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…

You used to be able to learn how to operate a PC on your own and be ready to run a company. Now, you have to be able to use the web, troubleshoot, install and activate software and save files to various locations. A lot of time is wasted by businesses that refuse to accept the fact that technology really is their friends. Companies will never go back to sending time sensitive correspondences in the mail when they have computers they can use to send emails. You might be willing to turn on your PC every day, but if you don’t understand what technologies are important to your business, you can pretty easily get stuck going in circles. 

Business Technology Improves Speed

How often are you surprised when you anticipate that it will take days to do something and it is instead completed in hours, thanks to technology? Technology can increase the speed of certain tasks phenomenally. Think of all the companies that are using internal messaging to communicate within small buildings just because it is faster to type than it is to walk down the hall. Things done with technology happen faster and more effectively.

Grazed from RCRWireless. Author: Dan Meyer.

In a move to combine what it sees as similar technology attributes, ZTE offered up a support for combining work being conducted in cloud and fog computing. Participating in the International Telecommunications Union’s Eighth CTO meeting in Thailand, the vendor said it analyzed online video, augmented reality, virtual reality, large-scale “internet of things” and other application scenarios in pointing out similar concepts behind fog computing and multi-access edge computing.

Those efforts were said to be placed under a “cloud-fog collaboration” system architecture. ZTE explained that while a solid cloud platform is required to deal with the generation, transmission and processing of massive data, performance and latency requirements for AR and VR in particular will require edge-based platforms…

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?

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