Grazed from AllAfrica. Author: Editorial Staff.

The recent AIGS Progress Africa Delight@Work conference, attended by software developers, business leaders and international delegates from the US and Europe, focused on key topics pertinent to the South African marketplace, such as leadership in the digital age, the cloud and the importance of context-aware technology.

During his keynote address, Dan Veitkus, the GM (EMEA) for Progress Software said that South African companies should not let current concerns, such as bandwidth capability, prevent them from innovating for the future.

"Instead of focusing on the reasons why technologies such as cloud or mobile computing won’t work, South Africans should focus on the benefits of shifting their business and applications into that space…because it is going to happen. We’re seeing a global change in application development. Technologists need to stop selling these incredible ideas to the heads of IT and start talking to the marketing and sales departments, who have the larger budgets and are able to sponsor innovation."…

Grazed from The Foundry. Author: David Inserra.

Last Friday, storms knocked out power for many in the D.C. metro area. Disruptions didn’t end there. Amazon Web Services, a cloud service provider, went down in the storm, taking several major companies’ websites and businesses offline.

Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest, among others, also lost access to e-mail, applications, data, and other business services. While the disruption was brief, bugs in the system caused Amazon servers to spread the problem, leading to delays and disabling of services beyond the affected region.

Cloud computing is the movement of IT capabilities away from individual computers and servers to centralized providers that manage IT resources for their users via the Internet. But if the cloud cannot survive a thunderstorm, can it survive a dedicated cyber or physical attack?…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Gery Menegaz.

In a recent article in Communications World Weekly, a leading Chinese technology news outlet, they noted that Cloud Computing was the fourth IT Industrial Revolution, after Mainframes, PCs, and the Internet. In a related article, KPMG, noted that China is projected to be on par with the U.S. as a future technology innovation leader. And according to the survey that KPMG conducted, the next big breakthrough is predicted to come from Cloud and Mobile.

Communications World Weekly reported accelerated growth patterns and predicts that despite a bumpy ride China’s public cloud computing sector will be a driving innovative force. “A research report shows that in 2012, the cloud computing of China will reach the scale of over 60 billion Yuan in the market and by the end of the ’12th Five-year Plan’ this industrial chain will come to the aggregate of 1 trillion Yuan. This broad market landscape and development space will usher in opportunities for many competitive partners, and also prompt the development of modern information services in China."…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Mike Fratto.

Cisco did a very strange thing June 27: It pushed a firmware update to its Linksys EA4500, EA3500 and EA2700 wireless routers that required router users to create a Cisco Connect Cloud account and changed its privacy policy. The update gave Cisco the rights to collect and retain data. That’s a problem for anyone who cares about privacy and could affect your organization’s governance policy.

There are two troubling aspects to what happened: The first is requiring that end users create a service account before they’re allowed to access the equipment they bought. When the access points shipped there was no such requirement, and when Cisco pushed out the new firmware, some owners were surprised to find they were locked out of the routers.

Brett Wingo, vice president and general manager of Cisco Home Networking, cheekily said in a blog post that the only people affected where those who opted in to automatic updates. ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who owns one of the affected router models, said auto-update was enabled by default. So, pretty much everyone who bought the product was affected. By the way, I turn off auto-updates on everything I own…

Grazed from ERP Cloud News. Author: Editorial Staff.

In an increasingly competitive environment, the benefits of cloud computing are no secret: lower costs, frequent updates and reliable technical support offered on a monthly subscription basis. Most industries are jumping on the bandwagon; while concerns over data security and uptime still exist, the advantages of cloud computing outweigh the setbacks of updating or replacing on-premises enterprise solutions. But when we single out the manufacturing industry, how does a cloud solution really fit into operations?

Cloud Manufacturing

Manufacturers face incredible competition from the global market, and cloud solutions offer a means of differentiation. As this article in SoftwareThinkTank.com shows, a cloud ERP solution can stand as the backbone of a manufacturing organization, providing companies with a way to share the efficiencies inherent in an up-to-date ERP system across all functional areas…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Bob Plankers.

In moving to the cloud, many organizations are opting for private cloud computing environments. This model makes a lot of sense as a method to consolidate IT expenditures and resources, automate tasks and introduce new technologies such as virtualization. Often, this model provides a bridge between legacy systems and new ways of thinking about technology.

Security presents challenges in the public cloud, but you’ve probably already solved many of those challenges in your own data center. Why not use those solutions with centralization and automation to reduce the initial complexity of a cloud project?

Moving to the cloud doesn’t require virtualization

Many enterprise IT shops are moving toward cloud computing while thinking that it’s all about virtualization. In many data centers, a virtualization platform is central to service offerings, but clouds aren’t really defined just by technology. Instead, they involve people, processes, centralization and control. Moving to the cloud promises to consolidate duplicate services within an organization and to automate routine, mindless tasks so that employees are free to work on difficult problems…