Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

How do you get started using the cloud? For some organizations, cloud usage has already begun by someone in the company – whether they know it or not. But to have a successful cloud deployment, it’s helpful to have a plan. Consultancy Cloud Technology Partners is one of many companies that help customers adopt public IaaS cloud computing resources. CloudTP says the following 10 tips are key for a successful cloud rollout.

1. Alignment work

After a company has made a decision to use IaaS cloud computing services, it’s helpful to have a level-set meeting with important stakeholders at the company to get everyone on the same page. Typical groups involved in this meeting would be security managers, finance and procurement professionals, infrastructure engineers, operations workers and third-party consultants…

Grazed from YahooFinance. Author: Editorial Staff.

LiquidSky — a revolutionary high-performance cloud-based gaming, processing, and remote desktop service — is pleased to announce today the successful closing of (US) $4 million in a series of seed rounds, led by Samsung Global Innovation Center, Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy, and former Sun Microsystems and AOL-Time Warner executive Bill Raduchel.

Both McNealy and Raduchel serve as LiquidSky’s strategic advisors, with Raduchel also the company’s Chairman of the Board. Presently in closed beta, LiquidSky has already attracted over half a million users to its revolutionary Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform. "We are thrilled to have secured the confidence and financial backing of Samsung Global Innovation Center, as well as technology pioneers Scott McNealy and Bill Raduchel," said Ian McLoughlin, LiquidSky CEO…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Databricks, the company founded by the creators of the Apache Spark project, today released the findings of their second annual Apache Spark survey to determine how enterprises and users are utilizing the data analytics and processing engine. The 2016 Databricks Apache Spark Survey collected more than 1,600 responses from 900 organizations.

The results show a rise in deployments of Spark in the public cloud, an increased usage of Spark in industry verticals, and an uptick in Spark streaming and Machine Learning. The survey also reveals that most developers employ two or more Spark components simultaneously to build increasingly sophisticated solutions. Spark remains the most active open-source project in the big data space today, with over 1,000 contributors from more than 250 organizations…

Grazed from Yourstory. Author: Tausif Alam.

Cumulus clouds are the pretty, cauliflower-shaped things you see floating in the sky. Apart from the rain and shade they bring, they seem to have performed one more task — that of serving as inspiration for a startup. Kumolus manages — yes, you guessed right — cloud technology.

Though it’s been almost a decade since cloud computing was introduced and privately used, the phenomenon is still quite new to India. It was just a couple of years ago that Indian companies finally shed security concerns, got impressed by the characteristics of this technology, and adopted it. Now, with enterprises adopting various kinds of cloud strategies to improve workload performance, the cloud systems management software market has grown exponentially in the past few years…

WinMagic Inc. today announced its collaboration with Microsoft Azure Solutions to further protect data in public, private and hybrid clouds. With the widest support from virtualized servers to numerous public and private clouds, WinMagic’s SecureDoc CloudVM provides a single platform and pane of glass that is enterprise controlled and can be utilized to increase enterprise security, ensure encryption compliance, reduce complexity and help to remove silos of encryption within an organization.

WinMagic’s SecureDoc CloudVM solution is a comprehensive full-disk encryption and intelligent key management for Azure virtual machines that protects data in Azure (public), Hyper-V (private) and hybrid cloud environments. The solution increases visibility and strengthens data security within virtual environments by controlling the encryption key management system across a vast array of layers including endpoints, file servers, virtual servers, enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) solutions and Internet of Things (IoT) instances. SecureDoc CloudVM’s application-aware intelligent key management capability alleviates the problems associated with protecting multiple encrypted layers and managing associated keys and credentials by providing unique key and policy management for virtualized workloads. SecureDoc CloudVM also offers a strong policy engine to provide granular policy and support for all cloud automation requirements.

Zadara Storage, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS) today announced that PRO IT has chosen the Zadara VPSA storage array architecture to support the Australian and multinational financial and media markets. By deploying the Zadara Storage VPSA On-Premise-as-a-Service (OPaaS) solution, PRO IT is able to transition from a CapEx model to a pure OpEx model, all while addressing its scalability, agility, performance and data sovereignty requirements.

Serverless computing has gained momentum because it boosts agility for modern enterprises, allowing them to build and deploy applications and services at scale on flexible platforms that abstract away physical infrastructure. Launched in beta as Project Kratos in February, Iron.io announced general availability of its multicloud solution in April. Since then, the company has systematically partnered with leading cloud providers to support multicloud development.

5nine Software, a Microsoft Gold Partner and leading global Hyper-V virtualization security and management provider, today released 5nine Manager v9.2, the popular management and monitoring solution for Windows Server 2016 and Hyper-V Server 2016, including the Nano Server and Server Core installation options.

5nine Manager v9.2 extends management and monitoring for Windows Server beyond the standard operating system, which increases availability of Hyper-V infrastructures and reduces overall maintenance costs. Additionally, it provides the convenience and efficiency to remotely manage Nano Server’s virtualization capabilities using a streamlined graphical interface that deploys quickly and requires minimal resources.

BlueData, provider of the leading Big-Data-as-a-Service software platform, today announced the new fall release for the enterprise edition of its BlueData EPIC software. Delivered as a flexible platform, this new release builds on the EPIC summer release to add deeper security integrations for Big Data deployments in production. It also provides networking and storage enhancements for managing Docker containers used to create Hadoop and Spark clusters in EPIC.

This new version of the BlueData EPIC software platform helps enterprises transition in their Big Data journey from initial dev/test environments to full production deployments of Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS). BlueData has implemented its EPIC software to meet enterprise customer demands for a wide variety of Big Data use cases, ranging from dev/test labs to mission-critical batch processing jobs and advanced analytics use cases.

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

With $37 billion in annual revenue, Oracle is one of the world’s biggest tech companies. And every year, tens of thousands of customers, partners, industry analysts, and journalists descend upon San Francisco for the company’s OpenWorld tech conference. It is a pinnacle week for the company’s top execs — its two famous CEOs, Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, and its even more famous founder, Larry Ellison, who stepped down from the CEO role in 2014 to become executive chairman and CTO, though he’s still very much the leader of the executive triad.

Oracle invited me to spend a full day shadowing Hurd last week at OpenWorld as he met with customers, analysts, and others on the biggest day of the conference. During the week, Hurd met with nearly 500 people either in one-on-one meetings or in small groups, answering their questions, solving problems, issuing reassurances, and explaining the company’s plans and strategy — all at a surprisingly exhausting pace…

Read more from the source @ http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-ceo-mark-hurd-openworld-day-in-the-life-2016-9/#our-day-together-started-at-8-am-at-a-local-starbucks-hurd-had-been-up-for-hours-already-since-about-430-am-working-he-always-wakes-up-that-early-he-warned-me-to-wear-comfortable-shoes-1