Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Mike Vizard.

Given the cost and complexity of standing up a private cloud these days, there’s been a marked shift toward more reliance on IT service providers that will absorb the capital costs associated with establishing a modern data center on behalf of multiple customers. As a result, IT vendors are either building up their own managed hosting capabilities or relying more on third-party partners.

In the case of EMC, the decision has been made to go the latter route via a Catalyst Alliance program under which EMC and Dimension Data, a unit of the NTT Group, will more closely align their private and public cloud computing efforts to create a comprehensive set of hybrid cloud computing services aimed primarily at midmarket IT customers…

Grazed from SysConMedia. Author: PR Announcement.

In the initial years of the Cloud, Gartner observed that "organizations are switching from company-owned hardware and software assets to per-use service-based models" so that the "projected shift to computing … will result in dramatic growth in IT products in some areas and significant reductions in other areas."

However, according to Dr. Jaushin Lee, founder and CEO of Zentera Systems, "The public cloud vendors have evolved disparate infrastructures, which operate as segregated Cloud Islands. The solution for cloud ecosystems is CoIP, or Cloud over IP. Like VoIP before it, CoIP overlays on top of IP networks, leading to deployments in days rather than weeks or months."…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

Every MSP offering a cloud-based file sharing service knows that few other IT infrastructures out there can compete with the cloud as far as security goes. In fact, advanced security features, such as multi-factor authentication and end-to-end encryption, are almost taken for granted in the world of cloud computing.

No doubt this is good news. However, cloud services should not make the mistake of taking their security for granted if they don’t want to witness a catastrophic fall someday. Take the recently released report on data breaches by Ponemon, which clearly finds that costs related to attacks against IT services are increasing…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Salesforce wants to use its massive cloud computing capabilities to make it easier for businesses to gain useful, real-time information from the massive amounts of data being generated by the devices that make up the Internet of things. At the company’s Dreamforce 2015 event in San Francisco Sept. 15, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff unveiled the Salesforce IoT Cloud, a new service through which businesses can not only store the data from the billions of IoT devices and applications as well as Websites and social networks, but also can analyze that data in real time and connect it back to Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) software.

The result is businesses can quickly get the information they need to bring new products and services to their customers, improve user experience and operate more efficiently, according to Salesforce officials. It’s part of a larger shift where business is becoming more "customer-centric," as connected devices meet growing and changing consumer expectations, according to Adam Bosworth, executive vice president at Salesforce…

Read more from the source @ http://www.eweek.com/cloud/salesforce-extends-its-cloud-reach-into-the-iot.html

Grazed from MotleyFool. Author: Editorial Staff.

The evolution of the server market over the past few years has not been kind to International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM). While the company’s mainframe systems remain entrenched, its Power servers have been losing share to x86-based systems for quite some time. Cloud companies have been building massive, hyperscale data centers, often designing custom systems around chips from Intel. This is where much of the growth in the server industry is occurring, and IBM has completely missed the boat.

IBM recognized this problem a few years ago, and in 2013, the company founded the OpenPOWER foundation along with a handful of other member companies. The goal of the OpenPOWER foundation is to build an ecosystem around IBM’s POWER architecture, with technology being contributed from all of the foundation’s members…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alan R. Earls.

There’s something comforting about the concept of a cloud service-level agreement. There it is in black and white: a cloud provider’s promise to keep your applications up and running — almost all the time. But while a cloud service-level agreement may be an indispensable component for securing cloud services, it’s rarely as airtight as it looks.

In fact, according to experts, users need to be aware of both service-level agreement best practices, as well as a host of potential problems. One of the biggest issues with cloud computing SLAs is that they haven’t yet evolved into an industry standard, said Michael S. Mensik, partner at Baker & McKenzie LLP, a Chicago-based law firm, citing a the firm’s recent survey on cloud computing and SLAs…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ron Miller.

Accenture, the worldwide consulting company, announced today it was buying Cloud Sherpas, a firm that specializes in helping companies incorporate cloud services like Salesforce.com, Google and ServiceNow into the enterprise. Accenture did not disclose the purchase price.

It’s not a coincidence that this announcement came as Dreamforce, the enormous Salesforce.com customer conference, is taking place in San Francisco this week. The acquisition actually has a lot do with Salesforce consulting services.Accenture already has a team of more than 2700 consultants devoted to helping with Salesforce integration. They will be adding 500 additional Salesforce experts with the Cloud Sherpas deal…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Mobile devices grow only more capable and computerlike in their abilities — the iPad Pro announced last week by Apple is a great example of that trend. Yet many mobile developers look to pair public cloud services with mobile devices, offloading the workloads to back-end servers.

That does not seem quite right, given the impressive processing and storage power of mobile devices. If processing occurs on back-end cloud servers, you must have connectivity to that cloud, and information must be transmitted back and forth to the device. For some mobile applications that share data, back-end storage is a requirement…

Grazed from LifeHacker. Author: Spandas Lui.

There was once a time when IT vendors shunned the idea of open source. Why wouldn’t they? The idea of sharing their very own programming innovations with others was viewed as detrimental to any competitive business. But nearly 20 years on, open source is now in vogue and has been embraced by some of the biggest IT vendors and their clients. So what changed? We find out.

The popularity of open source, believe it or not, has little to do with cost. Yes, the free nature of open source means that vendors can acquire and build upon those codes at a lower cost but, first and foremost, it’s about consistency. Open source allow vendors to develop different software and platforms that are compatible with each other…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

In a move that may turn the heads of IT admins, VCE just expanded its hyper-converged Rackscale family. The VCE VxRACK system promises to help IT quickly and cost-effectively build and operate clouds that tap into the benefits of VMware’s Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) offerings.

One of the key attractions VCE VxRack will offer IT is choice. With its new system, VCE shows it understands that workloads have different requirements and customer Relevant Products/Services environments vary. VxRack Systems give IT admins more options and the ability to map systems to specific app environments…