Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The start of any year is always a good time to take stock, inspect the landscape, and see where the puck is moving. That is exactly what Tariff Consultancy (TCL) has done, with the company’s latest cloud pricing report revealing that while enterprise cloud computing prices have dropped by two thirds on average since 2014, the race to the bottom is finally letting up.

The report, entitled ‘Pricing the Cloud 2 – 2016 to 2020’, assessed a total of 24 vendors, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Google, and cited the former two as a reason for stability in public cloud pricing. Price drops continue to fuel cloud adoption, but the landscape is different to 2014. Back then, both companies were offering free initial tier compute instances; now, free elements only come as part of promotional periods, or to entice customers in to paid options…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Clive Longbottom.

Over a decade ago, Quocirca looked at the current means of securing data, and decided that there was something fundamentally wrong. The concept of solely relying on network edge protection, along with internal network and application defences misses the point. It has always been the data that matters – in fact, not really even the data, but the information and intellectual property that data represents.

To our minds, enterprise content management (ECM) has not lived up to expectations around information security: it only dealt with a very small subset of information; it was far too expensive; and has not evolved to support modern collaboration mechanisms. It is also easy to circumvent its use, and far too easy for information assets to escape from within its sphere of control…

Grazed from TheIrishIndependent. Author: Editorial Staff.

The company is to grow its Irish workforce over 1,800 as part of a multi-billion euro investment across the Europe. A further boost will see 70 jobs created over the next 18 months by 3D4Medical, an Irish medical technology company which is one of the world leaders in developing applications for the healthcare sector.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Jobs Minister Richard Burton, as well as officials from IDA Ireland which has supported the Oracle investment, were given a tour of the company site as the announcements were made. Oracle’s cloud technologies deliver everything from secure computing infrastructure to enterprise cloud applications. It currently offers more than 600 different cloud applications…

Read more from the source @ http://www.independent.ie/business/jobs/jobs-boost-for-dublin-with-520-new-positions-announced-34363685.html

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Simon Sharwood.

Amazon Web Services has just done something rather interesting, in the form of making it possible to reserve servers in advance for short bursts of computing. The new “Scheduled Reserved Instances” caper does what it says on the tin: you can decide what kind of server you want to run, how long to run it for and what you’re prepared to pay. You can even add a schedule to get the same instance type each week. Or each day. Or whatever, provided you commit for a year.

AWS is talking up the new plan as ideal for those who predictably run certain jobs at certain times. Of course there’s also an upside for AWS in this new feature. Running a big public cloud means spending astounding amounts of cash on kit and operations. The more AWS and its ilk can predict usage rates, the easier it gets to plan future purchases, cashflow and capacity…

Gartner, a research and advisory firm, has estimated that by the end of 2019, 30 percent of enterprises will use SD-WAN products in all their branches, up from less than 1 percent today. 

Grazed from BCN.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cisco has announced a new service to help CIOs regain control of the company computing resources as shadow IT threatens to run rampant.  Its new Cloud Consumption as a Service (CCaaS) offering promises to discover and monitor public cloud computing usage, which grew at 112 per cent last year in large enterprises. With the average organisation now using 1,220 cloud services the position of chief information officer risks being undermined, as much of the information technology that companies use is now out of the CIO’s control, according to Cisco.

Zerto, setting the standard for protection, recovery and migration of data in cloud and virtualized data centers, today announced it has secured a $50 million Series E financing led by IVP and has achieved a fourth consecutive year of 100%+ sales growth. The additional capital will support continued product development to increase the flexibility of software defined, hybrid cloud infrastructures for easier adoption and use by business leaders in a wide range of industries. As a later stage venture capital investor, IVP’s noteworthy successes include high profile technology companies AppDynamics, Domo, Marketo, Netflix, Pure Storage, Snapchat, and Twitter.

MSPAlliance will be hosting its annual MSPWorld Spring Conference and Expo April 3-5 in Orlando, FL as well as its annual Fall Conference in October of 2016 in Las Vegas, NV.

Grazed from TheWhir. Author: Chris Burt.

The price of enterprise cloud computing services has dropped by two-thirds since 2013, but is starting to stabilize, according to a report released Monday by Tariff Consulting Ltd (TCL). The Pricing the Cloud 2 – 2016 to 2020 report puts the cost of entry-level cloud instances at about 12 cents an hour with Windows OS.

The report follows up a 2014 report, with research running through November 2015. It surveys published prices for more than 20 public cloud providers among 45 companies considered worldwide, and breaks down into public and private clouds, with the pricing categories pay as you go, hybrid, and private…

Grazed from IBTimes. Author: Brendan McDermid.

Technology giant International Business Machines Corporation won more U.S. patents than any other company in 2015, landing 7,355 grants. That works out to about 20 patents a day, including weekends. The designs range from an artificial neural network meant to serve as a computer processor to a newfangled authentication system that could lock a bank account if it detects fear or nervousness as someone makes a purchase.

Together, the concepts shadow the company’s emphasis on its fast-growing cloud platform and cognitive computing technologies. Over 2,000 of the new patents came from those two segments. But while it’s tempting to think of patents as a proxy for innovation, experts say that’s not always the case. Patents can also be used as a litigation tool or a way to secure hefty licensing fees…