Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Mike Vizard.

For many IT organizations the distinction between cloud services and managed hosting services is already blurry. Both are making use of outsourced infrastructure that have different pricing models attached to them in terms of how they are invoked. This week, SingleHop, a provider of both cloud services and data center co-location facilities, blurred that line even further by announcing it will provide a limited amount of free, private cloud computing services via its public cloud to IT organizations that use its data center co-location services.

Jordan Jacobs, vice president of products for SingleHop, says the virtual private cloud services, dubbed ColoPlus, is intended to entice more of its customers to start using the company’s public cloud service. While not all workloads are suited for the public cloud, Jacobs says many organizations that are rely on data center co-location services today could make more economic use of disaster recovery services, for example, that run on a public cloud…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Saimon Michelson.

To ensure a completely bulletproof data service, there are certain components you must own and control. At all times, you need to ensure that you’re in the driver’s seat, and that you didn’t hand over your car keys, along with your corporate data security and privacy, to someone else.

As your company’s security expert, you are the one chosen to protect your organisation’s data so you should invest in a system that allows you to apply your corporate policies, integrate your corporate security countermeasure systems while gaining continuous insight to your corporate user usage patterns…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: David Ramel.

Software-defined networking (SDN) players continue to form partnerships while jockeying for position amid the sea-wave change to virtualized networking. Making moves this week were Cisco Systems Inc., Extreme Networks Inc. and Big Switch Networks Inc.

Cisco made the most noise, as Verizon Communications Inc. announced Tuesday that it was the first major service provider to offer Cisco SDN technology, in the form of its Managed Software Defined Wide Area Network (Managed SD-WAN. The service leverages Cisco’s Intelligent WAN, based on Cisco’s counterpart offering to upstart SDN products, called Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)…

Read more from the source @ https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2015/09/10/sdn-partnerships.aspx

Grazed from AutomatedTrader. Author: Editorial Staff.

Technology is so tightly woven into the fabric of financial markets that IT performance is synonymous with business performance. But aging systems are no longer up to the job, and it’s not just IT hardware that can cause problems. In July this year, ‘technical issues’ related to a software upgrade took the New York Stock Exchange out of action for nearly four hours. Regulators are now scrutinising how banks manage their exposure to IT risks. Liability sits with the board and no board likes to be liable for things it cannot control.

In the thick of it

From every angle, the CIO is in the thick of it. He or she needs to respond to emerging new business models but also keep the existing plates spinning. To provide flexibility and choice, but also control risks. There is a real imperative for change but no clean sheet of paper for a big complex transformational programme…

Read more from the source @ http://www.automatedtrader.net/news/at/154509/balance-control-and-flexibility-with-a-cloud-of-clouds

Grazed from AOPA.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

Chris Anderson made a strong case that unmanned aircraft are about to change the world in much the same way the Internet did, and that the change is inevitable. The CEO of 3D Robotics delivered the opening keynote at an event billed as the largest drone convention held in the world to date, the International Drone Conference and Exposition in Las Vegas.

Most of the 3,000 registered attendees packed into the massive hall for Anderson’s Sept. 9 talk, with more arriving for the three-day event as he spoke. The crowd included more than a smattering of certificate-holding pilots who are straddling the manned and unmanned aviation worlds. Seminars and classes covered details of the construction and operation of drones, the legalities of commercial operation, and safety…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Keving McLaughlin.

VMware spent $1.2 billion to acquire software-defined networking startup Nicira more than three years ago, and now it’s pitching the technology — known as NSX — as a way to solve tough enterprise security and cloud computing challenges. In an interview at VMware’s VMworld conference last week, Dominick Delfino, vice president of worldwide systems engineering at VMware, said NSX provides a level of network security that firewalls and other traditional technologies can’t match.

VMware calls this aspect of NSX "micro-segmentation," and it’s all about preventing an attacker from moving laterally within a network after a breach. In several recent high-profile breaches, soft internal network security has enabled attackers to steal valuable intellectual property and customer data…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Iron.io, a leading provider of event-driven computing solutions, is pleased to announce that its core products, IronWorker and IronMQ, are now available as Application Services within the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Iron.io products and solutions are architected to power workloads at scale for a wide range of application use cases through industrial-strength message queuing and asynchronous task processing.

With the rise of Internet of Things applications, and the popularity of the microservices architectural style, more and more communication and computing occurs asynchronously. Users of Azure can now directly leverage Iron.io within their applications to respond to application events, decouple components as independent services, offload individual workloads, and schedule regular occurring jobs…

Grazed from MarketPlace. Author: PR Announcement.

Accenture announced today it is collaborating with Salesforce to extend the complete AccentureCASsoftware suite to the Salesforce1 Platform. By bringing the solution to the cloud it will combine the market leading suite of customer management and mobility software of Accenture CAS with the built-in mobile, social and analytics capabilities of Salesforce’s leading CRM and enterprise cloud platform.

Accenture and Salesforce will offer consumer goods companies a single system of engagement for sales and trade marketing processes. In the first phase of the rollout, which is scheduled for release in calendar year 2016, Accenture CAS Trade Promotion Management and Retail Execution products will be made available on the Salesforce1 Platform. This will enable consumer goods firms to leverage Salesforce’s leading CRM capabilities in sales, service, marketing and analytics…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: David Auslander.

One of the basic tenets of cloud computing is the ability to provide access to resources across a geographically dispersed cloud environment. This makes the cloud ideal for global distribution of applications and data. But what about those geographies that have highly restrictive data sovereignty laws or practices, such as Germany, Austria and South Korea? What about governmental bodies attempting to protect information while utilising the cloud?

An interesting example is the German government which, in certain circumstances, will require that data on German companies and their employees never leave German soil and that only German citizens be allowed to administer said data. These data sovereignty (DS) scenarios and many others present a challenge for organizations in terms of protecting the data entrusted to them while cutting costs and gaining efficiencies associated with the cloud…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Rachel Delacour.

In today’s ever-changing business environment, it’s essential that employees at all levels have access to the information they need, when they need it. Whether employees are on their computers, tablets or mobile phones, they need access to the information and resources that will enable them to make important business decisions in real-time and complete tasks efficiently, wherever they are. This is the type of access that only cloud-based business tools can provide.

In addition to ease of access, cloud-based tools help businesses do more with less. They help reduce costs, allow for flexibility and scalability as a business grows, and enable automation, removing the need to invest in IT support to keep information updated and maintained. There has never been a better time than now to take advantage of the cloud…