Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Dropbox has announced new features in administration, security and integration in a bid to change the way the cloud storage provider works for business. The company is introducing tighter account security through two-step verification, tiered administrative controls, as well as an extension to the Dropbox for Business API, with new capabilities for shared folders.

CloudLock, Netskope and SkySync are among the data migration providers who are already beginning to build integrations, alongside Israeli firm Adallom, which recently announced it was looking after the security for Dropbox for Business. “This is a major milestone for Dropbox for Business,” said UK country manager Mark van der Linden…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

Amazon Web Services customers have sent a letter to the cloud services provider requesting that it disclose more information about its sustainability practices. The 19 companies, including Tumblr, Change.org and the Huffington Post, said they want to convey the information to their users, customers, employees and other stakeholders.

While lauding Amazon’s commitment to get its entire cloud operation running on renewable energy, the companies wrote to AWS chief Andy Jassy last week that they want to see Amazon disclose more about its current carbon and energy footprint, its progress towards renewable energy goals, and its strategy for increasing its use of renewable energy…

Grazed from FirstPost. Author: Editorial Staff.

To help customers maintain control and compliance in this hyper-connected, hyper-distributed IT environment, Cisco and its partners are building the Intercloud—a globally connected network of clouds. In a step towards realizing that vision, Cisco has announced their intent to acquire Piston Cloud Computing, which will help accelerate the product, delivery, and operational capabilities of Cisco Intercloud Services.

Paired with their recent acquisition of Metacloud, Piston’s distributed systems engineering and OpenStack talent will further enhance their capabilities around cloud automation, availability, and scale. The acquisition of Piston will complement the Intercloud strategy by bringing additional operational experience on the underlying infrastructure that powers Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Paul Miller.

Europe’s particle physics lab, CERN, generated its share of cloudy headlines at the recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, as a multi-year collaboration between CERN’s openlab Project and managed cloud provider Rackspace reached prime-time as the underpinnings of OpenStack Kilo’s federated identity capability. Other organizations also contributed code and ideas as this project rolled into OpenStack, but CERN continues to explore other cloud technologies and perhaps even other ways of solving very similar problems.

As Frederic Lardinois reported for TechCrunch at the time, OpenStack Executive Director Jonathan Bryce used the opening keynote at last month’s Summit in Vancouver to announce a number of advances within the project. One of those was support for ‘federated identity,’ or the ability to log in to a remote OpenStack cloud using credentials associated with your own OpenStack cloud…

Grazed from Nature.com. Author: Nadia Drake.

In February, computer scientist Mark Howison was preparing to analyse RNA extracted from two dozen siphonophores — marine animals closely related to jellyfish and coral. But the local high-performance computer at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was not back up to full reliability after maintenance. So Howison fired up Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and bid on a few ‘spot instances’ — vacant computing capacity that Amazon offers to bidders at a discounted price. After about two hours of fiddling, he had configured a virtual machine to run his software, and had uploaded the siphonophore sequences. Fourteen hours and US$61 later, the analysis was done.

Researchers such as Howison are increasingly renting computing resources over the Internet from commercial providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft — and not just for emergency backup. As noted in a 2013 report sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia, the cloud provides labs with access to computing capabilities that they might not otherwise have (see go.nature.com/mxh4xy)…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Shane Schick.

Here’s the mayor of Toronto, not an IT professional, but John Tory has no problem articulating why he sees potential in cloud computing. “I’m of the age where I still ask my children for advice about these things, but even I knew an 18-year-old email system was not something to be admired,” Tory told a press conference where Microsoft announced it is building two new Canadian data centres to support its cloud-based software products.

Since City Hall moved from Groupwise to Microsoft outlook, Tory added, “We’re now in a situation where we can respond properly.” Tory’s example is just one of the ways that Microsoft is hoping to encourage more businesses to make the leap from running legacy technology on their on premises to a cloud or software-as-a-service model…

Grazed from WWPI. Author: Anna Riberio.

Hewlett-Packard announced updates to the HP Helion portfolio with debut of the HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0, an integrated enterprise cloud solution, and enhancements to HP Helion Managed Cloud Services to manage enterprise workloads in a secure hosted cloud environment.

HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 expands support for multiple hypervisors and clouds to provide enterprises and service providers with maximum flexibility, HP announced Tuesday at the ongoing HP Discover 2015 conference. Additionally, HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 integrates HP Helion OpenStack and the HP Helion Development Platform to provide customers an enterprise grade open source platform for cloud native application development and infrastructure…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Virtualization and cloud computing provider VMware has performed well in the network virtualization domain, which it ventured into relatively recently. The company launched the VMware NSX in late 2013, which merged its existing vCloud networking product line with the network virtualization platform of Nicira (which it acquired in 2012) into a single product family. VMware has since witnessed strong demand for the NSX, with the number of customers growing from just 30 to over 400 by the end of 2014.

The biggest challenge for VMware at this point is winning the ‘perception battle’ against once-partner Cisco. The networking giant has taken a different approach to network virtualization and software-defined networking compared to VMware. VMware’s approach holds the potential to make high-end and branded networking hardware/equipment redundant in the long term, which is a major concern for Cisco. In mid-2014, VMware’s CEO mentioned that Cisco branded VMware to be its “public enemy number one” following the NSX launch…

Grazed from Lexology. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing services for business purposes are rapidly gaining popularity. Gartner, an internationally renowned technology consultant, expects 33% of all companies to use cloud-based office systems in 2015. The reason for this growth is undoubtedly the flexibility of the solution: cloud services are generally provided based on the client’s demands and increases in the size of stored data do not generally incur significant incremental costs.

Although the cloud computing industry is not as strictly regulated as, for example, telecommunications, the provision of cloud computing services in Bulgaria must comply with certain personal data protection and information security requirements. Proper risk management can help business users and service providers minimise any potential commercial and/or reputational risks related to cloud computing…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

Now that most folks have a reasonably solid understanding of what the Apple Watch is any interesting new phenomenon is starting to occur in terms of how cloud services are being marketed directly to line of business (LOB) executives. Historically, mobile computing and the cloud have always been joined at the hip. In fact, it’s hard to think of one being nearly as useful without the other.

The Apple Watch and other devices like it simply extend that mobile computing experience out to the wrist. But the folks that can afford an Apple Watch tend to be fairly well off, which means most of them are to one degree or another line of business executives. Providers of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications have taken note of that correlation…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/06022015/using-apple-watch-sell-cloud