The filesharing specialist ownCloud announces a further improvement of his joint offer with GÉANT for the coming year. Universities and other institutions can purchase the open source solution directly from ownCloud at particularly favourable conditions. The new pricing model ranges from attractive entry-level offers for small organizations to volume-based licensing models for any installation size. The preferential price agreement applies to all members of the GÉANT community and their subsidiary institutions.

The new offer represents an improvement on the price agreement between ownCloud and GÉANT, which has already been in place for several years, whereby national and international members of the community  can purchase their own licenses of the ownCloud Enterprise Edition. To date, the successful model has led to the sale of more than 1.5 million licenses in 41 countries.

Awingu, the unified, browser-based workspace, today announced a technology relationship with Barracuda Networks, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-enabled security and data protection solutions. The new synergy brings together Barracuda’s high performance security and zero-touch configuration with Awingu’s turnkey, browser-based workspace solution, facilitating the deployment of Awingu in hybrid cloud environments.

According to new research from Kaspersky Lab, 35 percent of businesses admit that they are unsure if certain pieces of corporate information are stored on company servers or on those of their cloud providers. Businesses are rapidly adopting cloud-based services to leverage cost savings, but the new report shows that this is leaving them unable to safeguard and account for business data, which puts them at risk to the effects of a potential third-party data breach.

Cloud services are enabling companies to take advantage of key technologies to support day-to-day operations and growth plans – without having to worry about maintenance or a hefty price tag. Therefore, it’s no surprise that 78 percent of businesses are already using at least one Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based platform, and nearly the same amount (75%) are also planning to move more applications to the cloud in the future. When it comes to Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), nearly half (49%) of enterprises and 45 percent of SMBs are looking to outsource IT infrastructure and processes to third-parties.

Citrix is positioned as a leader in both The Forrester Wave: Enterprise File Sync and Share Platforms -Cloud Solutions, Q4 2017 report as well as The Forrester Wave: Enterprise File Sync and Share Platforms -Hybrid Solutions, Q4 2017 report. The two new, independent Forrester Wave reports evaluate enterprise files sync and share vendors.

According to The Forrester Wave, Cloud Solutions report, "Citrix differentiates with its process and security offerings. Citrix provides cloud and hybrid deployment options for ShareFile, its EFSS offering. Customers can share and collaborate on files, as well as get approvals or eSignatures in the context of a business process. It supports large files – up to 100 GB – by default. Customers can protect content with data loss prevention (DLP), mark sensitive items with configurable watermarking tools, and execute auditable transactions with digital signature support."

Nokia’s Data Refinery data processing software adds support for cloud-ready automated deployment, enabling service providers to deliver new digital services and operate with web-scale efficiency.

Deriving value quickly and efficiently from the tremendous amount of data available to service providers is critical to improving business performance and customer experience. However, the demands of the digital world require real-time data that is uniformly available, and more scalable, flexible and accessible data processing than ever before. 

Nokia Data Refinery (formerly Comptel Data Refinery) provides intelligent fast data processing to power complex event processing, mediation convergence and consolidation solutions. It captures and processes siloed data of any type and from any source, including data from customers, applications, connected devices, networks, locations and services. It then refines and enriches that data with important contextual information and delivers it in real-time and in the right format to any business application, enabling service providers to deliver new personalized digital experiences.

Worldwide spending on industry cloud in the finance industry (banking, insurance, and securities and investment services combined) is expected to reach $3.2 billion in 2017, which represents an increase of 26% over 2016, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Industry Cloud Tracker. IDC expects the amount to more than double in 2021, amassing total worldwide spending of $7.2 billion.

The manufacturing industry (both discrete and process combined) was a larger spender on industry cloud though, relative to its finance counterpart. This industry is expected to spend $4.2 billion in 2017 and achieve year-over-year growth of 23% in 2018. Similar to the finance industry, the manufacturing industry is also set to double its 2017 spending in 2021, reaching a total of $9.2 billion by then.

However, these two industries pale in comparison when matched against the spending might of healthcare providers. IDC forecasts healthcare providers across the world will spend a total of $8.9 billion in adopting industry cloud solutions during 2017. This industry is expected to increase spending by 20% year over year in 2018 on industry cloud solutions; by 2021, the same industry will spend a staggering $17.6 billion on industry cloud.