Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Beth Pariseau.

The United States federal government is moving beyond high-level cultural concerns as it looks to catch up to the private sector in cloud computing.  Instead of conversations about culture, this week’s Amazon Web Services Public Sector Symposium here featured discussions about legislation and regulatory initiatives that are in the works to connect the federal government to public cloud.

Federal government poster children were paraded before the crowd at a keynote presentation with tales of success in the trenches with cloud computing — including Healthcare.gov.  The site famously experienced freezes, crashes and other glitches when it first opened to the public in October 2013…

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Jack Clark.

International Business Machines Corp. will expand the networking services available through its SoftLayer cloud technology, trying to catch up with deep-pocketed rivals.  IBM researchers and engineers are now making regular trips to SoftLayer’s headquarters in Dallas to discuss product plans and get educated about cloud operation, said Marc Jones, SoftLayer’s chief technology officer.

Increasing cloud revenue is critical for IBM. It has tried to boost sales for operations like cloud computing and data analytics but that hasn’t been enough to make up for declines in longstanding operations — such as services and hardware — and revenue lost from divestitures…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

Compliance is one of those thankless activities that add a lot more pain than gain to IT managers’ and professionals’ worklives. It’s a matter of doing the minimum that needs to get done and be done with it, so one can get back to the good things, like building commerce and analytics systems.

Accordingly, most IT departments are ill-prepared for any audits that may come their way. A new survey finds three out of five IT professionals say they’re not ready for compliance audits…

Grazed from CIOToday. Author: Shirley Siluk.

The new in-app customer support offering from Salesforce, announced Thursday, includes an Amazon Mayday-like SOS button that instantly puts users in touch with agents for live, on-screen video help. The new cloud Relevant Products/Services-based Service for Apps will also enable companies to provide customers with in-app knowledge bases, chat support, case monitoring and tap-to-call access to phone support.

While Salesforce SOS is available now, the other app tools are scheduled to roll out in private beta later this year. Salesforce said Service for Apps will let enterprises easily embed multi-channel customer service directly into their mobile apps and fills a gap in existing customer relationship management. While 88 percent of mobile users’ time is spent in apps, most organizations aren’t yet making mobile a part of the service experience, according to Salesforce…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio-today.com/article/index.php?story_id=12100208I4YK

Grazed from SkyhighNetworks.  Author: Editorial Staff.

 The worldwide cloud computing market is expected to grow to $191 billion by 2020, according to analyst firm Forrester, up from $91 billion in 2015. There are numerous advantages of cloud computing driving a secular move to the cloud; among them lower cost, faster time to market, and increased employee productivity. However, the security of data in the cloud is a key concern holding back cloud adoption for IT departments.

Employees are not waiting for IT; they’re bringing cloud services to work as part of a larger “bring your own cloud” or BYOC movement. The Ponemon Institute surveyed 400 IT and IT security leaders to uncover how companies are managing user-led cloud adoption…

Grazed from Diginomica.  Author: Phil Wainwright.

Today’s announcement of a tie-up between cloud collaboration vendor Box and venerable computing giant IBM gives new insight into a broader strategic direction for both vendors.  In Box’s case, this is its second partnership with a big name in enterprise software in as many weeks. Earlier this month it joined forces with Microsoft to announce Box for Office Online, which allows direct editing of Office files shared in Box.

 Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Stanton Jones.

Grazed from GovLoop.  Author: Olivia Jefferson.

 Unless you’ve been pulling a Rip van Winkle in the woods for the past 20 years, you’ve probably heard of cloud computing by now. Many private sector companies have successfully integrated cloud services into their infrastructure; now government organizations are beginning to follow suit.  At Govloop’s Evolution of the Cloud event, Deputy CIO of the FCC John Skudlarek discussed how his organization is leading the way in the public sector adoption of cloud computing.

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

Tech giant IBM and enterprise cloud storage provider Box have announced a wide-ranging partnership, aimed at content management and social collaboration to improve the enterprise cloud and digital push.

The two companies aim to integrate their existing products and services to develop new solutions across multiple verticals, from medicine, to engineering and academia.  Among the developments proposed, Box will integrate with IBM’s enterprise content management solution, as well as collaborating to integrate Box into IBM’s business email and social collaboration platforms, IBM Verse and IBM Connections. IBM will leverage Box’s platform and APIs in its iOS applications, while Box will for the first time enable customers to choose a partner’s cloud platform for data storage…

Grazed from AndroidHeadlines.  Author: Tom Dawson.

While we all think of Google as a major player in the Cloud Computing space, it’s hard to forget that Amazon and their AWS web service, which powers popular websites, have been around for some time now as well. Before them however, was Cloud.com, a small startup that figured out a way of turning any data center into a cloud platform. Citrix paid over $200 Million for them back in 2011, and now some of the original employees are back with a new venture, dubbed Rancher Labs, and they have some choice words to share concerning Google and friends.

Rancher Labs CEO Sheng Liang and Director of Engineering Will Chan recently enjoyed a $10 Million investment round, and are now focusing on software containment, similar to the new hot product from Docker. You could think of software containment as a reverse engineering of cloud services, only to put it back out there again…