Grazed from Dell. Author: Shelly Kramer.

When it comes to the enterprise and the hybrid cloud, and what CIOs need to know about that, let’s start here: Nine out of 10 IT decision makers say embracing the hybrid cloud for their business is necessary for building a future-ready enterprise. Odds are that those same nine out of 10 CIOs are still struggling to agree on exactly what the term “hybrid cloud” actually means.

That’s because hybrid cloud is a bit of an “umbrella term,” covering all sorts of collaborative scenarios. That said, it almost always requires the intermingling and central managing of public or private off-site cloud technology, along with some in-house IT—both operating independently of one another—and both able to communicate over encrypted connections. Hybrid cloud also describes the general coordination of two or more clouds…

Read more from the source @ https://powermore.dell.com/technology/the-enterprise-and-hybrid-cloud-what-cios-need-to-know/

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Vivek Vahie.

Cloud computing has helped to re-shape the entire IT industry and has made technology services more available and affordable to businesses of all sizes. Over the years cloud has become the advent of computing; this, in turn, has positively impacted the cost of infrastructure meaning that service providers can offer more services for a lower cost.

Due to the flexibility of cloud there has been an emergence of pay-as-you-go models for applications which is often referred to as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or software on-demand”. The SaaS model is redefining the business model by creating opportunities for both customers and independent software vendors (ISVs)…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Dave Cartwright.

I dislike the term “private cloud". As far as I’m concerned, there’s really no difference between what I’d call a “traditional” homespun virtualised infrastructure and what they call “private cloud” these days. As Gartner puts it, private cloud is: “A form of cloud computing that is used by only one organisation, or that ensures that an organisation is completely isolated from others.”

Frankly, you could remove the word “cloud” and not notice the difference. And, don’t think by saying the word “private” that your cloud is “on premise". Your systems could well live in a data centre somewhere in the country, or the world. The bottom line, and what we’re talking about, is the fact you are the one with control over this cloud – and nobody else is sharing the infrastructure…

Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Duncan Macrae.

Cloud computing was by all accounts inevitable – we can see its steady adoption all around us. According to Goldman Sachs spending on cloud computing infrastructure and platforms will grow at a 30 perecnt CAGR from 2013 to 2018, compared with overall enterprise IT’s five percent. It forecasts global security-as-a-service revenue will reach $106bn in 2016, growing 21 percent over 2015.

Disruption to business

Earlier this year CEO of British insurance company, Lloyd’s said that cyber-attacks cost businesses as much as $400bn a year, including the damage caused by the attack and consequent disruption to the normal course of business. CIOs and their Infrastructure Management teams have historically been concerned about security in the cloud. Lack of trust, relative lack of control, fear of not knowing where the data resides, and complex regulations in different countries have only made this more difficult…

Read more from the source @ http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/cloud/cloud-management/cyber-security-driving-cloud-adoption-177366#GTQ5l0B5xjr4K88z.99

Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Duncan Macrae.

With the proliferation of cloud computing, SaaS could be a good option for your business, but it’s not for everyone. Ian Finlay, COO, Abiquo, discusses how to tell if it’s right for you. Although cloud computing is still in its first flush of youth, it’s continually evolving at a fast pace and has made a large impact on the modern business – as has its cousin, cloud-based software as a service (SaaS).

Many organisations are actively considering adopting the cloud, with Gartner predicting cloud computing as one of the ten strategic technology trends for 2015. Global cloud services spending reached $56.6bn last year and will grow to more than $127bn in 2018, according to recent data from International Data Corporation (IDC)…

Grazed from CIO-Today. Author: Shirley Siluk.

A new team feature for easier collaboration on Dropbox is rolling out to both Basic and Pro users over the coming week, the company said Monday. The feature, available today, is designed for the more than 60 percent of users who primarily employ Dropbox for work.
Among the new collaboration tools is a team folder option that creates a single, centralized location for members of a work group to "meet" and share documents online.

Each team member will have automatic access to any new files added to that team folder. Dropbox’s new team feature also enables users to create groups within work teams, and to add new members to those groups at any time. Adding new members automatically gives them access to all the documents in that group’s folders…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio-today.com/article/index.php?story_id=112001UV5F3K

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

Red Hat, the company behind a flavor of the Linux operating system popular with businesses, should hit $2 billion in revenue this year, chief executive Jim Whitehurst told analysts on the company’s second quarter earnings call Monday. But how much of the pie will come from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), OpenShift, or other products running in the cloud is an open question.

Some history: Red Hat RHT 0.00% which sells support and service for RHEL and other software, hit the $1 billion mark in 2012 making it what some called the first billion-dollar open-source company. And now, Red Hat, like every other tech company, is managing a shift in customer workloads from on-premises facilities to cloud deployment where the customer may not own or operate the servers running its workloads…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Katherine Noyes.

Netflix, Tinder and other major websites were affected for a time Sunday by glitches in Amazon Web Services’ Northern Virginia facility, offering a cautionary lesson to other companies that rely on the cloud service for mission-critical capabilities. The problem manifested itself primarily in the form of higher-than-normal error rates. Sites affected reportedly also included IMDb and Amazon’s Instant Video and Books websites.

At the heart of the snafu were issues with AWS’s DynamoDB database, but it spread to include other services such as EC2, the mobile-focused Cognito service and the CloudWatch monitoring service, according to the AWS Service Health Dashboard. "The root cause began with a portion of our metadata service within DynamoDB," AWS explained in a dashboard update posted at 4:52 a.m. PDT on Sunday…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jaikumar Vijayan.

With the number of paying organizations using Google Drive crossing the one million mark earlier this year, Google appears to be ramping up its efforts to bolster the cloud storage service’s security features. The cloud services giant introduced new features on Sept. 21 that are intended to give organizations more visibility and control over business files stored and shared by workers in Google Drive.

The new features add retention and legal hold capabilities to the existing collection of e-discovery capabilities available with Google Drive. The new functions are similar to those available from Google for email and chat, and they’re designed to help businesses fulfill their legal obligations pertaining to data archiving and removal…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Pajaree Suntudkarn.

We are hearing news about wearables and connected devices every day. The Wi-Fi-enabled fridge and a number of Wi-Fi-enabled household items have already hit the stores. Coca-Cola unveiled internet-connected vending machine while Burger King—the Coca-Cola company—installed over 2,000 internet-connected soda fountains called Coca-Cola Freestyle all over the US.

So, there is no doubt the estimation of over 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020 could well be true. The Internet of Things (IoT) is on the verge of revolutionizing the way people live, but what does it mean for businesses? IoT brings about a paradigm shift in the way brands establish and maintain the relationships with customers…