Grazed from SysConMedia.  Author: Kevin Jackson.

While SAP is globally renowned as a provider of enterprise management software, the name is hardly ever associated with the spooky world of intelligence. That is one reason why I jumped at the opportunity to talk with SAP executives responsible for the company’s work in that clandestine marketplace.

SAP National Security Services, Inc.™ (SAP NS2™) is an independent U.S. subsidiary of the company and offers a full suite of SAP enterprise applications, analytics, database, cyber security, cloud, and mobility software solutions. These offerings, however, are endowed with specialized levels of security and support needed to meet the unique mission requirements of US National Security Agencies and critical national infrastructure customers…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Peter Wagner.

The ascendance of mobile devices, cloud computing and big data is having a profound impact on the lives of workers. Yet many of the business applications that run on their smartphones and tablets still fail miserably to take full advantage of this revolutionary shift. Even services that tout themselves as “mobile first” often fall short of delivering novel functionality that boosts productivity and profit.

The offerings that will come to dominate the emerging $100 billion market for enterprise applications will be those that are “authentically mobile,” a term we use to describe services that would be extremely difficult or impossible to achieve without taking full advantage of the unique properties of the mobile ecosystem…

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Joel Clark.

The “Internet of Things” is a buzzword which is becoming more and more prevalent in today’s society. This is mostly due to the rise of crowd funding schemes and an insurgence of low power, highly capable microcontroller platforms such as Arduino.

The Equity Kicker expects 33 billion devices connected by 2020 with a large portion of them falling under the IoT umbrella term and Forbes are predicting some pretty mind-bending revenue estimates over the next few years.  Many of these devices are greatly enhanced by increased connectivity to the internet where they have access to large amounts of cloud based computing power…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author: Caroline Donnelly.

Google has spent the best part of a decade telling firms to ditch on-premise productivity tools and use its cloud-based Google Apps suite instead. So, the news that it’s moving all of the company’s in-house IT assets to the cloud may have surprised some.

Surely a company that spends so much time talking up the benefits of cloud computing should have ditched on-premise technology years ago, right?   Not necessarily, and with so many enterprises wrestling with the what, when and how much questions around cloud, the fact Google has only worked out the answers for itself now is sure to be heartening stuff for enterprise cloud buyers to hear…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jaikumar Vijayan.

Five one-day events will be held in New York, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam and Tokyo next month, with the goal of attracting more enterprise interest in its cloud computing platform.  Google is expanding its efforts to get more businesses to notice its array of cloud computing technologies.

Google’s cloud platform team will hold live events in five major cities this June where it will have customers and developers talk about their experiences with the company’s cloud computing technology…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

CIO Review’s most Innovative Cloud Company for 2015, CloudFX today (May 14) announced the launch of its first-of-its-kind Cloud Service Brokerage platform that will allow users to customise, configure, deploy and manage cloud services from the world’s most popular cloud service providers through one secure, central market place.

CloudSelect 2.0 follows fast on the footsteps of CloudFX’s first CSB platform offering CloudSelect and offers a multitude of functionality enhancements they believe will finally bring the promise of Cloud computing to SMB’s, Enterprises and Service Providers looking to simplify the design, deployment and management of multi-supplier cloud services…

Grazed from InformationManagement.  Author: Scott Feuless.

As more and more enterprises move infrastructure from in-house data centers to off-site public clouds, they begin to see changes in staffing requirements and functions almost immediately. At the very least, IT shops are freed from the work of purchasing, installing, configuring and upgrading hardware. You already know about those benefits.

But when an enterprise moves further along their migration journey to include a much larger percentage of the infrastructure and perhaps higher levels of the software stack, it will eventually reach a tipping point — where the benefits begin to build on one another, exposing unanticipated opportunities that can increase organizational efficiency, reduce staffing requirements and lower asset costs in a step-wise manner…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Many IT teams find that their AWS cloud costs grow less efficient as “clutter” builds up in their accounts. The good news is that both AWS and a small army of third party providers have developed tools to help engineers discover the cause(s) of these inefficiencies.

While there are several “easier” fixes, such as Reserved Instances and eliminating unused resources, the real issue is usually far more complex. Unplanned costs are frequently the result of nonstandard deployments that come from an unclear or absent development processes, poor organisation, or the absence of automated deployment and configuration tools…

Grazed from GeekWire.  Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

Despite making a commitment to use more renewable energy to power its datacenters, Amazon was blasted in a new report today from Greenpeace. The 2015 update to the group’s “Clicking Clean” report argues that Amazon’s commitments are laudable, but the company doesn’t offer enough information about its energy use to allow proper evaluation of its progress.

AWS-Logo-OrangeThe company was given a “F” grade for its transparency, and it scored a 23 percent on Greenpeace’s Clean Energy Index. That’s a far cry from the company’s other competitors in the public cloud: Microsoft scored 39 percent, while Google scored 46 percent. Apple swept the board with a perfect 100 percent score, keeping up its position at the top of Greenpeace’s report…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author:  Susan Marquette Poremba.

Cloud security has always been a sensitive topic. For many years, security was listed as the number-one reason why companies shied away from adopting cloud technologies. Cloud security has improved considerably over the years, but a survey conducted by Perspecsys shows just how far we have to go, especially when it comes to understanding where and how data is protected.

While at RSA, the folks from Perspecsys surveyed more than 125 attendees about data control in the cloud and more than half (57 percent) said they don’t have a complete picture of where their sensitive data is stored. Perhaps more alarming, 48 percent of the respondents said they don’t have a lot of faith in their cloud providers to protect their data. And because of this lack of trust, cloud adoption is slowed…