Grazed from ReCode. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Use of the cloud-based collaboration app Slack grew by 77 percent while Microsoft’s Office 365 remained the most widely used cloud application by businesses in the second half of 2015. The findings are contained in a report out today from Okta, which provides a service to help companies manage access to all the cloud applications they use.

To gather the data, Okta tracked the use of more than 4,000 applications across more than 2,500 customers who use its service. Slack led an interesting pack of fast-growing apps in use by Okta customers. Tableau, the business intelligence app, was the second-fastest grower, up 65 percent. New Relic was third, rising 56 percent…

Grazed from 247WallSt. Author: Lee Jackson.

If there is one company in the tech universe that you don’t want to compete with it is probably Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL). Over the years, the tech giant has proven a worthy adversary in almost every field it has entered into, and the company’s increasing focus on the public cloud may prove to be no different.

In a new Merrill Lynch research report, analyst Kash Rangan makes the case that the company is increasing the focus on the public cloud and that Google NEXT last week highlighted the increased commitment to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). While Rangan feels the GCP has a host of positive features, he notes that there is a need to catch up in services offered, global scale and the overall ecosystem…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Authjor: Shirley Siluk.

A growing number of enterprises believe hybrid cloud strategies will help bring their operations and customer service into the digital business era. However, many of them haven’t yet mapped out their plans for achieving those goals, according to a recent analysis by EMC and VMware.

Released last week, "The State of IT Transformation" report draws on comments from more than 660 EMC and VMware customers across 18 industries. The analysis found that more than 90 percent of those enterprises believe it’s important to have plans for IT transformation, although 55 percent have not yet documented their own roadmaps for change…

When is a security alert not a real security alert? With hacks and breaches a daily reality for businesses, security teams deal with a barrage of suspicious and anomalous user behaviors and have little time to isolate and focus on the true threats. Today, CloudLock’s security intelligence arm, The CloudLock CyberLab announced its breakthrough discovery that solves this challenge — the "Cloud Threat Funnel." Following its extensive research of the daily behavior of 10 million users, 1 billion files and 140,000 cloud apps, CloudLock CyberLab detected distinct patterns of user behaviors and developed a new process for isolating truly malicious threats from the noise of other potentially suspicious or unusual behaviors. CloudLock’s findings and methodology are presented in its Q1-16 cloud cybersecurity report published today, "The Cloud Threat Funnel: Suspicious User Behavior That Matters."

The report reveals that 99.6 percent of users accessed cloud platforms from just one or two countries per week. Establishing this as the norm, the team was then able to isolate the long tail revealing anomalies: 1 in 20,000 users, for example, logged in from six or more countries and, within this group, the CyberLab found some users logging in from as many as 68 different countries in a given week — real needles in the haystack. By applying the Cloud Threat Funnel methodology, the CyberLab was able to correlate these anomalous behaviors with other high-risk suspicious user activities and pinpoint compromised accounts.

"Dave was universally loved and admired at Ceridian and in the community," says David Ossip, Chairman and CEO, Ceridian. "The memories and condolences that we continue to receive are a true testament to Dave’s character. He had a tremendous impact on us as individuals and as an organization, and leaves behind a powerful legacy of kindness, integrity and humility. Ceridian grieves Dave’s sudden passing. He will be sorely missed."

Grazed from TriangleBusinessJournal.  Author:  Lauren K. Ohnesorge.

Decades ago, The Frontier in Research Triangle Park was a typical 80s-era IBM building, with long, windowless hallways and small isolated offices.  Today, under Research Triangle Foundation ownership, a co-working space is replacing those narrow hallways and collaboration, not isolation, is being touted as the Frontier’s theme.  As of this week, however, its longtime tenant IBM is officially back, at least in a small, leased office on the first floor. But it’s definitely not your parent’s IBM.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Sharon Gaudin.

 A company that helps users to create their own websites now knows what kind of sites their 80 million users are building without pestering them with repeated questions.  Wix, a Tel Aviv-based web development company, is using machine learning on Google’s cloud platform to learn more about its users so it can help them find the images they need to build interesting and useful websites.

Grazed from TheStreet.  Author: Scott Gamm.

Equinix  is smack in the middle of two burgeoning areas: cloud computing and the Internet of Things.  "The primary driver for us is the continued rollout of the cloud computing paradigm shift going on in the world today," said Steve Smith, CEO of Equinix, when asked what factors will drive the company’s expectations of 30% revenue growth in 2016. "Equinix is providing the on and off ramps to a lot of this cloud computing."

With these new advancements, Oracle provides all of the cloud-based services that organizations need to capitalize on key transformative technologies such as big data analytics, social, mobile, and IoT, as well as continue to extend foundational use cases that enable organizations to move enterprise workloads to the cloud. Oracle continues to help organizations drive innovation and business transformation by increasing business agility, lowering costs, and reducing IT complexity. The new PaaS and IaaS services can be deployed wherever an organization chooses — in the Oracle Cloud or in their own data center via the Oracle Cloud at Customer offering. 

AppDirect, the leader in cloud service commerce, today announced its acquisition of Xendo, the leading provider of hosted enterprise search. Xendo, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2014, offers cloud-based unified search across 30 different cloud and on-premise apps to allow business users to easily find content across the various cloud services they use every day. The service can be set up in minutes and integrates with organizations’ IT security infrastructure. Xendo’s customers include Netflix, Looker and Alphabet-owned Intersection.

With cloud adoption at all time highs, and with the average employee actively using 30 cloud applications per month, IT departments are aggressively attempting to address not only “shadow IT,” but also usability and interoperability to increase efficiency and collaboration across their organizations. While technologies like single sign-on allow workers to securely access multiple online services, cloud-based information still remains siloed, often leaving employees searching for documents, spreadsheets and other files within individual apps. Xendo’s turnkey enterprise search service allows users to spend less time looking for their cloud content and get more done.