Grazed from InformationAge. Author: Editorial Staff.

For most organisations the question is no longer whether it is appropriate to adopt cloud, but when is the right time and what services to move.Meanwhile, early adopters should be reviewing their portfolio to ensure they are getting best value and optimum service, as cloud providers are constantly developing and updating their offerings. These are the key cloud trends to look out for in 2017.

1. Enterprise cloud

At the moment, the term’ enterprise cloud’ is generally taken to mean virtualised in-house environments with an element of user self-service and reporting. Hyperconvergence is often described as enterprise cloud.However, ‘true’ enterprise cloud should be a common suite of design, provisioning, management and reporting tools controlling hybrid clouds that allow each service to be hosted and controlled on the most appropriate platform. That’s irrespective of whether these are public, private, hybrid, community, hosted or any combination…

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Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley is the premier event for enterprise application developers. The event will focus on microservices and continuous delivery in all frameworks. As such, organizers seek speaking proposals on best practices and tips implementing microservices in cloud environments using various languages including Java, Javascript, Ruby, Node.js and Golang as well as Cloud Foundry user stories from the developer perspective.

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Mike Wheatley.

Google Inc. on Thursday threw its weight behind the open-source Cloud Foundry Foundation, the organization that heads up development of the open source cloud platform Cloud Foundry. Google has signed on as a gold member of the foundation, joining companies such as EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co., IBM Corp., Pivotal Software Inc., SAP SE and VMware Inc.

Cloud Foundry is an open-source Platform as a Service that offers developers a choice of clouds, development frameworks, and application services for building and running apps at scale on public and private clouds. The platform bills itself as the industry-standard platform for developing cloud applications, and Google’s decision to back the project adds further weight to those claims…

With the cloud, collaboration can happen anywhere, data centers can shrink exponentially, and storage is nearly limitless. And institutions of higher education are catching on to this.

According to “Destination Cloud: The Federal and SLED Cloud Journey,” a MeriTalk survey of IT professionals who work in government or higher education, 39 percent of applications at colleges today are cloud-based, but by 2021 that number could rise to 62 percent.

Alibaba Cloud services provide the critical infrastructure that supports the Alibaba Group’s e-commerce sites, which recently processed a maximum 175,000 orders per second during this year’s Singles’ Day, a large-scale sale that takes place in China on November 11. With Alibaba Cloud, customers can use Alibaba Group hosted data centers in China, the United States, Hong Kong, Singapore and other locations in addition to those hosted by SB Cloud in Japan. Since data centers around the world can be used with a single account, Japanese and multinational companies, as well as offshore companies providing services for the Japanese market, can use cloud services conveniently. Also, since SB Cloud offers its services in a Japanese yen denominated basis, Japanese client companies can process expenses with ease.

It’s almost impossible to believe that just a few short years ago, the cloud was a new idea, and more than a few experts were convinced that it was never going to be more than a passing trend. There is no doubt now that the cloud has been one of the most transformative technologies of the last decade, and an important part of any business. In fact, a study by Cisco found that by the end of this decade, it’s likely that more than 80 percent of all data center traffic will be cloud based. It’s no longer a question of if a business should move some or all of their functions to the cloud, but a question of how to best leverage the technology for the greatest benefit.

With that in mind, there are some trends in how businesses are using the cloud that are likely to be the major stories of 2017.

Fast Track the Journey to the Cloud

Informatica Cloud optimizes the value of Azure services by simplifying complex data management initiatives. This agile data integration and management solution includes pre-configured connectivity to multiple Azure data services including SQL Data Warehouse, Blob Storage, Data Lake Store and DocumentDB.

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

Finding customer service help online can be a pain. Filtering through a knowledge base to find the right answer to your question can be an exercise in fighting with nested frequently asked questions documents. Microsoft is aiming to help by making it easier for companies to create intelligent bots that can answer common questions.

The QnA Maker, launched in beta on Tuesday, will let users train an automated conversation partner on existing frequently-asked-questions content. After that information is fed in, the service will create a bot that will respond to customer questions with the content from the knowledge base…

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: R.Danes.

With the dizzying array of technology products available to enterprises today, managers and CTOs may wonder where to start. Do they really need five clouds, a plethora of Software as a Service applications and an integration platform to do business in the Digital Age? We spoke to one engineer about how to get the most out of technology at the ready with culture, rigor and teamwork.

Shaheeda Nizar, senior director of engineering at GoDaddy Operating Company LLC, spoke at the CloudNOW 5th Annual “Top 10 Women in Cloud” Innovation Awards about her team-leading experience at GoDaddy. CloudNOW is a non-profit consortium of leading women in cloud computing and converging technologies…