Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Brock Spradling.

The cloud is here to stay. Enterprises both small and large are moving to cloud-based services en masse. This migration to the public cloud has created additional revenue pressures on Managed Service Providers (MSPs) as they look for new ways to add value on top of commoditized infrastructure. To add this value, MSPs must differentiate their offerings by providing additional services, including the assessment, design, automation and optimization of their clients’ applications and services.

Consuming IT infrastructure as software has never been easier. The hosted Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) marketplace has become crowded and confusing, with many new entrants and services during the last few years, offering a dizzying array of new choices for customers…

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Ian Barker.

A new study of nearly 14,000 information security professionals worldwide shows that two-thirds of respondents are concerned about the addition of multiple security technologies, often referred to as sprawl.

The Global Information Security Workforce Study (GISWS) produced by (ISC)² a not-for-profit membership body of certified information and software security professionals worldwide, is largest study of the information security profession ever conducted…

Grazed from Trefis.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Virtualization and cloud computing provider VMware is scheduled to announce its first quarter earnings on Tuesday, April 21st. VMware has been one of the fastest growing companies in its domain, with a 16% year over year growth in net revenues to $6 billion in 2014.

The company reported a 14% increase in product license revenues over the prior year period to $2.6 billion. On the other hand, services revenues were up by 17% year over year  to over $3.4 billion…

Grazed from Lexology.  Author: Jason Dixon.

In the era of the cloud, it has been an advantage to be an early mover, but when you get into the clouds you don’t want to lose your head.  About five years ago “cloud” was the IT industry buzz word and heralded as the new revolution in IT. But while the cloud is becoming an integral part of the IT infrastructure of a growing number of companies – especially in the mid-market – the challenge now moves to how much or how little of the “cloud” we need.

“It is the ability to buy as much – or as little – as is required that makes cloud computing a powerful option for mid-sized firms.” (Ian Grayson – The Australian, Wed 6 August 2014)

However, Jason Dixon, IT and IP law specialist at Ash Street, and former regional counsel for IBM Australia and New Zealand, urges a “buyer-beware” approach to businesses looking for their cloud solutions…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Hoping to move new applications to the cloud, Amazon has launched a new virtual server with four high-end GPUs, while Microsoft has made its SSD-based storage offering generally available.

Amazon and Microsoft have methodically been launching new services and adding features to EC2 and Azure, respectively, to make the platforms more competitive and a better fit for different applications…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective.  Author: Kyle Cebull.

A lot of people think that, like the internet, the cloud is just a fad. Sorry to burst your bubble, but this so-called fad is gaining some serious momentum. According to a recent Siliconangle.com article, throughout the next five years, a 44% annual growth in workloads for the public cloud is expected. With Millennials demanding that small businesses revolutionize their processes and workflows, more and more companies are jumping into the cloud to help streamline workflows and bring mobility to their workforce.

But it’s not for nothing, because the same article reports that 80% of cloud adopters saw improvements within 6 months of moving to the cloud. If you’re questioning the way things are moving or just aren’t on board with the cloud, here are a few reasons that we’re saying that the cloud and mobile are inevitable…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Joe McKindreck.

David Linthicum, sage of sages of the IT world, has some advice for those hoping their vendors will come to the rescue to untangle their ever-growing hairballs of big data and services: don’t hold your breath. "Those who think they can sit on the sidelines and wait for their data integration technology provider to create the solutions they require will be very disappointed," he cautions.

Instead of waiting on new releases of products, look to a rising breed of cloud-based services, David continues. As he explains in a new report (Sponsor: SnapLogic.), "everything you currently understand about data integration is changing. Assume that your traditional technology provider will soon be dead…

For those of you who haven’t yet had the chance to take a look at Docker, it enables apps to be quickly assembled from multiple components and eliminates some of the friction between development, QA, and production environments. With new Docker Platform tools Swarm, Machine and Compose, it is a growing component of modern infrastructure.

Docker, the open platform for distributed applications, today released new platform capabilities that enable organizations to more efficiently build, ship and run multi-container distributed applications across the entire application lifecycle. Using Docker’s platform, teams can collaborate on the development, testing and management of an application with an integrated effort that guarantees portability, improves productivity and accelerates deployment. These new capabilities for the first time – and moving forward – will be released simultaneously through coordinated updates of Docker Engine 1.6, Registry 2.0 and orchestration tools including Compose, Machine and Swarm. This unified release effort has been put in place to provide Docker users with incremental integrated platform capabilities every two months, providing continual improvement to all aspects of their application development lifecycles.

“Our community, which includes millions of developers and sysadmins, is depending on the Docker platform to support all stages of the application development lifecycle,” said Solomon Hykes, founder, chief architect and CTO of Docker. “These platform enhancements create new efficiencies and facilitate greater collaboration and a tighter integration between dev and ops. By synchronizing our releases, we are simplifying the evaluation and deployment process and enabling the community to immediately benefit from the integrated value that we’re building for them.”

According to IDC, cloud IT infrastructure spending, which includes storage, server, and networking, was up 14 percent in the fourth quarter to $8 billion. About 30 percent of all IT infrastructure spending goes to the cloud.