Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Suzanne Franco.

Cloud technology and services have gained widespread adoption and have made a huge impact on the way business runs making cloud computing more capable, and more accessible IT solutions. Is your organisation fully aware of cloud’s true benefits to the business? On this note, by partnering with ITWeb, Neotel is conducting an online Cloud Survey during August and September to identify the cloud strategies of South African organisations.

"The objectives of the cloud survey is to take an honest and realistic look at the way in which South African businesses are looking towards cloud services, what they are comfortable with and what benefits they expect from the cloud," says Andre Schoeman, data centre analyst at Neotel. Schoeman points out that there are always dramatic changes in the business environment…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=155394

Grazed from CIOReview. Author: Dr. Chandra Bhansali.

The desktop computing era gave us Do-It-Yourself (DIY) accounting systems created for small business owners. Accountants have become accustomed to working with their clients’ DIY accounting software solutions, despite their inherent risks and limitations. Now, cloud-based professional accounting systems let accountants overcome these challenges.

Unlike DIY systems, these professional systems combine the functionality of current DIY systems with the more sophisticated capabilities accountants need for their professional work. These systems allow accountants to work collaboratively with their clients, while they remain in the control of accounting process–a true win-win…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Dina Bass.

VMware Inc. is set to unveil new products in a bid to eke out greater relevancy for the company in internet-based cloud-computing. On Monday, the company will announce Cloud Foundation, which combines software for storage, networking and virtualization into one package, as well as the ability to use that product as a service hosted in IBM’s cloud.

The company will also preview new Cross-Cloud subscription services that let customers manage and protect applications hosted in clouds from International Business Machines Corp., as well as market leader Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. VMware is shifting its cloud strategy after little traction and executive departures…

Grazed from SysCon. Author: Jnan Dash.

While reading the latest issue of the Economist, I was reminded that August 25th. marks an important anniversary for two key events: 25 years back, on August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds launched a new operating system called Linux and on the same day in 2006, Amazon under the leadership of Andy Jesse launched the beta version of Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), the central piece of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The two are very interlinked. Linux became the world’s most used piece of software of its type. Of course Linux usage soared due to backers like HP, Oracle, and IBM to combat the Windows force. Without open-source programs like Linux, cloud computing would not have happened. Currently 1500 developers contribute to each new version of Linux…

Grazed from SysCon. Author: Kevin Jackson.

It was late 2011 and Steven Donovan was comfortable working at SHI International Corporation, a growing information technology firm, as a personal computer break/fix technician. His company had been growing quickly from a $1 million "software-only" regional re-seller into eventually becoming a $6 billion global provider of information technology products and services.

At that time, cloud computing was just starting to explode onto the information technology scene. Although Amazon Web Services had been offering its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) since 2006, browser-based enterprise applications from companies like Google had only been around since 2009. Steven wanted to somehow elevate himself professionally so after hearing good things about the New Jersey Institutes CloudMASTER® certification he enrolled. After a short, but intense, online curriculum Steven earned NJIT CloudMASTER® Certificate 11002…

Read more from the source @ http://news.sys-con.com/node/3901612

Grazed from CloudComputingExpo. Author: Stefan Bernbo.

Web-scale IT is a pattern of global-class computing that delivers the capabilities of large cloud service providers within an enterprise IT setting by reimagining positions across several dimensions. The unprecedented explosion of Big Data and cloud services is driving the development of new storage architectures to store the information produced by this web-scale trend.

It is becoming increasingly clear that even a linear growth trajectory for storage is insufficient to deliver the quantity of storage needed for data produced by the Internet of Things. Current architectures have bottlenecks that, while merely inconvenient for legacy data, are simply unacceptable for the scale of storage needed today…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tim Worstall.

There’s a really quite superbly wrong piece in the New York Times about cloud computing. They’re looking at the data centres that Microsoft, Amazon and others are building around the country. There’re a couple of minor economic points, things like path dependence and even government intervention which they get right.

But the big point they’re making they get entirely wrong. They’re bemoaning the fact that these data centres provide very few jobs. But that’s the entire joy of them. They produce huge value and utility without using much human labour. That’s the very process which makes us all richer – gaining more value from less labour…

The $32.00 per share cash consideration represents a premium of 38% when compared to Rackspace’s unaffected closing stock price on August 3, 2016, the last trading day prior to news reports speculating about a potential transaction. The Rackspace board of directors unanimously approved the agreement with the Apollo Funds and recommends that Rackspace stockholders vote in favor of the transaction.

Grazed from TheStack. Author: Alice MacGregor.

London-based fund manager C5 Capital is aiming to raise a $150 million (approx. £114 million) fund to tap into the growing cloud computing sector after appointing the former European head of Intel Capital, Marcos Battisti. Battisti will join the firm this September to manage one of the largest funds of its kind in Europe.

The investment will target next-stage development businesses operating in the cloud computing market, and hopes to enable further opportunities for remote processing and storage. The Financial Times expected typical investments to be between $5 million and $15 million. At Intel’s venture capital group in the States, Battisti was involved in investments in companies such as French mobile connectivity company Sigfox, and Israeli semiconductor designer Anobit – which was bought by Apple in 2012…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

There is something of a space race on in the datacenter market. Hardware vendors now think they are software vendors. Well-known ex-PC manufactures now bill themselves as Software Defined DataCenter (SDDC) specialists — and cloud computing specialists are busy reshaping their offerings as it turns out that ultra-hybrid multi-cloud multi-vendor cross-platform is the only way to run a cloud.

There is no real cloud

It’s all change and some say that there is no real ‘Internet’ or ‘cloud computing’ anyway. The web is in fact a distributed hypermedia system of data nodes interrelated via defined interaction criteria that live in datacenters. The cloud is just a collection of various data nodes in that same system with bits of software management intelligence sprinkled around…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/adrianbridgwater/2016/08/26/veritas-ups-resiliency-factor-in-datacenter-space-race/#7f15d4b43745