Grazed from Channelbiz. Author: Antony Savvas.

New cloud-based solutions (56 percent) and data security (50 percent) are the key areas of investment for IT departments in the UK this year, according to research. A study of 400 senior IT decision makers from medium and large organisations in the UK, France and Germany has established the main spending priorities of firms.

Cloud solutions are seen as a key investment priority as they enable the simple management of data, documents and applications employees use on their devices. Through cloud computing, businesses are also able to use IT on demand, enabling them to upscale or downsize their computing provision in line with business growth…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Chris Lau.

IBM Corp. announced on Thursday (May 19) Nvidia power on IBM cloud. Cloud computing is becoming an increasingly powerful option for enterprises looking for data analytics, storage, and application hosting. GPUs, or graphic processing units, may bottleneck application solutions when implementing a cloud solution.

By adopting Nvidia’s Tesla solution, IBM is making inroads in supporting AI and cognitive across a variety of enterprises. The IBM cloud will offer Nvidia’s Tesla M60 GPU accelerator. HPC (high performance computing) need powerful GPUs to do data analytics, AI, and graphical computations. In the energy sector, Haliburton and Repsol both use GPUs to analyze seismic data…

Grazed from MIS-Asia. Author: Steven Yong.

Today’s cloud computing pace is moving at an accelerated rate – we see a shift in traditional computing that gives businesses on-demand access to a variety of software and services while giving IT a shared pool of configurable computing resources at the platform, infrastructure and application layers. When done right, cloud computing helps businesses do more – tapping into the power of massive datacentres and IT services without having to build, manage or maintain them.

In Malaysia, deploying cloud-based ICT solutions has become the most important trend and is expected to reach about US$900 million by 2020. The cloud market in Malaysia is growing at a rapid pace, with the local government driving the development of a cloud computing ecosystem as a strategic initiative to promote MSC Malaysia while simultaneously equipping organisations with cloud capabilities to accelerate the nation’s development into a fully innovative digital economy…

Read more from the source @ http://www.mis-asia.com/blogs/blogs/cloud-is-a-paradigm-not-a-place/

Grazed from CIO-Today. Author: Jef Cozza.

The latest release of the SAP HANA platform announced yesterday at the Sapphire Now conference in Orlando, Fla., promises to bring enterprise customers some major new cloud capabilities. The SPS 12 update features a hybrid cloud approach to popular database management systems that SAP said will bring cloud capabilities to on-premises deployments.

“Our new beta program breaks down the traditional silos of on-premise and cloud, allowing customers to freely use both approaches for greater agility,” said Daniel Schneiss, senior vice president and global head, SAP HANA Platform and Databases, SAP. The true hybrid model lets organizations test the impact of IT system change requirements in the cloud before they commit the upgrades to an on-premise environment — ultimately promoting cost-effective IT management, Schneiss said. "We designed the program in close collaboration with our customers to shape the next wave of data management services in the cloud," he added…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio-today.com/article/index.php?story_id=103001PHW79E

Grazed from DarkReading. Author: Jamie Tischart.

13 questions to ask your service providers to better understand their service offerings and your risks. When you sign up with a cloud provider for computing, storage, or application functionality, you should get a service level agreement that describes what the provider promises to deliver. An SLA should be fully transparent to customers and published on the provider’s website for prospective customers to review.

Unfortunately, SLAs are often difficult to find and can be even more difficult to decipher. SLAs are not really there to protect you, the customer. While they may provide some customer protection as a byproduct, they are really a marketing tool and a method to limit service provider responsibility in the event of an outage…

Talligent is excited to be the first reporting solution to achieve Mirantis Unlocked certification and be packaged for easy deployment as a Fuel Plugin.  Mirantis Unlocked means that a solution has been tested by Mirantis, confirmed to work with Mirantis OpenStack, and offered to customers with validated deployment tooling through Fuel.  Fuel is an open source deployment and management tool for OpenStack, recently accepted as an OpenStack project.

Safe Computing started operating as a provider of specialised IT support for Andalusian SMEs with particular focus on the implementation of on-premise virtualised environments. The company is now launching an ambitious growth and evolution programme aimed at setting up a professional cloud-based environment and continuing to offer the same virtualisation services, but as an outsourced activity.

Grazed from EconomicTimes. Author: Bino George.

Organisations have reached an inflection point in their IT strategy. On one hand they are battling with legacy hardware and software implemented, while on the other end they are expecting IT to play strategic role in enabling digital transformation. Modern businesses need technology to play a pivotal role to seamlessly ride the growth to tap new growth opportunities, respond to market scenarios and meet customer demands.

Cloud computing has certainly caught everyone’s attention and over the past few years has become the focal point of CXO discussion. It has gathered this momentum due the strong conviction in the on the adoption that will streamline processes, and free up capital, while giving the necessary flexibility to meet evolving operational needs…

Cloud computing is based on the concept of virtualization. Cloud computing is on-demand network access of shared computing resources. Changing business landscape and evolving technology gave rise to cloud adoption. The main characteristics of cloud computing is provision of computing capabilities without any human interaction with a service provider.

Cloud computing technology is maturing to the point of becoming a prime source of technology for military and civilian agencies, and state and local governments. Most of the large as well as small companies have adopted cloud computing or in the process of adopting it for at least some of its applications or processes. The deals in cloud deal tracker identifies leading vendors and their distinct competencies in the cloud market.