Grazed from SecurityIntelligence. Author: David Strom.

The ENISA report titled “Secure Use of Cloud Computing in the Finance Sector,” published in December 2015, showed just how far European banks and other financial institutions lag behind with respect to perceptions and usage of cloud computing in their businesses. While more than 87 percent of those institutions are already using some form of cloud computing, their knowledge of basic cloud technologies and best practices is either sadly disappointing or shocking, depending on your perspective.

There’s a Need for More Information Regarding Cloud Security

The study was sponsored by the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA is its French acronym) and had input from the Cloud Security Alliance, an international best practices body. The authors, Rossen Naydenov, Dimitra Liveri, Lionel Dupre and Eftychia Chalvatzi, developed two survey instruments: one for financial and cloud service providers, and the other for the national regulatory bodies in various EU countries…

Grazed from Converge. Author: Derek Collison.

In 2016, technical innovation, combined with evolutionary trends, will bring rapid organizational changes and new competitive advantages to enterprises capable of adopting new technologies. Not surprisingly, however, the same dynamics will mean competitive risk for organizations that have not positioned themselves to easily absorb (and profit from) new technological changes. The following predictions touch on some of the areas in IT that I think will see the biggest evolutions in 2016 and beyond.

1. Hadoop: old news in 24 months. Within the next two years, no one will be talking about big data and Apache Hadoop—at least, not as we think of the technology today. Machine Learning and AI will become so good and so fast that it will be possible to extract patterns, perform real-time predictions, and gain insight around causation and correlation without human intervention to model or prepare raw data…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Mike Ettling.

 The beauty of the cloud is the promise of simplification and standardization — without regard to physical or geographic boundaries. It’s this “any time, any place, any device” flexibility that is driving rapid adoption.

 Grazed from MarketRealist.  Author: Parkter Thomas.

Oracle is spurring its growth in cloud computing by acquiring StackEngine, a Texas-based startup that develops management and automation tools for Docker containers. As a part of its strategic acquisition, StackEngine will be integrated with Oracle’s “public cloud” unit.

Grazed from GovernanceNow.  Author: Shubhendu Parth.

How important a role do you see cloud playing while the government looks to transform IT as a means towards goals like Digital India? Traditional models of IT delivery are not in tune with changing times, especially when India is looking ways to go paperless and digital. In such a dynamic environment, seamless and timely flow of information is the need of the hour, which the cloud technology is capable of.

Governments across the world are on the lookout to host data on the cloud. Meghdhoot, Digital Locker and Meghraj are prime examples of the Indian government’s cloud-based initiatives. Given the limitations in scaling of National Informatics Centre and state data centres, the department of electronics and IT (DeitY) is aggressively working on accreditation of cloud service providers that will be used by central and state government departments and banks, for various e-services…

Grazed from CloudWedge.  Author: Erick Wingfield.

SteelBrick has rapidly gained recognition inside of the SalesForce ecosystem by providing small businesses the ability to “Configure, Price & Quote” their customers.  SteelBrick gives small businesses a rapid method of collecting payments from their customers. SteelBrick automates much of this process, giving it’s users a leg up on the competition. So why is SteelBrick worth $360M when so many other cloud based vendors exist that do essentially the same thing?

Grazed from Upstart. Author: Maia Heymann.

Hyperconverged virtualization or infrastructure is a massive tech trend that is the most recent architectural shift to reduce IT costs and improve efficiencies. As with prior architectural waves, we expect that in 2016 and beyond, entrepreneurs will form many new disruptive companies to benefit from this new way of providing infrastructure.

One of the leaders is here in Massachusetts: SimpliVity, based in Westborough. SimpliVity is the first private company in this infrastructure space to reach a $1 billion valuation in under two years, indicating the huge market potential that venture capitalists see. Waltham-based Actifio, too, is also another company in this space that has raised significant funding — more than $200 million…

Grazed from CloudWards.net. Author: Editorial Staff.

Mergers and acquisitions have changed the financial situations of cloud computing companies. Innovations and advancements are setting the technological tone for the year past and the one to soon come.

Looking Back at 2015

The cloud computing world consolidated with several companies involved in:

• Mergers
• Partnerships
• Acquisitions

The highest price tag of 2015 was $67 billion, paid by Dell for EMC, including its VMware virtualization software. Dell was in the news also for a new partnership with Microsoft to create Azure in a Box, a cloud system that can be used in multiple industries. Meanwhile, Microsoft also announced a partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise that involves each being a preferred partner to the other…

Grazed from InsuranceNetworking. Author: Joe McKendrick.

“In the future, enterprises may be as unlikely to stand up their own data centers as build their own power plants.” We’ve been hearing this message for some time – that data center capacity would be delivered in the same manner of electricity, in which companies can plug in and receive their service.

However, it appears that cloud computing has achieved a momentum that is on the verge of making this a reality. Is it time for insurance companies to start gravitating away from the business of managing large data centers to depend on the cloud? In a recent post at InfoWorld, Matt Asay points out that the data center as we’ve known it is moving to the cloud en masse…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Basit Farooq.

Microsoft continues to improve the integration between its cloud and on-premises products and services, and SQL Server 2014 features take a big step in that direction by enabling hybrid cloud scenarios. Now you can integrate an on-premises platform with the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform (e.g., to back up data in Azure or add an AlwaysOn replica in Azure virtual machines, or VMs, for improved on-premises disaster recovery).

Let’s look at the features that allow your organization to use SQL Server 2014 to create hybrid cloud scenarios and move from an on-premises data center at your own pace. SQL Server 2014 features enable native support for SQL Server database files as Microsoft Azure blobs. This feature, which lets you create and place your database data and log files as blobs in Microsoft Azure storage, works for on-premises SQL Server instances and SQL Server instances running in Azure VMs…

Read more from the source @ http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/feature/SQL-Server-2014-features-enable-hybrid-cloud-scenarios