Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

 Snowflake Computing announced Tuesday that its cloud-based data warehouse service is available to all users.  Called the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse, the service allows companies to pool all their data and workloads in a single warehouse that can be accessed by all their users. The warehouse is designed to handle administrative tasks for many of its users, like automatically scaling to match a company’s demands and handling hardware provisioning by itself so that administrators don’t need to spend as much time managing it.

 Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

 Most enterprises do not have the experience or talent to effectively take advantage of private or public cloud resources, so adoption is a trial-and-error process.  Even if you use case studies from other enterprises with similar problem domains, you’ll still run into issues that are unique to your enterprise, including problems with data integration, governance, and poor application design.  When enterprises deploy their first cloud projects, there are three outcomes:

• ImplementIng something that’s not a cloud (such as virtualized servers); enterprise IT calls it a cloud, then declares success
• Implementing public or private cloud services in improper ways; enterprise IT falls on its face, then declares success
• Implementing cloud-based applications and other resources successfully; enterprise IT quickly moves on to the next cloud projects…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/2937730/cloud-computing/3-ways-to-screw-up-a-cloud-deployment.html

 Grazed from DataCenterJournal.  Author: Editorial Staff.

IT operational spending plans are rising in 2015 at the fastest rate since the Great Recession, but IT capital spending remains on hold and hiring is muted in what could signal a broad-based shift to cloud computing.  "There is a notable shift from IT capital spending to operational spending, which is exactly what we would expect as companies move from software licenses implemented on premises to cloud subscriptions,” said Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics, Irvine, Calif.

“Economic uncertainty is also at play, but we think the shift to cloud computing is the greater factor.”  The findings from the executive summary of this year’s Computer Economics IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks study indicate investment in cloud-based applications is beginning to have a noticeable impact…

 Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle Corp founder and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said his database company is expanding its cloud-computing offerings, bringing Oracle into more direct competition withAmazon.com Inc.  "We’re prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price," said Ellison in a webcast presentation on Monday, after announcing that Oracle would offer online storage and capability for customers to run their applications entirely in Oracle’s cloud.

The expansion is a major new step for Oracle, which is shifting its traditional database and customer relationship management businesses to the cloud.  "This is a really big deal," said Ellison, who stepped aside in 2014 as chief executive of the company…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Paul Gillin.

If you aren’t doing DevOps now, chances are you soon will be. Results from the field show that DevOps is not only a more productive way to develop software, but also the resulting code is of higher quality and is delivered more quickly. In today’s business environment, who can afford to wait six months for new applications?

DevOps is an evolution of agile software development, which demands frequent releases and iterative feedback so that applications move steadily toward the business goal, nurtured by collaboration between developers and users. If you’ve ever waited months for your IT organization to deliver an application, only to find that it’s horribly different from what was requested, you know why this idea has appeal…

 Grazed from Bloombery Law.  Author: Dennis Garcia.

The high-profile data breach incidents that continue to occur highlights that companies will only use technology they can confidently trust. If your company is ready to reap the many well-documented benefits associated with cloud computing, it’s critical to select a “trusted cloud” provider.  While that sounds like a great idea, how does a company identify a trusted cloud provider?

Assemble Your Team

The first step is to assemble a team of stakeholders who will help your company conduct the necessary due diligence to select a trusted cloud provider…

 Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: David Auslander.

The first time I heard the acronym SDN was more than 10 years ago. At that time SDN was the cool way of saying “once the networking guys have racked, stacked and wired the switching and routing components we can install tools on a server and configure them through those tools from the comfort of the NOC”.

This was much more than just standard monitoring and management; we could setup whole networks and change them around, in software. But alas, this wasn’t really what we were hoping for and we would have to wait a number of years for the next advance…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Charlie Osborne.

The face of cloud and IT is going to change rapidly in the next five years, and the enterprise needs to respond now to maintain their market positions in the future.

Speaking to attendees at the Asigra Cloud Backup Summit held in Toronto, Canada, Tiffani Bova, Vice President & Sales Strategies analyst at Gartner said the cloud market is transforming and it is up to companies to use this to advantage — or be left by the wayside…