Police are increasingly relying on digital infrastructure. The problem is that if that if it fails, lives could be at stake. Here’s how the cloud can help.

In January, Canadian police were hit with a major network outage that prevented them from accessing critical resources required to do their jobs. The outage, it is reported, started around 11:30 PM ET on Wednesday, January 18, and continued until 3 PM ET on the 19. Evidently, the whole thing originated with a router failure which also impacted "mobile computer workstations in RCMP police cruisers and two other crucial internal RCMP databases," according to CBC news.

This is not the first such outage suffered by the organization – their networks have reportedly gone down "more than a dozen times since last spring," reports CBC.

This month, HP Enterprise (HPE) announced an agreement to acquire Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) vendor Simplivity for $650M.  The acquisition highlights the growing popularity of consolidated computing systems that CIOs are adopting as an alternative to public cloud services, and suggests that on-premises computing systems still remain a crucial option for many organizations.

SimpliVity is but one of many companies offering hyperconverged systems which bundle computing, storage and networking onto the same server.  The company’s flagship product is called the OmniCube hyperconverged infrastructure appliance, and they’ve been working with hardware vendors such as Lenovo, Dell, Cisco and Huawei to bring the software portion of its solution to those vendors’ hardware platforms.

SimpliVity was founded in 2009, and over the last couple of years, they raised almost $276 million in four funding rounds led by Waypoint Capital, Accel Partners, Charles River Ventures, DFJ Growth, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Meritech Capital Partners.  When the company raised its Series D round of $175 million in March of 2015, the company was estimated to be worth as much as $1 billion.

As technologies surrounding cloud computing and convergence continue to evolve, data center managers have to reshape their strategies to allow for greater capacity and to ensure they can provide the highest quality of uninterrupted service that is being demanded of them. Industry leader, Chatsworth Products (CPI), provides seven best practices for addressing these demands and achieving data center optimization.

Data center managers should work to identify where their resources are currently allocated and how they can best be optimized. The key to this is embracing the latest thermal efficiency, airflow and power and environmental monitoring strategies. The way data centers utilize their resources will undoubtedly continue to change as new technologies emerge. Furthermore, as more devices become integrated with the Internet of Things (IoT), downtime will not be an option.

With this in mind, here are seven best practices to consider:

Choosing to Get a Degree Online

Of course, you can go to just about any college in the country to earn your degree, but there is a more popular option that has been giving every student a chance to get a degree in a way that is a little easier.  Choosing to get your degree online is an option and master in communications degrees are included as an option.  Because you can get a degree online these days, there are now plenty of schools that offer this type of course.  Doing a simple online search can help you narrow down that search.

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

At first, it’s all about cost savings — avoiding up-front fees, hardware costs, and ongoing maintenance and software upgrades. But looking beyond the operational concerns with cloud computing, things get much more interesting. Cloud really begins to shine when it becomes an enabler for increased business opportunities, and expanded horizons.

The challenge is measuring, or at least understanding, the gains. Incremental savings from moving an application off a local server to a cloud site are easy to capture and document. But how do you measure increased agility? How do you measure the ability to pivot to new business opportunities? How do you measure an increased capacity for innovation?…

According to a new survey from CompuCom Systems, Inc. ("CompuCom"), a leading technology infrastructure services company, nearly half of IT professionals surveyed (47 percent) believe that cloud security is the most important technology for their organization this year, over Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics, third-party software support and robotics process automation (RPA). The online poll collected responses from 662 IT professionals across multiple industries from November 9, 2016 – January 12, 2017.

The cloud computing market is susceptible to threats including data breaches, data loss and insecure application programming interfaces (APIs). The world cloud security market is expected to reach $8.9 billion by 2020, according to a report by Allied Market Research, with a CAGR Of 23.5 percent from 2015 to 2020.

TEKsystems, a leading provider of IT staffing solutions, IT talent management expertise and IT services, today announced it has achieved AWS Service Delivery Partner status for Amazon Redshift and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR).

The AWS Service Delivery Program was recently launched to help AWS customers find qualified Amazon Partner Network (APN) members that provide expertise in a specific service or skill area. To qualify, partners must pass service-specific verification of customer references and a technical review, meaning customers can be confident they are working with partners that provide recent and relevant experience.

Grazed from CCI. Author: Editorial Staff.

Depending on your source, UK cloud adoption rates are currently anywhere between 78% and 84%, and whilst cloud is no longer a new phenomenon, its importance to not only the CIO but also the full c-suite of decision makers such as CEOs, CMOs and CFOs, is paramount as they jostle to gain a competitive advantage over competitors.

It has been argued that cloud adoption heralds the largest disruption in enterprise computing since the advent of the PC, with many industries embracing cloud-based platforms to not only cut costs but also drive efficiency. Despite this, there has been a certain amount of trepidation from the financial services sector to make the transition and fully embrace cloud and its many advantages…

Kaseya, the leading provider of complete IT management solutions for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and small to midsized businesses (SMBs), today announced the general availability of Kaseya VSA 9.4, the industry’s only second-generation remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution. Available both on-premises and in the cloud, the new technology delivers cross platform support for Windows, macOS and Linux, allowing for comprehensive IT systems management across any environment.

The latest release of Kaseya VSA features next-generation innovations developed specifically for advanced MSPs and enterprise IT departments. New features promote policy-based automation with proactive remediation all to increase overall team productivity. The Kaseya automation framework allows companies to securely take charge of their infrastructure by transparently and remotely managing servers, desktops, mobile devices, home-based desktops and network devices — all from a single central management console. Built on a foundation that promotes the best user technician experience in the industry, Kaseya VSA is the ideal RMM solution for growing IT departments.

New features and functionality in Kaseya VSA 9.4 include: