Grazed from NetworksAsia. Author: Editorial Staff.

With the increasing utilization of data centers and cloud services across the Asia Pacific region, companies have gradually updated or upgraded their existing IT systems, giving rise to the Hybrid IT environment which is fast becoming the new normal.

Besides helping enterprises to drive digital disruption, the latest Hybrid IT environment is also enhancing the customer experience and encouraging business model innovation.  As a result, there is greater acceleration in the adoption of a multi-vendor multi-cloud environment or Hybrid IT…

Grazed from IBT.  Author: Jessica Menton.

Microsoft Corporation’s Windows 10 launch kicked off to a strong start last week, with its usage share jumping by four times in just three days, Computerworld.com reported, citing Irish metrics company StatCounter. Microsoft released Windows 10 Wednesday as a free upgrade for users who are currently using Windows 7 or Windows 8.

The increase was much larger than Microsoft’s last free upgrade of Windows 8.1 in October 2013.  The global Windows 10 usage share, a measure of how active users of the OS were on the Internet, doubled from 0.3 percent to 0.6 percent on the official launch day Wednesday, Irish metrics company StatCounter said…

Grazed from ChannelBiz.  Author: Antony Savvas.

Acronis has announced a partnership with ProfitBricks to deliver Acronis Backup Cloud as its backup solution option for the ProfitBrick’s cloud computing platform.  Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) firm ProfitBricks says that with Acronis Backup Cloud, its managed service provider (MSP) partners and end user customers will have access to “best-in-class” backup through its cloud computing platform.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Joab Jackson.

IBM may be leading the pack when it comes to putting away patents related to cloud technologies.  In the past 18 months, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued more 1,200 patents to IBM related to the cloud, with 400 of those issued so far in 2015, according to an IBM tally released Friday.

Grazed from 7thSpace. Author: Editorial Staff.

IBM today announced that its inventors have received more than 400 new cloud patents in 2015. Furthermore, over the last 18 months, IBM has secured nearly 1, 200 cloud patents, bolstering the company’s ability to deliver innovative new cloud services, solutions and capabilities to clients across all industries. These new IBM cloud patents comprise a wide range of innovations, including enhancing and improving the speed of deployment and security of cloud data centers, as well as easing the management of cloud applications, storage and maintenance. The following are examples:

Patent #9, 015, 164: High availability for cloud server – A key attribute of a cloud computing environment is high availability. Aspects of the disclosed invention enable a cloud environment to take snapshots of virtual machines, which can then be used for recovery purposes…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

I remember the pitch: Cloud computing (called on-demand at the time) was the alternative to traditional enterprise software. You purchased cloud services using an on-demand or subscription model, you paid for only what you used, and you owned no hardware or software. What could be better?

Ten years later, cloud providers are becoming "enterprise-y" in their behavior — more like the very traditional enterprise providers they were supposed to differ from. Many cloud providers are behaving like traditional enterprise software providers: selling multiyear agreements, having their customers sign closed agreements, and even selling maintenance and support…

Grazed from TheWhir. Author: Chris Burton.

Financial services firms are aggressively using encryption and tokenization to maintain data security while adopting cloud computing, according to a new report from CipherCloud. The report shows that financial companies are employ a rapidly maturing approach to cloud, with almost every one storing personally identifiable information (PII) in the cloud.

CipherCloud surveyed employees of over 50 global banking and financial services firms from North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America, asking them about strategies used to protect personally identifiable information in the cloud. The results inform the company’s Q2 2015 Global Cloud Data Security Report…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: John Furrier.

For many years now, IT conferences around the world have had keynote speakers asking why Enterprise IT organizations didn’t operate more like Google GOOGL +0.58%. The line of questioning was based on the premise that Google moves quickly and creates services that end-users love, so why wouldn’t an Enterprise CIO want to emulate those characteristics for their business? It’s a valid question to ask, given the approval rating of many CIOs is near 40% and their leadership believes IT moves too slowly for the business.

But until last week, it was nearly impossible for Enterprise IT organizations to get the core technologies from Google into their own data centers. They could easily use services such as Gmail or Google Apps, but it rarely ran their most critical or differentiated applications. That all changed last week, as Google announced the formation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the release of their Kubernetes software as open-source for the open community…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

When HP announced July 28 that it was acquiring ActiveState’s PaaS business, senior vice president Bill Hilf said it was doing so in part to bridge the gap between traditional IT and "cloud-native applications." The term "cloud-native applications" is not only finding its way more frequently into announcements, it’s also gaining currency as a phrase that sums up where a lot of enterprise developers and operations staff think they are headed.

"Cloud native" is not merely a buzzword; it’s also enshrined in its own foundation — the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, launched July 21. For those unsure of what the term means, here’s a primer on why it’s the term du jour and why it’s often used to sum up a set of goals and priorities that used to be the province of a Google or Facebook…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/cloud-native-what-it-means-why-it-matters/d/d-id/1321539

Grazed from Houston Business Journal. Author: Heinan Landa.

It’s marketed as the cloud. People say it’s the cloud. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, well, it must be a duck, right? Think again. Since 2011, Microsoft has been putting considerable time and effort into promoting its Office 365 package. This is presented as an all-in-one, low-cost cloud solution for businesses large or small, and it has been gaining some serious ground in the marketplace. But is it a cloud computing solution? Yes and no.

All about definition

If you define cloud computing as access to your email and files from anywhere you have an Internet connection, then, yes, it is a form of cloud computing. It lets you do that and it lets you work from anywhere. Office 365 also stores your data an off-site data center, which means you benefit from increased reliability, redundancy, and business continuity…