Grazed from Information-Age. Author: Ben Rossi.

The adoption of cloud computing has been on the up since as far back as 2008, when a survey conducted by the Pew Research Institute found that cloud services were used by nearly 69% of Americans. Since then, the industry has experienced hyper-growth and exceeded the already vast predictions of how big it would become.

IDC predicts that the cloud computing market in 2017 will be worth $107 billion and, according to Gartner, by 2020 a corporate ‘no-cloud’ policy will be as unusual as a ‘no-internet’ policy would be today. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine an organisation in 2017 that did not use webmail, file sharing and storage, and data backup…

1) Wearable Devices

Wearable devices come in many forms and do many things. Fitness trackers, smart watches, head-mounted displays, smart jewelry, and smart clothing are changing both the quality of our lives and how we access information. Other devices, known as implantables, are implanted under the skin to treat heart conditions. Because of this flexibility, wearable devices have caught the eye of manufacturers. When used with the cloud, such devices could transform manufacturing as we know it.

Take Google Glass, for instance. This pair of glasses can allow workers to access critical data without leaving their stations. It can also replace scanners and barcode readers by collecting and sending data to servers and cloud-based applications. Employees can then use the time they would have otherwise spent doing data collection on something else, thereby increasing their productivity. Smart devices also increase safety in the workplace. They warn drivers, especially those driving heavy machinery when colleagues are in the drivers’ blind spot.

Azure specializes in offering luxury holiday properties at the Golden Sands Resort and Spa in Malta, and had plans to expand its member base in Europe to include Germany, Norway and Italy. Azure needed a robust communications platform that would allow it to scale rapidly. 8×8’s innovative communications cloud solutions fulfilled both requirements, offering a platform that will grow alongside the business with all the advantages of investment in latest technology, but without the capital outlay.

“When we set out to select a VoIP and contact center system we were looking for a provider that’s innovative, has a scalable and reliable product and can support our complex operations without being overly complicated as a system. 8×8 ticks all the boxes,” said Marthese Vella, Chief Information Officer, Azure. “We’re looking forward to working in a more unified and coherent way as an organization to give our customer service agents the tools they need to continue delivering excellent service. They are a close-knit and knowledgeable team and 8×8’s technology will enhance their expertise. We have ambitious growth plans in the future and we’re confident 8×8 will be able to support us every step of the way.”

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Today’s cloud computing architecture resembles 70s mainframes. The heavy lifting happens in dense data centers that act as the central point of gravity. In both the scenarios, applications share the underlying infrastructure. While this architecture works for the majority of the scenarios, the emerging use cases demand a different approach.

Edge computing fundamentally changes the cloud by making it distributed and decentralized. With edge, the core building blocks of cloud such as compute, storage, and the network will move closer to the applications. Cloud providers will move abstract layers such as machine learning models, serverless computing, and lightweight databases that run on the core infrastructure to the edge…

Grazed from IHS. Author: Liz Cruz.

With digitization transforming and disrupting businesses everywhere, there is tremendous pressure to change and adapt, especially for enterprise information technology (IT) departments. A key part of change is the need for greater agility and faster adoption of new technology. Both of these agents drive the off-premises cloud market, while also altering the architecture of on-premises data centers or private clouds to include orchestration for the automatic deployment of workloads. To achieve success, a key takeaway for businesses is to rethink IT, shifting reliance from traditional data-center models to new mechanisms like the cloud.

Growth all around

In assessing just how fast transformation is occurring within the space, one only has to look at the rate of growth projected for the next few years ahead. The market for off-premises cloud services is forecast for solid revenue growth of approximately 30% year-over-year in the near term, with strong expansion to continue through 2021. The market’s increase is due to larger portions of enterprise IT budgets being allocated to off-premises cloud services…

Read more from the source @ http://blog.ihs.com/off-premises-cloud-computing-services-gain-traction-are-multi-clouds-next

Panzura, the leader in hybrid cloud storage, today announced that within the past 60 days, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has awarded the company eight new patents.

These patents cover key enabling technology for the Panzura distributed cloud file system, which provides true storage consolidation in the cloud without sacrificing performance at the edge. As a result, customers can move to hybrid cloud storage rapidly to manage exponential unstructured data growth and reduce total storage costs by up to 70 percent. Panzura has won 26 patents to date, with 19 more pending.

Specifically, the new patents cover:

Grazed from CloudGenix

CloudGenix, Inc., the software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) leader, today announced it has signed a partnership agreement with TBI, a leading distributor of data, network, cloud, voice and managed services. This agreement will allow TBI partners to deliver to its clients the industry’s first and only application-defined SD-WAN solution. With CloudGenix, enterprises can now eliminate complex routing protocols and hardware routers, and directly set up business rules and app-SLAs — all while reducing WAN cost by 50 to 70 percent.

As a leading technology distributor, TBI advises and consults on the right solutions to solve organizational challenges, especially those related to increasing bandwidth, upgrading outdated systems, adding new services and migrating or deploying cloud solutions. TBI helps recommend technologies like SD-WAN that assist with convergence and modernization.

Sauce Labs, Inc., provider of the world’s largest cloud-based platform for automated testing of web and mobile applications, today announced Sauce Labs Test Analytics, the latest addition to the Sauce Labs Automated Testing Cloud. This latest release provides users with near real-time, multi-dimensional test analytics to optimize resources and release software faster.

"With modern development teams often distributed across the globe, it is difficult to obtain insights into testing behaviors and patterns in a way that make sense," said Lubos Parobek, vice president of product at Sauce Labs. "Sauce Labs Test Analytics addresses this need, providing users the insights to optimize their tests, release software faster and drive CI/CD and DevOps initiatives forward."

Sauce Labs Test Analytics brings analytics to everyone — including executives, developers, test engineers and QA teams. The platform allows users to dig deep into test results to identify critical trends. Executives can leverage a high level dashboard to get an overview of test coverage, feature readiness and releases, while more technical users can easily narrow down into individual tests to identify common failures.

Key benefits of Sauce Labs Test Analytics include:

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Editorial Staff.

Just occasionally, you get it right. Six years ago, I called containers "every sysadmin’s dream," and look at them now. Even the Linux Foundation’s annual bash has been renamed from "LinuxCon + CloudOpen + Embedded Linux Conference" to "LinuxCon + ContainerCon".

Why? Because since virtualization has been enterprise IT’s favourite toy for more than a decade, the rise of "cloud computing" has promoted this even more. When something gets that big, everyone jumps on board and starts looking for an edge – and containers are much more efficient than whole-system virtualization, so there are savings to be made and performance gains to win…