The enterprise driven programme for the international forum and exhibition, now in its 12th year with 60 countries represented, will extensively draw on business users from financial services, transport, auto, media and gaming, pharmaceutical, retail, oil and gas, telco and other key verticals.  The congress will explore how they are responding to the challenges of energy, security, connectivity, interoperability, and using Cloud enablement, continuous delivery and DevOps lifecycles for faster rollout of new features and applications and for sustaining business innovation.

Sphere 3D Corp., a containerization, virtualization and data management solutions provider and parent company of Overland Storage and Tandberg Data, today announced encouraging initial results from its Microsoft Azure joint marketing campaign. In-market tactics launched in late November 2015 were directed to a control portion, subset of its dedicated customers that use its SnapServer and SnapScale on-premise storage solutions. The campaign entices them to augment their existing solutions with Sphere 3D’s SnapCLOUD  – a cloud-based data storage product which is available from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. The campaign has already resulted in over 100 SnapCLOUD customer deployments, meeting 40% of the target goal for the original 90-day period.    

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google aren’t slashing cloud prices as fast and furious as they did two years ago, but there’s still plenty of smack talk going on.  For example, Google  GOOG -1.64%  on Friday took to its cloud blog to proclaim that its cloud computing service is less expensive than comparable Amazon  AMZN -0.14% Web Services products.

To back up a bit, AWS trimmed prices 5% on Tuesday for some Elastic Compute Cloud instances, its 51st cost cut to date across all its services. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is Amazon’s term for units of computing power that it sells or rents to customers. EC2 “instances” are the cloud equivalent of a computer’s central processing unit…

OnApp has announced that its portal for VMware vCloud Air Network service providers has been recommended by VMware for service providers offering VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCenter and VMware vCloud Air MSP cloud services.

Proven in thousands of production cloud deployments globally, the OnApp portal cuts cost through automation, improves customer experience through streamlined provisioning and management, and introduces new ways for vCloud Air Network partners to add value to their customers through new features and services.

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Sean McAvan.

Over the course of 2015, we’ve seen many of the trends we predicted last year come to fruition. As cloud adoption in the UK soared past 84% in May, it was evident that we had been right that the technology would become even more mainstream. With enterprises aiming to become more mobile, 2015 has also seen the normalisation of “anytime, anywhere working” and the increased dependency on IT to help drive business transformation.

With over two-thirds of IT departments set to increase their operational IT budgets in 2016, it does not look like the importance of IT in driving business goals will diminish anytime soon – the question really lies in how. Although we don’t have a crystal ball that we can look into to predict anything with certainty, there are some trends emerging that we see shaping the enterprise IT in the year ahead:…

Grazed from FedTech. Author: Phil Goldstein.

The Defense Department does not have a consistent definition for cloud computing or a complete list of cloud computing service contracts, according to a report from the DOD’s inspector general. That makes it impossible for the department to assess the effectiveness of its cloud computing contracts, the report says.

The inspector general’s office, which issued the report in late December, had sought to find out whether its armed services branches and departments “performed a cost-benefit analysis before acquiring cloud computing services” and whether they had “achieved actual savings as a result of adopting cloud services.”…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Barclay Ballard.

Security is now a key driving force for cloud adoption according to the latest survey by Rackspace, marking a significant turnaround for the technology. The study, titled “The Anatomy of a Cloud Migration,” polled 500 IT and business decision makers in the UK who have either been through or are planning a cloud migration project and found that security was one of the top three motivations for moving to the cloud.

38 per cent of respondents cited security as a reason for migrating, beaten only by reducing IT costs (61 per cent) and disaster recovery capabilities (50 per cent). 58 per cent of organisations also said that they migrated business-critical data to the cloud first, indicating that cloud security fears are abating…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

Maybe it’s just a media thing, but it sure seems that the price-cutting frenzy that roiled the cloud computing market two and three years ago simmered down over the past year. But the lull may be over. On Tuesday, Amazon AMZN 0.07% Web Services kicked off 2016 with a set of price cuts to three of its bread-and-butter Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing services.

The nitty-gritty details are here, but basically the public cloud giant is discounting three of its core Linux computing modules by about 5%. The reductions cover users running Amazon’s own version of the Linux open-source operating system. Customers who run Microsoft MSFT -1.62% Windows, or two other flavors of Linux from SUSE or Red Hat RHT -0.78% , will see smaller discounts…