Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Why do cloud projects fail? Why does cloud technology not meet expectations? Why are security models are not transferable to the cloud? How did you end up with performance issues that can’t be fixed? The answer is usually this: resistance from your colleagues. The overwhelming issues that I run into when helping clients move to cloud computing are never the technology — those issues are easily fixed. It’s the people issues.

But don’t despair because there are some actions you can take. Most cloud computing projects threaten someone in the organization. No matter if they admit it or not, or if their lives will actually change or not, the core idea of public cloud computing is to remove some of the control that your colleagues may currently have. At the heart of cloud resistance is insecurity…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3149521/cloud-computing/how-to-handle-the-politics-of-cloud-resistance.html

The online education industry was worth $166.5 billion dollars last year and it is estimated that its financial value will grow year on year.  A survey by Global Shapers of 25,000 young people from across the world reported that 77 per cent of respondents have embarked on an online course at some point.

There appear to be many benefits to studying an online course from lower overall costs to the convenience and flexibility it provides.  So, does this mean that online learning is going to dominate the future of education?

What’s on Offer?

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that KeyBank, one of the United States’ largest bank-based financial services companies, used the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to expand the bank’s digital banking capabilities.

As with many large companies, KeyBank found that application delivery resulted in complexity growth over time, with slow manual testing, quarterly release cycles and outages resulting in poor Mean-to-time-Resolution (MTTR).

“We’ve been broadening our hosted services since 2005, and the addition of CenturyLink’s on-the-ground facilities and support assures even more clients that we can process and protect their sensitive data,” said Tom Driscoll, Global Managing Director, Charles River. “Our newest functionality in the Charles River Investment Management Solution is SaaS-based. Our agreement with CenturyLink lets clients take full advantage of hosted capabilities regardless of their location.”

Cloud computing as a technology is so groundbreaking that it will eventually end up affecting every sector, may it be healthcare, education and in some cases engineering. Engineering is a fluid sector that thrives on the efficient exchange of information, and engineering firms big and small might benefit from cloud computing in ways they might not even imagine. In this article, we’re going to explore a few reasons why it’s time for your engineering firm to move to the cloud.

Cloud Computing Gives You Access to Big Brand Infrastructure

One of the biggest advantages of cloud computing is that it allows your company to benefit from the same infrastructure bigger companies have access to, with a small time budget. In many cases, the idea of overhauling huge systems might be frightening to some, and Cloud computing offers a great solution to companies who either want to upgrade on the cheap or are looking for a temporary solution until they secure the funds necessary to upgrade their infrastructure.

Grazed from CNBC. Author: Ari Levy.

At Amazon.com’s annual cloud computing gala last month called re:Invent, recruiters from on-demand learning company Pluralsight were on the hunt for experts to teach coding. Pluralsight offers a library of over 5,000 online courses for software developers and IT pros to gain new skills, ranging from learning popular open-source languages and big data tools on Amazon Web Services to mastering the latest in cybersecurity and designing mobile games.

The explosive growth of technology platforms like AWS has driven Pluralsight’s expansion, enabling the 12-year-old company to reel in a recent round of $30 million at a valuation exceeding $1 billion, CEO Aaron Skonnard told CNBC.com in an exclusive interview. Pluralsight, based near Salt Lake City, is using the cash as part of its push beyond individual subscriptions and into big businesses, where a host of new web and infrastructure technologies as well as cyberthreats are forcing developers into a constant state of learning…

Grazed from TheCSuite. Author: Grant MacDonald.

With IDC recently predicting that IT infrastructure spending will grow at a CAGR of 15.1% from 2014 to 2019, and given that spending on cloud will be 46% of the entire IT budget – it’s clear that now is the time harness the best that the cloud has to offer. Research commissioned by Fruition Partners in 2015 showed that CIOs had a range of serious concerns over cloud control. This year, the research was repeated and it looks as though little has changed.

The research found that 80 per cent of CIOs do not apply the same comprehensive IT service management processes to cloud as they do for in-house IT services. When compared to last year’s figures, the research found while there has been a slight improvement in overall cloud maturity, we’ve still got a long way to go. In fact, more than 85 per cent of CIOs still say that the proliferation of public cloud computing services is reducing the control their organisation has over the IT services it uses. CIOs are highly concerned by the negative impacts of this trend, with three-quarters of them saying it leads to financial waste, and increases the business and security risks to the organisation…

For owners and operators of small- to medium-sized buildings, the cost of adding smart building technologies can often be expensive. The high price tag is usually due to proprietary software solutions that are tied to the building equipment or to LED lighting systems. Magnum provides solutions that allow standalone lighting options without the need of software. If data visualization and remote control support are needed, the cBox provides a cost effective alternative.