Grazed from ChannelInsider.  Author: Michael Vizard.

 The cloud solution provider faces a complicated paradox: There is no shortage of opportunities—or obstacles—in this burgeoning field. This irony, though common in the business world, is particularly pronounced in the channel.  The movement of workloads in the cloud challenges business models that many solution providers have relied on for decades.  A key issue for companies in the channel, including cloud MSPs, is finding the spots where they can add value.

Grazed from Barrons.  Author: Tiernan Ray.

 What ails tech? The last couple of weeks of corporate earnings have seen one disappointment after another, for companies large and small.  Some of this is pressure on global economies finally hitting home, with the miracle of American tech giants making money off an expanding world marketplace now showing its unfortunate downside. But that’s not all. Read through the statements of the companies reporting, and there is evidence that their businesses are changing drastically because of cloud computing.

Cirba Inc., the leading provider of software-defined infrastructure control software released the results of a study it conducted on factors impacting the cost of leveraging Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM SoftLayer. The study revealed that workload patterns and hosting models can dramatically impact the cost of leveraging public cloud in ways that people might not expect.

Cloud native networking pioneer Aviatrix Systems recently announced its new Aviatrix Cloud Native Networking 2.0, a solution that’s built from the ground up for AWS, Azure and Google.  The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and was founded back in 2014.  To find out more about the company and its technology, I spoke with the company’s newly hired CEO, Steven Mih.  A technology veteran and evangelist himself, Mih joined Aviatrix to lead the company into its next phase of growth, building on the momentum of the company’s recent GA launch and a $10M Series A funding round led by Ignition Partners and Formation 8 announced in September 2015.

"The IT professionals in my department are often running around the office supporting employees so it’s historically been difficult to address urgent user requests when we’re not at our desks," said Brad Everts, IT supervisor at TW Garner Food Company. "The mobile app for Spiceworks’ cloud-based help desk gives us the flexibility to open, respond to, and close tickets from wherever we may be."

Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of the industry-standard multi-cloud platform, today launched a new Fellowship program. The program is designed to solicit select expertise from member companies to help drive critical Cloud Foundry needs. Abby Kearns of Pivotal will join Cloud Foundry as Vice President, Industry Strategy to drive ecosystem and content strategy for Cloud Foundry.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation Fellowship program draws from the Foundation community to contribute focused resources for a period of time to work on targeted initiatives. The program will strengthen membership value and engagement for and within the Cloud Foundry community.

RapidFire Tools Inc. announced today that it won another coveted industry accolade, the MSPWorld Cup 2016 award for "Best MSP Solution." The MSPWorld Cup program is sponsored by the MSP Alliance in association with its MSPWorld Spring Conference, which took place early April at the Swan Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Fla. The conference is a premier managed services and cloud computing event, one of the few in the IT industry that maintains a single, vendor-agnostic focus on managed service providers (MSPs) and the ecosystems that support this profile of channel professionals.

New Q1 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate the cloud infrastructure services market with a 31% worldwide market share, dwarfing the chasing pack. The big three followers — Microsoft, IBM and Google — in aggregate accounted for 22% of the market, while the next 20 top-ranked cloud providers accounted for another 27%. The good news for Microsoft and Google is that they both achieved growth rates of well over 100% so they are at least slowly gaining some ground on the market leader. Outside of the big four, the next 20 cloud providers are growing at an average 41% per year, but in a market that is growing at over 50% that means that most of them are losing market share.

Grazed from TechWire. Author: Ángel González

Local behemoths Amazon.com and Microsoft, as well as other tech firms that rent out computing power and storage, are rapidly becoming some of the biggest spenders in the corporate world, as they lay down the bases for a future in which most computing will take place in the so-called cloud. These companies are spending billions in acquiring or leasing the data centers that embody the cloud and employing the thousands of engineers that operate the new technology.

The ramp-up was spurred by the widespread adoption of mobile computing, as smartphone and tablet-toting consumers wanted their data accessible from anywhere, including Netflix movies and music from Spotify. But it became massive when large companies started shunning their own server farms for those operated by tech giants, a phenomenon that took off a couple of years ago…

Grazed from BBCNews. Author: Matthew Wall.

Cloud computing – storing data and applications remotely rather than on your own premises – can cut IT costs dramatically and speed up your operations. But is it safe? Despite the rise of public cloud platforms offered by the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, less than 10% of the world’s data is currently stored in the cloud. So what’s holding many companies back? Technology of Business explores the issue of cloud security.

What’s so good about the cloud anyway?

Building your own energy-hungry data centres is expensive and time-consuming, while managing hundreds of software applications chews up IT resources. If you can outsource a lot of this hardware and software to specialist tech companies that can expand or reduce the level of service according to your needs, it can save you a lot of time and money…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36151754