Grazed from MovieTechGeeks.  Author: Marius Maronilla.

Nothing lasts forever. Not even Microsoft Windows. Microsoft has been shoving Windows 10 up our behinds for a while now, but even they know that someday, they’ll have to go back to the drawing board and come up with something new. Wintel PC sales continue to slide among consumers. Cloud computing is on the rise for businesses and enterprise software that can run on browsers continue to increase enabling users to choose their platform.

Microsoft recently announced SQL Server for Linux. Microsoft Office has versions for Macs, iOS, and Android. Office versions can be run on Linux through Wine, and enterprise software can now be run through browsers or remote software across platforms. Plus, Microsoft saying that Windows 10 is the last version of Windows somehow paints an ominous picture for Windows fans…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

If you don’t like the current cloud landscape (cloudscape?), wait a minute. It’ll change. Take this week as an example. First, news dropped that Dropbox, which had long used Amazon Web Services to store most of its digital stuff, acknowledged that it had moved most of that (90%) to its own infrastructure. The migration, which has taken more than two years, was previously reported but wasn’t confirmed by Amazon AMZN -1.46% nor Dropbox until now.

For those who don’t follow this space, a public cloud is a huge pool of shared servers, storage, and networking owned and managed by one provider—Amazon, Microsoft MSFT -1.50% , and Google GOOG -0.12% are the big three. Those providers, in turn, rent that capacity to customers ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies…

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2016/03/18/cloud-computing-busy-week/

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

IBM has announced the acquisition of Microsoft software as a service (SaaS) specialist Optevia, ramping up its offering for CRM SaaS in the public sector. Optevia’s specialism in Microsoft Dynamics CRM firms makes an interesting avenue for IBM, given how dominant Microsoft is in the public sector. Among Optevia’s more recent customers include Wealden District Council, who announced in October “significantly improved customer services” using Dynamics CRM.

The company announced record financial results in May, and among its current client base are ministries, councils, regulators, transport authorities, and social housing organisations. “By acquiring Optevia, IBM will be able to provide public sector clients and prospects with a range of unique, industry focused CRM based solutions,” said Joanna Davinson, IBM Europe public sector leader in a statement. “This strategic acquisition will help strengthen IBM as a SaaS provider and global software integrator.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2016/mar/18/ibm-acquires-optevia-public-sector-crm-saas-play/

Do you have or want to have a modern, agile, perhaps self-service, cloud infrastructure?  Are you struggling with or considering how many disparate workloads are deployed?  How will you gain useful insight into who’s using which resources, and how do you appropriately charge users, departments, the customers of IT, for the resources they consume?

Cloud computing is growing rapidly, so the number of jobs available in the sector is on the increase. For anyone looking to get ahead in tech, looking for a job in cloud computing could be the way forward. So how can you ensure you have the right skills to progress in your chosen career?

The tech world is vast and varied. There are thousands of different jobs in tech, so it is important to select the right career path if you have a specific job in mind. Clearly this is easier said than done if you are still in education, but the skills you learn at the start of your career will play a big part in where you eventually end up. 

The Best Route into Cloud Computing

For many people, the most obvious route into an IT career is via a university degree and, perhaps, a post-grad qualification. There is no doubt that a good degree from a recognised university will help your cause, but a degree is not the be all and end all, particularly in a specialised field such as cloud computing.

Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Ben Sullivan.

Organisations are turning to the public, hybrid and multi-cloud to accelerate digital transformation. A 2015 Oxford Economics Survey entitled ‘The Cloud Grows Up’ shows that 69 percent of global business leader and IT executive respondents planned to make moderate to heavy cloud investments over the next three years; not only to save money, but to enter new markets and develop new products, services, lines of business and business models fast.

But one of the biggest challenges of hybrid and multi-clouds is achieving visibility, performance and management across the entire complex estate. You can wrestle with multiple cloud-provided tools and instrumentation, but that can be time consuming and frustrating. However, there is a surprisingly simple path to holistic visibility; the application delivery infrastructure…

Grazed from SWNS. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is on the rise, but behind the virtual cloud there isn’t always a silver lining. In recent months the mainstream media has picked up on some serious issues with the cloud services of some major companies and organisations – and that’s caused some to question the safety of this technology.

Indeed, whether it was the ASUS incident where the company put thousands of users at risk by failing to fix a flaw in their routers or the LA Hospital security breach where malware in an email allowed hackers to lockdown the system and demand a ransom, cloud services have taken a beating recently…

Nimbix and Bitfusion today announced the immediate availability of its new combined solution to offer more choices to application developers looking for high performance GPU accelerators on an on-demand basis. The Nimbix Cloud, powered by JARVICE, now integrates Bitfusion Boost to offer lower cost accelerator resources for developing compute hungry machine learning, analytics, and photorealistic rendering algorithms.

The solution uses Bitfusion Boost’s software defined compute technology to enable higher horsepower virtual GPU instances with costs significantly lower than anywhere in the cloud. The solution will also permit the combining of interesting CPU-memory-GPU configurations in the future. A developer will be able to combine the largest memory machine with an unlimited number of GPU nodes together to form a single powerful instance capable of handling a much larger job than before.

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

What do Gartner, IDC and Clutch have in common? They all predicted that the cloud would become the centre of attention in 2016. Analyst house Gartner forecasts that the global public cloud services market is likely to reach $204 billion in value by the end on 2016, while a survey conducted by research firm Clutch shows that roughly 90 percent of enterprises intend to increase or at least maintain spending on cloud computing this year.

Last year security was the top cloud challenges, this year it was dethroned by the lack of resources or expertise -26 percent of respondents noted that cloud cost management is a significant challenge, but 32 percent said the lack of resources or expertise was by far the biggest challenge. Gartner, Inc. has predicted that the global public cloud services market will increase by 16.5 percent this year to total $204 billion…

Read more from the source @ https://www.whatech.com/cloud-computing/news/139509-2016-year-of-the-cloud-lack-of-expertise-dethrones-security-as-the-biggest-predicted-challenge-for-business

Grazed from Windows IT Pro. Author: Richard Hay.

Cloud, Cloud, Cloud! It seems the cloud is involved in nearly every business decision, planning for start ups, etc. but when do you decide it is time to go solo with your own cloud? We all know that cloud is a bit of a misnomer because in reality your files are just in residence on someone else’s server hardware.

There is no need to look any further for proof of this than the server revenue and shipment report for the last quarter of 2015 that I wrote about last week. Companies around the world are moving a lot of hardware and making money while doing it. Of course, you folks understand this and the decision to go public or private cloud can be a challenging one because it involves cost and what the ultimate return on your investment will be in either case…