Grazed from ChannelPartners. Author: James Anderson.

Partners have mixed opinions about whether cloud computing has improved their relationship with end users and vendors. CompTIA’s annual State of the Channel survey offers an in-depth look at the changing growth areas, business models and concerns that solution providers are encountering in 2016 in the upcoming years.

The study found that optimism for the channel is essentially unchanged from last year, with 63 percent of respondents saying they are hopeful for the industry. But the overall sentiment of positivity and confidence comes alongside angst that surrounds cloud computing and vendor-partner relationships. Let’s take a look…

Grazed from Phys.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft launched a new consumer offensive Wednesday, unveiling a high-end computer that challenges the Apple iMac along with an updated Windows operating system that showcases three-dimensional content and “mixed reality.” The US tech giant announced its first desktop computer, called Surface Studio, a $3,000 high-end “all-in-one” device that aims at creative professionals, a segment dominated by Apple.

“We’re creating a new category that transforms your desk into a creative studio,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said at the unveiling in New York. With a large, 28-inch (71-centimeter) hinged touchscreen display touted as “the thinnest desktop monitor ever created,” Surface Studio adds to the Microsoft lineup of tablet and laptop devices for the premium segment…

Read more from the source @ http://phys.org/news/2016-10-windows-d-two-dimensional.html#jCp

When it comes to disseminating sensitive patient information between healthcare providers, there is always some room for doubt as to whether or not that information will remain safe and secure during the transmission and storage of any data. This is a reasonable fear and one that perhaps hasn’t been adequately addressed, however, there are other fears of working in the Cloud in terms of patient privacy and the potential for loss of data.

Some of those fears are unfounded and others can leave room for doubt. Since health informatics is still in relative infancy, these fears are common among healthcare providers. In fact, a healthcare informatics masters degree is one of the newer careers in IT as it applies to healthcare and one that was instituted specifically to address these concerns and to provide a vehicle for the safe storage and delivery of patient information between providers.

"For the first time, users have a solution that protects data in a holistic manner, regardless of where the data comes from or where it’s going," said Mike Fey, Symantec president and chief operating officer. "We are moving quickly to integrate our solutions and deliver a combined product portfolio to deliver integrated cyber defense solutions across customers’ entire IT environment. Symantec is uniquely positioned to bring market-leading solutions, fed by the largest threat intelligence network, to offer unprecedented protection to the cloud generation."

The OpenStack cloud operating system is fast becoming an important alternative for large enterprises wishing to avoid vendor lock-in with multi-hypervisor support while being able to tailor the OpenStack environment to meet their specific needs. SUREedge Migrator allows organizations to migrate complete workloads to new infrastructure inside a data center, from data center to data center, to public clouds, between clouds, or from a cloud back to on-premises. Version 4.7.1 delivers the already feature-rich SUREedge Migrator capabilities including; ease of deployment and management through a powerful UI, automated transformation of the workload to the target environment, efficiency and security with deduplication, compression and encryption for any data going across a WAN, and no impact on the production server during the migration process.

To satisfy growing customer demands for cloud migration and high-performance applications, ServerCentral is deploying Ciena‘s Waveserver stackable data center interconnect (DCI) platform. This upgrade allows ServerCentral to quickly scale bandwidth and support customer needs for high-speed data transfer, virtual machine migration and disaster recovery/backup between data centers. Additionally, with the extremely compact design of the Waveserver platform, ServerCentral can make more efficient use out of its data center footprints.

Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking, will showcase highly optimized platforms enabling OpenStack deployments based on Cavium’s award-winning ThunderX, LiquidIO and FastLinQ Ethernet adapter product lines during OpenStack Summit being held in Barcelona Spain October 25 – 28.

OpenStack is the most widely deployed open source software for building clouds. Enterprises use OpenStack to support rapid deployment of new products, reduce costs and improve internal systems. Service providers use OpenStack to give customers reliable, easily accessible cloud infrastructure resources, supporting technologies including VMs, bare metal and containers.

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

Hidden in Microsoft’s announcement of the public beta for its Azure Analysis Service was word of another big data development: the SQL Server 2016 DW Fast Track Reference Architecture. It sounds innocuous and even downright useful. Microsoft has, in its words, "collaborated with a number of our hardware partners on a joint effort to deliver validated, preconfigured solutions that reduce the complexity and drive optimization when implementing a data warehouse based on SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition."

However, this sounds a lot like the "validated, preconfigured solution[s]" Microsoft has declared its sole delivery method for Azure Stack in hybrid deployments. If Microsoft is building a hybrid cloud future where every significant part, from database to compute, requires specific hardware, that’s going to turn off a lot of IT…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Sead Fadilpašic.

European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), set to kick off in May 2018, is going to help the big players in the cloud industry to dominate even more, while the little guy won’t stand a chance. This is according to Kuan Hon, consultant lawyer at law firm Pinsent Masons.

Speaking at the Computing Cloud and Infrastructure Summit, Hon said that the GDPR will force companies into so much administration only large companies will see profit in cloud. "It will be a big change for sub-processors," said Hon. "Prior consent will be needed and notification of changes, as well as what they call a ‘terms flowdown’. …