Grazed from CIO. Author: Mary K. Pratt.

At Milwaukee Tool, the long, long waits to open large CAD files were making international collaboration between engineers in the U.S. and China inefficient–and threatening the company’s goals for innovation, agility and speed. Eric Hanson, the company’s vice president of IT and business optimization, says engineers in China often had to wait multiple hours for the tool company’s design files, typically about 2GB each, to open.

Because of the lag, engineers in China saved files locally so they could be opened quickly. But that meant their changes weren’t visible to engineers in other locations, and vice versa, until files were later synced. Moreover, because engineers worked with local files, there was a chance that files might not have up-to-date information, which could lead to duplication of effort and incomplete product designs, Hanson says…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Gary Hilson.

Moving data and workloads to the cloud can be a hefty task for enterprises and some still prefer to keep everything on-premise, so a startup has come up with a solution that decouples storage from compute. “The common assumption was to provide adequate performance, you needed to couple storage and compute,” said Issy Ben-Shaul, founder and CEO of Velostrata.

“We decided to challenge that premise.” The company enables enterprises to stream production workloads from on-premise storage into the cloud computing. The decoupling is done without sacrificing performance, he said. Ben-Shaul said most customers are looking to make use of the cloud, but there are still some key barriers. Enterprises are less likely to move workloads into the cloud if they have particularly large data sets in the terabyte range, he said…

 Grazed from TimesOf India.  Author: Kumar Saurav.

Grazed from IntelligentAerospace.  Author: Courtney Howard.

Grazed from SFGate.  Author: Benny Evangelista.

At last year’s VMworld, the big news was conference sponsor VMware announcing partnerships with big companies like Hewlett-Packard and Dell to introduce two business virtualization products.  But in July, VMware suffered a setback when HP dropped out of an agreement to bundle VMware’s Evo Rail technology with an HP system.

“We thought it was very interesting and well-intentioned, but when we look back a year later, there was just no real market traction,” said Joe Skorupa, a data center convergence analyst with the Gartner research firm…

Grazed from FierceGovernmentIT. Author: Robert Bartley.

The Defense Department Wednesday initiated two sets of policies to enforce stricter guidelines when dealing with about 10,000 contractors the department trusts with offsite cyber information. One part of the interim rule, called "Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Network Penetration Reporting and Contracting for Cloud Services," will amend the DFARS to include mandates passed in recent Defense funding bills for stricter contractor reporting rules on cyber incidents.

According to the issuance, this is part of a greater effort to streamline contractor incident reports. For their part, the National Defense Authorization Acts from two of the last three years sought to require more DoD oversight on contractor systems during potential cyberattacks. The NDAA from fiscal year 2013 (pdf) requires that cleared defense contractors report network penetrations to DoD…

Grazed from OpenDNS. Author: Editorial Staff.

OpenDNS has gone through many changes in its ten-year history as a leading cloud-delivered network security company. In 2006, the company was launched as a consumer DNS provider. In 2012, the company transitioned to cybersecurity with the release of the Umbrella network security service.

Two years later, OpenDNS announced partnerships with some of the biggest IT security vendors in the world. Next, 2015 saw a new set of APIs that allow any customer to integrate any security product with OpenDNS’s global security network. The latest change came on June 30th, when Cisco Systems announced its intent to acquire the company. Today officially marks not only the close of the acquisition, but also the first milestone in our joint efforts to accelerate Cisco’s cloud-delivered security portfolio…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Sharon Wagner.

Around six years ago, Amazon introduced an EC2 usage option at very low costs: Spot Instances. With EC2 Spot Instances, you can save money, but there’s a catch – they won’t necessarily be available when you need or want to use them. Managing and strategising around such temperamental instances can be challenging, not to mention unsuitable for AWS customers who are looking to provide stable online end user experiences.

Amazon created this type of resource in order to optimise their data center utilisation by leveraging their data centre’s spare capacity. However, if a customer on a higher-priced on-demand, or reserved capacity plan requires an instance, Amazon will take it from the Spot Instance pool to provide it to the higher paying customer…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Kevin Fiftal and Steve Orrin.

Federal IT professionals used to be able to depend on keeping their information safe in secure on-premise data centers, but times have changed. Traditional data centers could be depended upon for consistent control, visibility and security, but today’s cloud-based centers offer new variants of those capabilities – a fact that IT administrators struggle with every day.

This is particularly problematic for those managing two adjuncts of today’s cloud-driven environment: geographically dispersed servers and emerging OpenStack deployments. Both pose their own unique challenges, including the need for assurance that systems are adhering to location-specific laws and security concerns in general…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Jon Oltsik.

It’s the end of the summer of 2015 – the nights are getting cooler, the leaves are starting to change colors, and flocks of students are abandoning the beaches of Cape Cod bound for college campuses. The seasonal change also signals another annual ritual – VMworld in San Francisco.

VMworld used to be focused on virtual server technology, and then it expanded to VDI. Now the show represents all things cloud computing. Of course, I’ll be looking at a specific sub-segment: The intersection of cloud computing and cybersecurity. As such, I’m anticipating discussions around:…