Grazed from eWeek. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Next year, Microsoft is planning to open new Azure cloud data centers in France. The announcement was made in Dublin at the Microsoft Experiences event today, the first day of a four-day tour of Europe, in which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and President Brad Smith will meet with the region’s leaders and businesses. Other stops include Paris, Berlin and London.

Dublin is a highly symbolic site for Microsoft. Not only does the Redmond, Wash., software company operate a cloud data center in the Irish capital, it was an email stored there that sparked a major court case with cloud privacy and data sovereignty implications. The U.S. Department of Justice served Microsoft with a warrant in 2013 for emails stored in the Irish facility…

Grazed from Baseline. Author: Mike Elgan.

Giving up control is probably the best way to develop more competent employees and happier customers. And those outcomes add up to professional success for you. People need a sense of control. Understanding this fact helps you make better management decisions, career choices and products. So many fraught circumstances can be explained or understood by the human need for control.

Why do supervisors micromanage? And why do the people being micromanaged hate it so much? In both cases, the culprit is control. When tasks are assigned or delegated to a subordinate, the manager feels a loss of control. This out-of-control feeling is interpreted as, "They can’t do it as well as I can." Or "They’ll get the credit for this instead of me."…

Grazed from DatacenterNews. Author: Shannon Williams.

Increased threats to stored information due to the rising number of cyber attacks is just one of many factors driving the data center security market, according to new figures from Grand View Research, which says the global market is expected to reach USD 15.49 billion by 2024. The report says data centers need to be safeguarded against attacks and manipulation at both physical and logical level, subsequently creating a need for a cumulative deployment of security infrastructure.

The increasing awareness about the need for security, growing demand from the data center users for an integrated infrastructure, increasing adoption of cloud computing and virtualisation, and threat to the stored information due to the rising number of cyber-attacks are expected to propel industry over the forecast period…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Don Sheppard.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the relationships among emerging technologies, especially how the various ecosystems fit together. The list of technologies can be lengthy – social networks for people, wireless networks for mobile devices, systems for big data and analytics, hybrid cloud computing, IoT (in various flavours) and various applications of blockchain.

These are the building blocks of a truly major disruption in how IT is developed, deployed and operated. But do we have an appropriate architecture for what we’re building? In my opinion, few if any of the next-generation technologies have been the result of a structured architecture or an architecting process. Furthermore, traditional approaches to enterprise architecture do not seem to fit very well with today’s open source vendor-driven services…

5nine Software, a Microsoft Gold Partner and leading global Hyper-V virtualization security and management provider, today announced the release of Cloud Security v8.1, which supports Hyper-V Server 2016, Microsoft Windows Server 2016 and Server Core 2016.

5nine Cloud Security is a unified security and compliance solution designed to specifically address virtually every Hyper-V vulnerability across every virtual resource. Its lightweight agentless architecture enables administrators to easily secure and enforce compliance across multi-tenant Hyper-V environments and isolated virtual machines.

Sonus Networks, Inc., a global leader in secure and intelligent Cloud communications, today introduced the Sonus SBC SWe Lite, a virtualized e-SBC designed for Skype for Business or Office 365 Cloud PBX deployments. The SBC SWe Lite supplements the Sonus SBC SWe, providing a virtual Customer Premise Equipment (vCPE) option for SMEs looking to virtualize interworking, security and survivability for Unified Communications (UC).

By leveraging the same management and provisioning interface as the Sonus SBC 1000 and SBC 2000, the SBC SWe Lite empowers enterprises to migrate from hardware to software without additional investments in new equipment. The SBC SWe Lite also gives customers the flexibility to deploy a virtual SBC solution on standard off-the-shelf servers or in virtualized environments. Enterprises with spare virtual machine resources available to host SBC functionality can significantly reduce the capital expenditures associated with deploying physical hardware on-premises in support of Skype for Business or Office 365 Cloud PBX. 

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Stratosphere Networks, an IT managed service provider based in Chicago, has been selected as one of the top 10 cloud computing consultants by the Washington, D.C.-based B2B ratings and reviews firm Clutch. Stratosphere Networks and the other nine companies were identified as leading cloud consultants based on more than a dozen qualitative and quantitative details, including their market presence and experience in the realm of cloud computing.

Analysts from Clutch also conducted interviews with past clients to assess how the consultants tackle challenges and custom projects, in addition to how they approach strategy development. “We’re very proud that Clutch has recognized us as one of the best cloud computing consultants,” said Kevin Rubin, president and COO of Stratosphere Networks…

Grazed from Cordis. Author: Editorial Staff.

Whether it’s sharing files via Dropbox, saving images on Google Drive or placing an order with Amazon, we all use what is commonly referred to as ‘the cloud’ for our basic computing needs. But did you know the typical cloud server only operates at approximately 20 % of its computing capacity? In fact, the cloud is now responsible for nearly 10 % of the world’s total electricity consumption – meaning the current model of cloud computing is simply not sustainable.

The EU-funded CLOUDLIGHTNING project intends to change this by creating a more efficient, sustainable and user-centric cloud. The project is working to develop an intelligent, power-efficient cloud computing infrastructure that will provide energy savings to cloud service providers and simplify access for cloud users. By using heterogeneous processing resources, the project believes it can increase the cloud’s computing capacity from the dismal 20 % of today to a more sustainable 80 %…

Read more from the source @ http://cordis.europa.eu/news/rcn/126365_en.html

Written by David Marshall

Even as companies turn to the cloud, Condusiv Technologies says the physical data center is an important yet neglected part of an IT infrastructure. The company today updated its popular Diskeeper software with DRAM caching and a guarantee to improve performance for physical servers or PCs. This latest version, Diskeeper 16, uses available DRAM resources to serve hot data reads and ensure large, clean contiguous data writes from the Windows operating system so fragmentation is no longer an issue for disk or solid-state storage.