Grazed from PoliceNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Ready or not the cloud is coming to your department. In the age of body-worn cameras, in-car video and ruggedized multi-purpose tablets law enforcement agencies need a place to store data coming from a variety of sources and devices. But before you jump into a data storage solution it’s critical to understand the implications and next steps — it could save your organization time, money and overall resources.

More often than not the cloud saves organizations money

Unlike digital photos, digital video requires significantly more storage space — even more than traditional servers can provide, in most cases. What’s more, storage needs in these scenarios can be exacerbated by the number of body-worn cameras or in-car video cameras your agency operates. Even a relatively small fleet can require large data stores — and this may come with a large price tag…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Mike Vizard.

Less than a day after becoming a party to the biggest merger in the history of enterprise IT, VMware today is back at it, making a push to dominate the future of IT management in the era of the cloud. At the VMworld 2015 Europe conference today, VMware added updates to its framework for managing the hybrid cloud, made additions to its vCloud Air public cloud service, and launched a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) initiative.

At the core of these initiatives is an update to the VMware vRealize Automation framework that adds support for an event broker and better defined application programming interfaces (APIs) that make it simpler to consume IT services. Also included is a series of VMware vRealize Automation 7 blueprints designed to provide a reference architecture for quickly deploying applications that not only reside in VMware vCloud Air, but also Amazon Web Services or any cloud that supports the Kilo edition of the OpenStack cloud management framework…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

AWS Re:Invent 2015 is now a memory — a good memory for Amazon Web Services fans and a bad memory for AWS’s competition. Other providers in the market hoped that AWS would slow down or stumble. That’s not happening — AWS had the right list of cloud services from the start, and it’s been expanding them in the right order as the latest Re:Invent has shown, from the Internet of things to improvements in container management.

Once upon a time, some of us thought AWS would have trouble getting into Global 2000 companies because its sales approach did not mesh well with enterprises that required a high-touch selling process. But AWS adapted, and now AWS is systemic to most cloud strategies in large corporate IT shops. Four years ago, who’d have thunk it?…

Grazed from SeekingAlpha. Author: Gary Bourgeault.

Amazon has been ramping up the pace of its growth strategy for Amazon Web Services (AWS), as it moves from primarily servicing small and mid-size businesses, to enterprise companies. Its existing strategy has been based upon gaining market share by slashing prices, having done so for just under 50 times since 2006.
That will probably continue going forward.

That has some risk associated with it because of the potential it could be considered a commodity business rather than one that adds value. Some of that appears to have been mitigated by its large number of announcements of new products or services added to its cloud business. Rather than look at the new services in this article, we’ll look at the strategy Amazon is using to gain market share while positioning itself for future price boosts once its customers are locked in…

Read more from the source @ http://seekingalpha.com/article/3567446-amazons-strategy-to-dominate-cloud-computing-with-aws

Grazed from CRN. Author: Joseph Tsidulko.

Dell’s acquisition deal for EMC hit the IT industry Monday like an 8.0 earthquake, and while cloud providers might have been out of range of much of the initial shaking, the aftershocks could rattle their businesses and their channels significantly in the months and years ahead.

As competition among rival cloud providers gets increasingly bloody, post-merger Dell will have the means to change battleground dynamics through its influence as an infrastructure vendor and as a service provider, industry experts told CRN. While plans for the amalgamated cloud assets have not been shared, in an interview on CNBC, EMC CEO Joe Tucci, sitting alongside soon-to-be co-worker Michael Dell, said the combined company will have the heft to help customers "with their cloud computing needs, both on- and off-premise."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300078430/how-will-dell-emc-blockbuster-affect-the-public-cloud.htm

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

Dell’s planned acquisition of cloud computing and storage company EMC for $67 billion is the largest technology industry acquisition to date. But the deal is significant beyond its monetary value. It underscores the turmoil among traditional IT vendors as enterprise computing moves from hardware and software products to subscription-based cloud services.

The combined company will be privately held, freeing it from the regulatory scrutiny and earnings pressure faced by public companies. VMware, mostly owned by EMC, will remain a separate publicly traded company. On a conference call for the media, Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, acknowledged that the IT industry is going through a transformation, and the traditional IT business is being disrupted…

Grazed from BusinessBecause. Author: Seb Murray.

The technologies behind cloud computing and data analytics are set to alter the future of the accountancy landscape and with it the careers of future CFOs. As the big accounting firms — among them PwC, KPMG, EY and Deloitte — face growing challenges from disruptive tech companies like Google and SAP, their employees must master new digital tools.

Nick Frost, partner at KPMG in the UK, says: “To deal with this real threat we must become the best at accountancy-based or financial process data analytics.” The biggest growth in demand is for budding auditors who can trawl through vast quantities of big data using advanced analytics. “Big data is starting to take hold on the industry, with the Big Four leading the way,” says Alex Stremme, assistant dean at Warwick Business School…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

CSC, an IT services and solutions provider, launched a pay-as-you-go cloud security services solution called On-Demand Workload Protection to allow clients to scale their cloud workload security as needed. The service, which was developed in partnership with CloudPassage, was designed to allow customers to utilize protection and security services in the same vein as public cloud computing services, according to CSC.

The company expects the service to meet growing demand for more flexible, consumption-based security models that customers are already accustomed to. Instead of having to combine different solutions into a single offering, CSC is looking to provide customers with a one-stop shop for all of their security needs…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

It was pretty clear, earlier this year, that EMC was working to rationalize its scattered strategy for its cloud computing business. Now that the company will be acquired by Dell and Silver Lake Partners in a blockbuster deal announced Monday morning, the question is whether their combined assets will make that effort easier or more complex.

Will Dell’s multiple cloud alliances and Boomi cloud integration product fit into EMC’s cloud portfolio, which includes VMware’s vCloud Air and offerings from Virtustream, the software company it acquired in July? On conference calls Monday morning, EMC EMC chief executive Joseph Tucci said the combined company will have a $30 billion (or more) systems business, a virtualization business in VMware, a computer security business, and a cloud computing business led by Virtustream’s software…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Claire Hopping.

Jaguar Land Rover and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have set out their plans for a driverless car research project, worth £11 million. The study will investigate whether autonomous cars can fully operate without input from humans, how integrated technologies such as distributed control systems and cloud computing can be used in the vehicles and how they will interact with humans and the environment around them.

Ten universities around the country will be involved in the research, alongside the new Transport Research Laboratory set up by the government and announced by secretary of state for business, Sajid Javid. Javid explained that research into driverless vehicles is something the government plans to be heavily involved in, with the department of Business, Innovation and Skills taking the lead where the authorities are concerned…