Rackspace today announced an expanded professional services offering to help customers move workloads out of their data centers and onto the world’s leading public and private cloud platforms. This offer, called Global Solutions and Services (GSS), will provide customers across all markets with the specialized expertise and support needed to transform their IT operations. Through GSS, Rackspace architects and engineers will work with customers to plan, assess, design, migrate, manage and optimize their journey to the cloud, helping to ensure they achieve maximum performance, agility and cost-efficiency.

For the first time, Rackspace will provide professional services to any business, regardless of which cloud platform it chooses or whether it is an existing Rackspace customer. Rackspace has earned the highest level of partner certification from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and recently announced a strategic relationship with Google Cloud to become its first managed services support partner for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Rackspace also offers specialized expertise and support for dedicated servers and for the three major private clouds, powered by VMware, Microsoft and OpenStack.

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

The cloud computing industry is going through a gradual shift towards becoming an intelligent cloud. While compute, storage, and networking continue to be the revenue spinners for cloud vendors, it is Machine Learning that is becoming the focal point of the contemporary cloud.

Cognitive Computing

Cognitive Computing aims to bring sensory capabilities to applications. It enables apps to see, listen, talk, and even make decisions. Based on natural language processing, visual recognition, face detection, emotion detection, video analytics, text to speech, speech to text, language translation, and sentiment analysis, Cognitive Computing empowers developers with simple APIs…

Grazed from Teradata. Author: Editorial Staff.

The US-based data and analytics company Teradata has introduced licence portability for hybrid cloud computing for its customers. With portable database licenses, Teradata customers can now choose, shift, expand, and restructure their hybrid cloud environment by moving licenses between deployment options as their business needs change, that is, between keeping this data on-premises or on cloud or on both.

This new software licensing model is the first in the hybrid cloud market to feature portability — a shift away from cloud lock-in or siloed on-premises deployments. With this new facility, Teradata’s customers can develop an analytic solution on the on-premises system — Intelliflex — and later port the same to the cloud facility, Intellicloud…

Grazed from 1RedDrop. Author: Shankar Narayanan.

Vision Mobile’s 12th Developer Economics Global Survey, which reached out to more than 21,200 developers across 160 countries, revealed many developer trends in the cloud segment, and how developers around the world are utilizing top cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

As expected, Amazon Web Services is the most popular cloud service provider, running away with medium to large enterprises segment, while holding a marginal lead with small companies with 1-5 employees. In that segment Amazon has a 15% share, with Microsoft holding 12% and Google holding an 11% share…

Read more from the source @ http://1reddrop.com/2017/04/02/aws-tough-microsoft-google-beat-cloud-computing/

Grazed from Tech.co. Author: Tom Andrulis.

If you’re considering migrating to the cloud, you’re not alone. According to a recent survey, companies run 79 percent of their workloads in the cloud. It’s easy to see why: in a cloud environment, you benefit from redundancies that bring you as close as possible to 100 percent uptime. It may sound ideal, but there are hidden roadblocks to migrating to the cloud. Before you make the move, ask yourself these five crucial questions:

How Much Downtime Should You Expect?

When you make the switch to a cloud environment, you’ll need to shut down your old equipment and switch on the new equipment at a certain point. In between, there will be a period of downtime that could last anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. The exact amount of time will vary from one business to the next. When planning your cloud migration, it’s important to know how long you can expect the downtime to last, so you can plan accordingly…

Read more from the source @ http://tech.co/5-tips-cloud-migration-company-2017-03

Grazed from 1RedDrop. Author: Editorial Staff.

The growth of cloud computing has not only made companies around the world take notice and shift their IT priorities, but it also made tech giants that sat on the sidelines – like Google and Oracle – take the plunge and fight for market share. Amazon and Microsoft are racing towards $20 billion in annual cloud revenues, which they should hit within the next few years, but considering the furious rate of growth, should we brace for a slowdown in the near future?

Far from it, says Rackspace’s CEO in an interview with ZDNet. “Rackspace CEO Taylor Rhodes said that while revenue across the big cloud players is around $20bn, that’s still dwarfed by the $500bn of applications and data still held in data centers — and it could take a decade or more for all of that to move to the cloud…

Read more from the source @ http://1reddrop.com/2017/03/31/cloud-computing-perfectly-poised-second-wind-growth-spurt/

All of these advancements are making the online market more competitive. If you’re trying to maintain a competitive advantage and keep your online business growing, analytics may just be the answer. Here are some of the insights you can acquire from your e-commerce store and the customers directly.

The International Association of Cloud & Managed Service Providers (MSPAlliance – www.mspalliance.com) today announced they have partnered with Ingram Micro Cloud to launch MSPAlliance’s MSP/Cloud Verify Program, an initiative to promote best practices and improve service delivery among the managed service provider (MSP) and cloud computing community.

MSP/Cloud Verify is an examination conducted by the MSPAlliance based on 10 objectives of the Unified Certification Standard (USC), a set of globally accepted standards and best practices designed specifically for the MSP and cloud industry. Measuring against these 10 objectives quantifies the overall health, competency and service delivery capability of an MSP or cloud practice. The USC has been created by MSPs for MSPs and is updated annually by a committee of MSP/Cloud Verified companies.

CloudPassage, Crowd Research Partners and other cloud security vendors have released the 2017 Cloud Security Report, revealing the concerns of cyber security practitioners around cloud adoption and related security roadblocks. The report is based on the results of an online survey of over 350,000 cyber security professionals conducted by the Information Security Community on LinkedIn.

"This is feedback straight from the trenches — illuminating the most pressing concerns of cloud adoption, management, and security," said David Appelbaum, chief marketing officer of CloudPassage. "Understanding where security practitioners see gaps in their legacy processes, practices, and tools helps us help them as they begin migrating more of their critical infrastructure to the cloud."

Key findings from the report include:

Rapid adoption of cloud-based services and exponential data growth in the recent years have exposed a need for fast, powerful, and integrated data protection solutions. Backup is king, and Acronis, a global leader in hybrid cloud data protection and storage, has the world’s only data protection solution specifically designed to equip service providers to take advantage of this lucrative market opportunity – Acronis Backup Cloud.

Plesk, cPanel, and Website Backup with Acronis Backup Cloud

Acronis Backup Cloud, the world’s #1 backup for service providers has just got better. This week Acronis will announce the addition of Plesk, cPanel, and generic website backup functionality to what is set to become the most complete hybrid cloud backup-as-a-service platform in the world.