Grazed from ERP Cloud News. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing — you’ve heard of it, you may even be using it without realizing it. What is it exactly, and what potential benefits does it offer for your small business? As the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) points out, cloud computing has been around in some way, shape or form for years. Facebook, Gmail and Flickr are just three applications of the technology that many of us use daily to store comments, photos, videos and other content in the cloud. But that are many other applications, says the SBA.

“Imagine being able to log onto a website and access all the tools and programs that your employees need to do their jobs without having to invest in lots of standalone software licenses,” it notes. “What if you could access all your office productivity tools (email, calendar, word processing, databases, invoicing, CRM, intranet, etc.) from any location or device? What’s more, all the software management and trouble-shooting can be done by the cloud service provider, freeing up your IT resources.”…

Grazed from Information Daily. Author: James Johns.

Before the birth of the electricity generating industry, any enterprise needing power had to build and run private generators. These were inflexible, inelastic and did not scale easily. In the mid 19th Century, centralised generation allowed electricity to be provided as a utility, meaning that consumers only had to pay for what they used. Consumption could be scaled up or down to meet demand without the need for capital expenditure. A century and a half on, this is precisely the emancipating effect that cloud computing is now having on the enterprise.

Organisations no longer need to build, maintain and renew cumbersome IT infrastructure in order to consume as much, or as little computing resource as they need. The cost implications of this model for both public and private sector organisations are clear inasmuch as cloud allows the enterprise to make use of sophisticated business solutions on a “pay as you go” basis with almost no capital costs…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

Talk of Dell going private might scare enterprise customers, as they may see it as a sign of ill health for the company, but when it comes to cloud computing, it could be a good thing. Dell partners say it’s in the company’s best interest to go private, as it struggles to deliver a cohesive Dell cloud strategy.

Going private would potentially rid Dell’s management of worries about its PC business, which has dragged the company’s revenues down as of late, and it could free executives up to focus on new efforts like the cloud, said Scott Houston, CEO of GreenButton, a Dell partner that runs its cloud-based software management tool on a mix of Dell’s vCloud infrastructure and Amazon Web Services…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

Technology is not without its pitfalls even if it has so many benefits, especially if it is not used properly. Cloud computing is no exception; in fact a lot of people think that cloud computing has more pitfalls than the current solutions that they are already employing in their business. Some of these are actually real but can be prevented, while others are just rationalizations out of laziness to plan and execute or even simply an undeniable resistance to change. A lot of people are afraid of change, to step out of the comfort zone. True enough, stepping out of your comfort zone half-heartedly and without a real plan will quickly help you realize these fears. But we shall only tackle the biggest one here.

The most glaring of these pitfalls that people are buzzing on about is security. In a data-driven world, security is paramount. And why shouldn’t it be, it’s the most powerful weapon anyone could possess; whole empires have come crashing down because of a few key pieces information. Granted it would take years to tear down an empire with mere information or disinformation, but it would only require a few minutes for a big company, no, a whole economy to fall because of lost information. Imagine if the worldwide stock exchange entity suddenly lost all of its valuable data including all the backups at the same time, that would be billions in every currency lost, causing an entire worldwide economy collapse…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

Internal telephone networks, switches, wires, and other equipment used to make up a significant part of the enterprise infrastructure. The rise of cloud computing has changed this and nowadays you have a cloud computing alternative to consider, as with most everything else. Cloud PBX is now a widespread phenomenon. If your organization hasn’t considered such a system instead of implementing or upgrading a traditional phone system, it probably will soon.

Chances are, your business has some form of Voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP, in place. Many hosted and cloud PBX systems are based on this concept. The transition is being guided by the much more expansive transfer of public switched telephone networks to VoIP. Internet based telecommunications services have been used in homes for several years. The technology has advanced to the point that businesses find it reliable enough for their telecom needs, at a much lower cost of ownership…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Arthor Nichols.

In the cloud conversation, Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) appear much less than the famed Software as a Service (SaaS). This is not surprising when you consider that a world already populated with built platforms and infrastructure has but to operate on them. However, offering Platforms and Infrastructure through the cloud has been a boon to the software development field, especially with the recently growing push toward increased collaboration between developers and admins, commonly referred to as Development Operations (DevOps).

Distinctions and Utilization

Though somewhat easy to confuse the two, it may be best to view PaaS as a subset of IaaS with fewer responsibilities in terms of provision of infrastructure. Specifically, choosing PaaS over IaaS moves the responsibility of managing the database, runtime, and middleware from an organization to the vendor of the service. PaaS and, to a lesser degree, IaaS are a direct route via the cloud to facilitating the work of software developers, though IaaS may be more desirable in cases where an organization has a suitable existing infrastructure and prefers more control over those elements…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

When the CEO of a rust-belt manufacturer speaks of cloud computing as critical to his company’s business strategies for competing globally, it’s clear a fundamental shift is underway. Nearly every manufacturing company I’ve spoken with in the last ninety days has a mobility roadmap and is also challenged to integrate existing ERP, pricing and fulfillment systems into next-generation selling platforms.

One of the most driven CEOs I’ve met in manufacturing implemented a cloud-based channel management, pricing, quoting and CRM system to manage direct sales and a large distributor network across several countries. Manufacturers are bringing an entirely new level of pragmatism to cloud computing, quickly deflating its hype by pushing for results on the shop floor…

Grazed from PRNewsWired. Author: PR Announcement.

The World’s Top Cloud Computing Event, Cloud Connect (http://www.cloudconnectevent.cn/) will first launch at the Shanghai International Convention Center from September 15 to 17, 2013 (Sunday to Tuesday). Supported by the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy & Information and Shanghai Promotion Center of Software Industry, Cloud Connect will engage with nearly 50 top companies and more than 3,000 professional visitors at one time.

The rapid development of the cloud computing business model has had a significant impact on China’s IT industry and created new prospects for it. In 2013, China’s cloud computing service market will develop even further. Cloud computing will become one of the mainstream business models, constantly fused with big data, mobile, socialization, and more. At the time of enterprises’ transitions to the cloud computing model, organizers are introducing Cloud Connect into China, with a goal to provide the latest top cloud technology for Chinese clients and business partners, which will lead an innovation wave for the cloud industry.

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

For about an hour starting around 11:30 a.m. Pacific, the Amazon.com retail site was inaccessible to customers. Attempts to access the site were met with a http://1.1 message on an otherwise white and unadorned screen. The site appeared to be operating normally again about 12:45 p.m. Pacific. Several customers noted the outage on Facebook and Twitter. At 12:24 p.m. Pacific, The San Francisco technology reporting site, GigaOm, noted: "Amazon is down; Yes, you read that right."

Security blogger George V. Hulme noted about 12:30 p.m. on Facebook: "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable." Queries submitted to Amazon Web Services and Amazon.com public relations personnel did not result in any immediate response. Amazon Web Services appeared to be up and running during that time. The AWS home page appeared on cue and key services, such as the Heroku cloud running on AWS, were still up during the period Amazon.com was inaccessible.

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Editorial Staff

The Labor Department will pay a vendor up to $50 million to move its employees and contractors to a cloud-based Microsoft email system, according to an award notice. The contract also appears to include systems for Web-based e-discovery, records management and software-as-a-service tools, according to recent solicitation documents.

The Department first sought a vendor for cloud email services in August. The plan at that point was to combine legacy systems from the department’s nine major divisions into a unified email system with three separate domains, one for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, another for the Office of Inspector General and a third for the remainder of the agency, according to the request for proposal…