Grazed from CIO. Author: Kenneth Corbin.

Pamela Dyson is shepherding a determined, if incremental, effort to move her agency’s applications to the cloud. Dyson was named the CIO at the Securities and Exchange Commission in February, after having joined the agency in 2010, when she joined an ambitious initiative to modernize and improve efficiencies in the SEC’s IT infrastructure.

Dyson shared her thoughts on the cloud-enabled Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model during a recent presentation hosted by Federal Computer Week, explaining that the SEC’s Office of Information Technology holds out four overarching IT priorities: modernizing its aging infrastructure, improving business agility, harnessing big data and analytics, and what Dyson calls digital transformation — updating applications and access to better serve end users…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

One of the more subtle things that has changed over the last year or so when it comes to cloud computing is how much more involved IT operations teams are these days. For that very reason cloud service providers such as ProfitBricks are starting to focus more on the IT operations experience.

ProfitBricks this week announced that it has added support for both the Ansible and Chef IT automation frameworks to its cloud service. That move comes on the heels of making available a command line interface at the end of last month. Matt Baldwin, head architect for ProfitBricks, said that like a lot of cloud service providers ProfitBrick is making this shift because while application programming interfaces appeal to developers, IT operations teams want access to tools that enable them to management a cloud service consisting of infrastructure that spans multiple applications…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/it-ops-teams-starting-exert-more-cloud-control

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

Tech giant Oracle is working to maximize its Marketing Cloud — and its latest acquisition proves it. The company has just reached a deal to buy Maxymiser, a firm that provides cloud-based software to help marketers test, target and personalize what a customer sees on a Web page or mobile app, for an undisclosed sum.

Oracle was attracted to Maxymiser’s technology because it promises to significantly increase engagement and revenue for its clients. Maxymiser optimizes over 20 billion customer experiences every month for some pretty well-known brands, including Allianz, HSBC, Lufthansa, Tommy Hilfiger and Wyndham…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Mycroft, an open source artificial intelligence startup opened its Kickstarter campaign last week. It is getting ready to take on the heavyweights such as Amazon Echo, Apple Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft Cortana. Thanks to Apple Siri and Google Now, voice-activated personal assistants are in vogue.

Abundant bandwidth, affordable computing power, and advancements in machine learning made this technology accessible to consumers. Amazon Echo is one of the first dedicated voice-activated assistants available in the market. Though it started as a smart speaker, it will become the cornerstone of Amazon’s IoT strategy…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Shirley Siluk.

Among the 2,500 customers that use Okta’s online identity management services, Microsoft Office 365 is now the most-deployed cloud application in the world, beating Salesforce for the first time since Okta began tracking such usage in 2012. That’s one of several striking findings about cloud application use revealed in the company’s inaugural "Businesses @ Work Report," released today.

The report also found that a company’s size no longer indicates how many cloud apps it might use, and that enterprise apps can quickly grow wildly popular . . . and can just as quickly lose ground in today’s fast-evolving market. Companies are also surging in their uses of new Web sites, portals and other cloud-based applications to engage with customers, partners and contractors, Okta reported…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

Starting up a cloud computing deployment is a case of just choosing a cloud and switching it on, right? Kind of, yes. Cloud ‘instances’ can be ‘spun up’ inside 60 seconds — but obviously it’s not quite that simple. Customers will need to choose between public, private (on-premises) or some hybrid combination of both.

CLUE: The answer to the title is the last line of this post.

Deeper still, cloud comes in many shapes, colors and flavors. Firms can opt for a cloud that has been ‘provisioned’ (or tuned, if you prefer) for specific performance characteristics such as:…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Rackspace®, the #1 managed cloud company, today announced it has expanded its digital support offerings with the early access announcement of Managed Cloud for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). As a leading, comprehensive content management solution for building websites, mobile apps and forms, AEM makes it easier to manage marketing content and assets.

With Managed Cloud for AEM, marketing leaders and the technology teams who support them can help reduce time for each new deployment, version upgrade, or major campaign launch in AEM – while also gaining access to specialized 24×7 support, maintenance, and monitoring of AEM environments…

Grazed from CloudAwards. Author: Denise Sullivan.

AURO is now offering high performance SSD block storage. The new service works with the company’s cloud computing products and their Tier 1 service. The SSD block storage comes as part of AURO’s service upgrades. The Canada based cloud company wanted to offer users a better way to run their applications and databases. As with all of their services, the new feature is powered by OpenStack technology.

SSD Block Storage Makes Cloud Faster

Solid-state drive, or SSD, is a device that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data. Because these systems do not contain spinning disks and movable read/write heads, they are take less time to access information written to them and have lower latency. Additionally, these systems are more resistant to physical shock…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

The trouble most solution providers have with migrating servers into the cloud is that it’s generally a one-time event that is hard to build an ongoing IT service practice around. Not only does the migration usually require a fair amount of time; each server migration can take weeks to migrate. But once it’s done the solution provider winds up with a lot of expertise in server migration that can only be reapplied only so many times.

For that reason WSM International has made a business out of working with solution providers to automate server migrations as much as possible. As of today, WSM International is now offering those server migration services at a fixed price starting at $849 per Linux or Windows Server…