inside the Linux kernel and often favored by open source developers.

The compute orchestration capability has been given the ability to provision bare metal servers as well as virtual servers. But the key area of development is adding virtual networking to the OpenStack arsenal of capabilities. Networking has lagged servers when it comes to being managed as a virtual resource and in most enterprises, is still tied to a set of hardware resources that are hard to modify…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Cade Metz.

Anyone can now use the Google Compute Engine — the web giant’s answer to Amazon’s seminal EC2 cloud computing service. Well, anyone who’s willing to pay Google $400 a month for customer support. On Thursday, the company announced that you too can now use Google Compute Engine if you sign up for “Gold Support” program, which provides twenty-four-hour-seven-day-a-week access to Google support engineers for prices beginning at $400 a month. Previously, the service was only available to certain beta testers. “You no longer need an invitation or a conversation with sales to get access,” the company said in a blog post.

Uncloaked last summer, Google Compute Engine is an online service that provides instant access to virtual machines where you can run just about an software you like, including, say, your entire website. It’s a lot like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, service, which first brought the cloud computing idea to the mainstream and is now widely used by startups and developers and so many others. According to one study, Amazon’s cloud services now run as much as one percent of the internet…