Small businesses have the power to revive the nation’s economy, they just need the opportunity, technology and the right government policies to help them succeed, according to a report from the Center for Public Policy Innovation (CPPI) and the Digital Dialogue Forum (DDF). The report also notes small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy and they are responsible for two-thirds of the 40 million jobs created in the country over the past 30 years, calling them the nation’s greatest source of innovation and vital to maintaining the country’s economic competitiveness.

In a December forum in Washington, DC, entitled “Creating Jobs and Unleashing the Potential of Small Businesses through Technology and Innovation”, addressed many issues that impact the ability of American entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to life both at home and abroad, including the growing importance technologies like cloud computing and mobile connectivity hold for start-ups and small businesses…

Building on a successful alliance, N-able Technologies®, providers of remote monitoring and management (RMM) automation software for managed service providers (MSPs) and IT departments, and NTRglobal, a specialist in cloud-based help desk and ITSM delivery systems, today announced the integration of the NTR Cloud into the award-winning N-central RMM platform.

Through its cloud-based API, NTRglobal enables ISVs to seamlessly integrate its secure remote connectivity technology. By leveraging this flexible interface, N-central now includes NTR Cloud unattended remote control functionality as part of its overall service offering. Available now, the powerful remote desktop module allows support technicians to securely connect to and manage a wide range of remote devices in seconds. It is also proven to reduce support queues, optimize workflow and boost time to repair by 50 percent or more by enabling faster, more effective incident resolution…

Silicon Valley is creating jobs and wealth for highly skilled workers but may be leaving some residents behind as employment closes in on pre-Great Recession levels, according to a report released Tuesday.

The 2012 Silicon Valley Index found job growth in the high-tech hub far outpaced America as a whole last year. The region added 42,000 jobs, a jump of nearly 4 percent, compared with a nationwide increase of little more than 1 percent.  The current unemployment rate in the region stands at 8.3 percent, the same as the national average but well below the overall state rate of 10.9 percent.

Job growth occurred in all major sectors of the Silicon Valley economy except manufacturing. Key industries adding jobs included cloud computing, mobile devices, mobile apps, Internet companies and social media…

Is a data center built into a standard 20-foot shipping container on your shopping list, cloud service providers? That’s the question some are asking as these portable data centers, pioneered by Sun with its Project Blackbox (later dubbed Sun Modular Datacenter, or Sun MD), enter their sixth year of commercial availability.

Our friends at Data Center Knowledge (DCK) take stock of the market, noting that such modular designs are now common in huge cloud data centers and high-performance computing (HPC), with vendors saying they are set to become even more mainstream.

With the growth of cloud computing occurring so rapidly over the past few years, many individuals may have yet to discover what this phenomenon is all about and may have many questions. Cloud computing at its core is the allocation or lease of computer services and can include computation, software and data storage/access, which allows companies and individuals to access these functions from a remote location. In many instances, cloud computing allows for a “pay-as-you-go” solution to a variety of computing features and is the next big thing in personal and commercial computer solutions.

The most obvious advantage to cloud computing is the amount of money that a business or individual can save by switching over from a traditional infrastructure. Instead of directly buying software, hardware, infrastructure and employing technicians, users of the Cloud can simply purchase access to these elements and get only what is needed. Since everything is hosted remotely, there is no need for extra personnel to manage the infrastructure…

Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, today announced that President and CEO Tarkan Maner will present at the Stifel Nicolaus Technology & Telecom Conference on Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 1:30pm PT, in the Adriatic Room within the St. Regis Monarch Beach in Dana Point, California.

Mr. Maner will discuss how cloud computing and mobility are the next wave of information technology enhancing economic growth. The conference runs from Tuesday, February 7th until Thursday, February 9th.

Mr. Maner has traveled the globe evangelizing the numerous benefits of the cloud and warning of its pitfalls — in a personal, private, public or government cloud setting. Recently back from the World Economic Forum 2012 in Davos and numerous cloud forums and keynotes across four continents, Mr. Maner will share his vision of the future; controversial for some, inspiring for others, interesting for all…

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of the Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that is built on the former Gluster technology that the company acquired in October 2011. As the leading enterprise-ready scale-out NAS offering for the public cloud available on the market today, Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance enables organizations to extend their datacenter storage to the cloud. With the appliance, users have the ability to aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, creating a highly available virtualized storage pool that offers enhanced scalability and performance in the cloud. This news comes on the heels of Red Hat’s announcement of its Storage Software Appliance in December 2011. These two products provide greater flexibility to organizations looking to include file storage in their on-premise and cloud strategies.