Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Brandon Bulter.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) recently announced a new Managed Services product for its public cloud that aims to ease migration of legacy enterprise applications. AWS Managed Services is a series of infrastructure operations management tools meant to provide ongoing management, support, monitoring, and security of an AWS cloud environment.

It’s delivered jointly by AWS employees and certified AWS partners and is meant to serve AWS’s largest clients who are planning to migrate workloads to Amazon’s public cloud. Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Lydia Leong says most workloads can be broken down into two categories:…

New data from Synergy Research Group shows that across six key cloud services and infrastructure market segments, operator and vendor revenues for the four quarters ending September 2016 reached $148 billion, having grown by 25% on an annualized basis. IaaS & PaaS services had the highest growth rate at 53%, followed by hosted private cloud infrastructure services at 35% and enterprise SaaS at 34%. 2016 was notable as the year in which spend on cloud services overtook spend on cloud infrastructure hardware and software. In aggregate cloud service markets are now growing three times more quickly than cloud infrastructure hardware and software. Companies that featured the most prominently among the 2016 market segment leaders were Amazon/AWS, Microsoft, HPE, Cisco, IBM, Salesforce and Dell EMC.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.2, the latest version of its award-winning open hybrid cloud management solution. IT operations teams can face slow, manual processes to deliver services internally, which may cost time, money and competitiveness. To address these challenges, IT teams can use Red Hat CloudForms to increase service delivery while enabling IT teams to focus on critical, business-impacting issues.

Red Hat CloudForms, based on the open source ManageIQ project, provides an advanced open source management platform for physical, virtual and cloud IT environments, including Linux containers. CloudForms helps IT organizations offer composable services through a self-service portal, managing the service lifecycle from provisioning to retirement. It can also define and enforce advanced compliance policies for new and existing IT environments, better enabling operators to optimize the costs of a given environment and system.

Red Hat CloudForms 4.2

HEAT Software, a company that’s leading the unification of Cloud Service Management (CSM) and Unified Endpoint Management (UEM), today announced significant updates to three of its core IT software solutions: HEAT Endpoint Management and Security Suite (EMSS), HEAT Service Management (SM), and HEAT Desktop and Server Management (DSM).

EMSS 8.5 delivers defense-in-depth endpoint security with simplified endpoint management, while offering added protection against targeted attacks. EMSS 8.5 further reduces complexity for both security and IT operations teams, optimizes TCO & operational efficiencies, improves visibility and delivers control back to IT.

Improvements delivered in the new EMSS 8.5 release include:

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

There’s a trend in IT firms. CEOs and evangelists like to try and coin the next major buzz phrase with the word ‘data’ in it. There’s big data, fast data, data analytics, data provenance, time-series data and then there are data lakes, data marts and the data warehouse. TechTarget defines the data warehouse as federated repository (either physical or logical) for all the data that an enterprise’s various business systems collect.

Data warehouse, in simple English

To use a simple retail analogy, specific groups of users or jobs lead to the creation of data markets (we will call them ‘data marts’)… and in the same way that markets are fed by a central distribution and storage warehouse, individual data marts all come together to reside in a bigger data warehouse…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

It’s a new year. We’ll soon have a new president in the White House, tax returns due in four months, and a bunch of resolutions that we’ll have failed to keep by February. But there is one more thing to do. Most enterprises have spent the last few years determining the what of cloud computing: What is it? What does it do for you? What does it cost?

By what dates do your applications need to be in the cloud? They’re all good questions to answer, but now in 2017 it’s time to get to work — that is, to move from the what to the how. As part of that move to the how of cloud computing, enterprises need to take care of a few points in planning:…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3152871/cloud-computing/planning-is-over-its-time-to-actually-move-to-the-cloud.html

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Tony Connor.

In our final instalment of this three-part A to Z series of terms you might commonly hear associated with the Cloud, we will take you through the letters S to Z. Our previous instalments have included a wide range of terms, from DevOps and Elastic computing to Operating system and Redundancy, and if you’d like to go back through and see the terms we have covered off already, you can read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here. With just a few more terms left to explain for you, we now pick up where we left off with the letter S.

S is for SaaS

Software as a Service, sometimes referred to as “on-demand software”, is a type of software which is hosted centrally “in the cloud” and paid for using a subscription, a so-called pay-as-you-go model. Users can access the services via any internet enabled device with a web browser and as a bulk of the processing occurs in the cloud, the end-users do not need high-end equipment…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itproportal.com/features/a-to-z-of-the-cloud-part-three/

Grazed from CIOReview. Author: Scott Fenton.

In speaking with a number of companies, I am surprised at how many have not adopted a Cloud First strategy. In many cases, I find the organization either does not understand the benefits, both business and financial, or are simply risk averse. These can range from a fear of losing control of your applications and data, to losing your staff.

I totally understand their concern. Disruption to your business applications and platform could have devastating consequences. On the flip side however, the benefits far outweigh the risks. As a CIO, I had not purchased an on premise application in years, only Cloud solutions. Below, I have outlined five benefits of a Cloud First strategy, and five pitfalls to avoid…

Read more from the source @ http://avaya.cioreview.com/cioviewpoint/cloud-first-are-we-there-yet-nid-23553-cid-90.html

Grazed from StarOnline. Author: Matt Day.

In a Seattle-area conference room earlier this year, Washington state’s two largest employers started sketching out the future. In a daylong series of meetings at Microsoft’s campus, engineers from the software company knocked heads and keyboards with their counterparts at Boeing. The goal: tapping in to Microsoft’s Azure, the software maker’s network of on-demand computing power, to build a new generation of software.

Boeing for years has made tools, from paper navigational aids to maintenance software, that help its aerospace customers fly and take care of their planes. An engineer with a record book and a manual knows roughly when to replace a part. But an engineer equipped with software that can help make sense of decades of maintenance data could do a more precise job, the thinking goes, improving aircraft maintenance and fuel consumption. Boeing is hoping to build web-based variants of its aviation analytics tools on Microsoft’s Azure…

CloudRecover Backup solution powered by Asigra is now available for existing and new customers

Adding Asigra to the portfolio will add more value for customers and partners that are looking for a secure backup and recovery solution. Organisations demanding flexibility with fast access to data and scalable backup solutions now have access to CloudRecover’s enhanced managed service across multiple devices and platforms.