Grazed from Datamation. Author: Bruce Byfield.

When should you choose cloud services and when a local Linux installation? For years, cloud services have been spreading like an out-of-control bushfire. From mega-corporations to the individual owners of a Chromebook, users are outsourcing their infrastructures, passing their administration and their data to third party applications on the Internet.

Software companies are investing heavily in cloud services, and every indication is that they will continue to do so — at least, until the next development fad comes along. Yet is cloud computing really making local computing obsolete? Depending on your priorities, a strong case can still be made for local computing, especially local computing with Linux and free and open source software…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

John Purrier, chief technology officer for CenturyLink’s cloud effort, is now CTO at Automic, a business automation company. The news comes two weeks after two other high-profile CenturyLink CTL -0.83% cloud executives, Jonathan King and Jared Wray, left the company, as well as the departure of Lucas Carlson, chief innovation officer in July.

This indicates a broad changing of the guard for the telephone company, which launched an ambitious cloud computing effort four years ago with its $3.2 billion buyout of Savvis. CenturyLink subsequently bought AppFog, with its cloud development services, and Tier 3, a well-regarded cloud infrastructure provider founded by Wray. King landed at Ericsson; Wray appears to be taking time off…

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2015/12/10/centurylink-cto-exit/

The Azure Starter Kit focuses on Azure use cases that address major business challenges among SMBs and enterprises and are easy for partners to sell. Opportunities include the end of life and end of support of SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005 in April 2016. Tens of millions of SQL databases and millions of customers are affected. SMBs especially lack the resources and expertise to upgrade their databases, putting their critical data and business applications at risk. By migrating these outdated databases to Azure SQL Databases, IT service providers can save customers money and ensure their databases are always up-to-date going forward.

Total consideration in the transaction, which closed on December 8, 2015, was $30.0 million consisting of $28.5 million in cash and $1.5 million in Fusion common stock. The cash portion of the consideration was funded via Fusion’s existing bank credit facility and its cash balances. The transaction is immediately accretive to Fusion, with substantial opportunity for cost savings through elimination of redundancies.

Fidelity Acquisition Highlights

Databricks offers a cloud-based integrated workspace for big data powered by Apache Spark, the most active open source project in the big data ecosystem. Spark continues to gain industry-wide momentum, with the number of committed contributors surging from 255 in 2014 to more than 750 in 2015. The Databricks platform lets users go from data ingestion, to visual exploration and production jobs without the hassle of managing complex infrastructure, systems and tools, making it easy to turn data into value.

Titled, "Key Benefits of Working with Azure Resource Manager," this webinar will be held on December 15 at 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM EST. To register, please visit: https://www.mssqltips.com/webcastSignupPage.asp?id=480&src=sios

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is a new way to work with Microsoft Azure IaaS (infrastructure as a service) that has many benefits including template deployments, grouping, simplified billing and more. It provides new features and new ways to interact with Azure. In this webinar, Dave Bermingham will introduce ARM and describe strategies for leveraging it to deploy highly available and scalable SQL Server deployments in the cloud. This webinar will provide valuable information for IT managers and SQL Server administrators who are moving SQL Server or other business critical applications to Azure.

Today’s users increasingly demand mobile access to apps, and modernizing the front-ends of existing apps to add mobile capabilities using web technologies is more efficient than investing time and money in building native apps for each of the mobile platforms such as Android, IOS, and Windows. Those platforms and devices change rapidly, requiring constant updating of native apps, which is a maintenance headache. Plus, building new front-end apps is easier than modifying existing web apps because mobile apps have newer interaction paradigms, including different navigation controls, multiple screen resolutions, and platform-specific usability guidelines. Most mobile app building requires complex API development to access enterprises’ backend systems and server-side databases.

Every organization shares five primary cloud cybersecurity concerns, regardless of what industry it is in: Account Compromise, Cloud Malware, Excessive Data Exposure, Over-Exposed Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data, and Collaboration. On average, only 5 percent of organizations take active steps towards protecting credentials, which include attempts to identify instances of exposed credentials in public cloud environments.

As Gartner Analyst, Douglas Toombs, notes in his July 2015 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Enabled Managed Hosting North America Report "Cloud-enabled managed hosting brings cloudlike consumption and provisioning attributes to the traditional managed hosting market. It represents an evolution of a mature market in which the wide variety of offerings and capabilities means vendors must be chosen carefully."

DH2i Company, recently named a Cool Vendor by Gartner in the "Cool Vendors in Servers and Virtualization, 2015" report, recently announced the general availability of its new Sandbox Lab. Designed to provide simple access to evaluateDxEnterprise container management software for Windows applications and workloads, the new lab streamlines proof of concept (POC) testing. It gives IT teams unfettered access to a live customizable testing environment, eliminating the need to build and/or maintain their own on-premises POC infrastructure.

"The DH2i Sandbox Lab is an ideal way to accurately evaluate the value of container management technology for Windows Server environments, such as SQL Server workloads," said Edwin Sarmiento, Microsoft SQL Server MVP and MCM. "Using the lab, enterprises can quickly determine how container management software will meet their requirements in areas such as minimizing datacenter complexity, Windows Server OS sprawl, and licensing costs."