Grazed from ERP News. Author: Editorial Staff.

Productivity is valued in every workplace, but there are differing schools of thought as to how best to achieve it. Some businesses prefer a lot of structure and accountability, while others advocate a more flexible and permissive environment, giving employees more freedom and latitude. One of the ways productivity has been increased of late is via the development of cloud computing. It cannot be denied that cloud computing is having a tremendous positive effect upon integrating technology and making life easier overall. This is also true in the workplace, and more and more businesses are reaping its benefits.

In the past, traditional IT has managed inter-office communications, information logging, file sharing, data storage, and team and collaborative efforts. All of this used to require a more hands-on and managed approach. However, many of these functions are now being handled remotely by the cloud, which in itself is a boost to efficiency in the workplace…

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Adi Gaskell.

The following is an interview with Joseph Corrigan, Partner at Posternak Blankstein & Lund in Boston on the benefits and risks of using cloud computing in your business.

How do you use cloud computing in your business, and what are the advantages of using it?

We are currently use a cloud service provider to back-up our data periodically throughout the day as well for our disaster recovery needs. The advantage of cloud computing for this service is that backing up data used to be a time consuming and expensive process, where tapes were utilized to back up data on a daily basis, and it was expensive to maintain the equipment necessary restore the data contained on the back-up tapes…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Charlie Osbourne.

Although organizations are moving to cloud-based computing systems in their droves, it may result in unforeseen costs unless rogue cloud use is regulated. Symantec’s "The Hidden Costs of Cloud 2013 Survey" (.pdf) suggests that over 90 percent of organizations are now discussing cloud, which is up from 75 percent a year ago, in order to try and remain competitive and improve the flexibility of their business practices. However, picking the wrong system can result in high expenditure in the long run.

Based on data from several thousand responses from 3,236 organizations — both SMBs and enterprises — from 29 countries, the report found that rogue cloud computing use is causing an escalation in cost, increasing complexity in backing up and storing data, and inefficient storage services. "Rogue" cloud use, defined as business groups that offer public cloud applications which are not managed by or integrated into a company’s IT infrastructure, are at the heart of the problem…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

The cloud has a way of hiding much of what we used to fret about. Servers are boxes, and boxes are meant to be interchangeable. You push the button and you log in. It’s just a box, and there’s no need to spend much time thinking about it because it’s a commodity. SoftLayer is one of the companies fighting the commodification of the servers, at least a bit. SoftLayer is still selling servers by the hour and offering a cloud of machines that starts up on demand, but it’s also making the server purchase more like it used to be. You have plenty of options, some of which include getting a raw machine that’s yours, all yours.

Amazon and Google, for instance, started selling a few basic models. Although they’ve expanded the selection over the years by adding higher-powered CPUs or more RAM, the menu of choices is still pretty simple. If you get a small machine, you get a small CPU with a smaller amount of RAM and a smaller bundle of everything else. If you want more, you buy more of everything. SoftLayer lets you shop for servers the old way. You choose how many cores you want, then choose the RAM independently. You can build a machine with 16 2GHz cores and 1GB of RAM, one core and 16GB of RAM, or any integer in between — say, 13 cores and 7GB of RAM. The prices slide up and down, and the two parts are priced independently. Sixteen cores will cost 75 cents per hour, while only one core will cost 7 cents per hour. There are price breaks along the list and it’s not exactly linear…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Oracle is continuing its faux cloud strategy, adding to its private-cloud infrastructure offering the ability to rent for a monthly fee preconfigured application servers to be deployed in customer data centers. The available application servers — what Oracle calls "engineered systems" — include Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Sparc SuperCluster, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, and Oracle Sun ZFS Storage.

The notion is they provide specialized capacity beyond what you deployed using Oracle’s private cloud systems, which Oracle labels "infrastructure as a service" but is not actually a cloud IaaS offering — it’s the usual Oracle data center gear. Just as Oracle IaaS is not a true cloud offering, neither is Oracle’s new "Iaas On Demand" selection of rental application servers. Unlike with a true cloud on-demand service, your monthly fee — which requires a three-year contract — covers just the hardware, its maintenance, and some degree of usage. You pay extra for the Oracle software licenses and for "peak" usage (no definition or price given). It’s not the standard cloud model, in which the entire service is included with the fee…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The National Association of Realtors®’ venture capital fund Second Century Ventures has become a strategic investor in Symform, a revolutionary, distributed cloud backup service. "Second Century Ventures was created to help develop and deliver real estate industry technologies to Realtors® so they can best serve their clients and customers," said Dale Stinton, SCV president and NAR chief executive officer. "This investment in Symform will give Realtors® access to electronic data management resources they can use to organize and protect the information of home buyers, sellers and investors in the real estate transaction."

Unlike traditional data center storage, the Symform Cloud Storage Network encrypts, shreds and globally distributes data. This technology provides a secure and high-performing cloud backup system. Customers join the Symform network by contributing excess local drive space and, in exchange, receive free cloud backup…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

The audacity of a database startup: NewSQL vendor NuoDB dares to propose an update to E.F. Codd’s 12 rules of relational databases, the blueprint for SQL databases for decades. NewSQL database startup NuoDB likes to think big. This week as it makes its scalable database generally available, it is also pitching an update to database guru Edgar F. Codd’s 12 rules of relational databases for the age of cloud computing. It’s a move that is bound to raise eyebrows since Codd, an IBM computer scientist who defined the relational database model, is viewed as a god in that arena.

NuoDB CEO Barry Morris (pictured above) seems girded for blowback.”The rules from Codd are intended to be obvious. If [the new rules] were strange or oriented around a particular product, they’d be self-serving, but they’re not. We want to say: ‘let’s stop screwing around with incremental database improvements. If you were to design your own requirements for an ideal 21st century database, what would they be?’ This is what we came up with. What’s missing? We want the conversation.”…

Grazed from TelecomReseller. Author: Ali Din.

2012 was the year cloud computing took off and went mainstream. Some startups recorded exceptional growth, and won numerous awards and recognition. But for some service providers, 2012 was a pretty tough year with a number of outages, affecting millions of users and some even causing permanent data loss to its customers. Still, this didn’t put a damper on the acquisition spree we saw during 2012 as cloud computing’s value continued to shine. Let’s look at what were the key developments and challenges for enterprise cloud computing in 2012.

The evolution of the cloud was much greater than what was expected. Cloud computing helped IT in many organizations become more dynamic – spending grew to over $109 billion, up 20% over the previous year. And that’s not all. Gartner predicts that the total outlay for cloud computing services could nearly double, to $207 billion, by 2016. , It appears that installing-and-upgrading software and infrastructure is becoming less popular by the day…

Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider, is warning CIOs about an emerging – and alarming – new trend in IT: Cloud Sprawl. Lured by easy-to-purchase and quick-to-install cloud applications, individual departments are finding and deploying their own cloud solutions.

CIOs don’t have to look too far today to see the effects of this bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) movement -employees are tapping into free Google Drive space, free Dropbox space, and free Box.com space -giving themselves more than enough online room to store confidential customer sales and other mission-critical data outside the company firewall and outside of IT’s control. Inexpensive cloud applications that don’t require corporate approval are walking through the door unchecked as well -from CRM to email to marketing automation. Along the way, BYOC has given way to a new, repackaged phenomenon dubbed "cloud sprawl" as poorly managed end-user cloud purchases and deployments make for fragmented, redundant, unmanaged and inefficient cloud-based outsourcing decisions with little or no input from IT.

Grazed from Microsoft.  Author: PR Announcement

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of new solutions to help enterprise customers manage hybrid cloud services and connected devices with greater agility and cost-efficiency. System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1), the enhanced Windows Intune, Windows Azure services for Windows Server and other new offerings deliver against the Microsoft Cloud OS vision to provide customers and partners with the platform to address their top IT challenges.

“With Windows Server and Windows Azure at its core, the Cloud OS provides a consistent platform across customer datacenters, service provider datacenters and the Microsoft public cloud,” said Michael Park, corporate vice president of marketing for Server and Tools, Microsoft. “Powerful management and automation capabilities are key elements of the Cloud OS, taking the heavy lifting out of administration and freeing IT organizations to be more innovative as they embrace hybrid cloud computing and the consumerization of IT.”