Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud computing — in its current form — has been around for well over a decade now.  While it takes on many dimensions, the earliest roots of current-day cloud formations can be traced back to 1999 with the launch of Salesforce.com, and to 2004,with the first Amazon Web Services offering.

With all this activity going on year after, enterprises have accumulated some key lessons on what cloud is and is not all about. So, what have we learned, more than a decade in?…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Jeff Fleece.

The ladder to the cloud is missing a few rungs. At least, that is the conclusion of 276 IT professionals recently polled in a survey commissioned by Sungard Availability Services*. In the survey, the top three reasons indicated for why cloud computing implementations fail were:

• lack of understanding of cloud security and compliance (indicated by 56% of respondents)
• lack of clearly-identified business objectives for migrating to the cloud (55%)
• lack of planning (42%)

Those are three gaping holes in the ladder to a successful cloud implementation, and I believe that mistaken beliefs are at the core of each one…

Grazed from EnterpriseTech.  Author: Alison Diana.
 

There’s a temptation to view the many flavors of cloud as the solution to all an enterprise’s network, storage, and infrastructure challenges. But simply transitioning existing processes to the cloud without scrutinizing every element from a security perspective compounds current vulnerabilities and creates new problems.

Despite the risks, between 40 percent and 60 percent of enterprises today do not always review these processes before moving to cloud, according to CompTIA’sTrends in Information Security Study, published March 2015. Risks include security gaps; moving some processes back to on-premise systems, or switching cloud providers – time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes risky…

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Jonathan Vanian.

If you needed another reminder that the personal computer business is continuing to slump, look no further than Intel’s flat first quarter revenues that it blamed on people being uninterested in buying PCs.

But as those sales continue to decline, Intel sees a bright light when it comes to selling microchips to data center operators and cloud companies that handle computing for their customers. Intel expects this business will contribute more heavily to its future revenue. It’s just a question of whether that business will grow fast enough to offset the public’s lack of interest in desktop computers…

Enterprises and service providers operating modern data centers need to create an infrastructure that has higher capacity, is less complex, and allows for fast and affordable addition of standard and new services. They require an approach that supports new, more fluid application architectures with greater agility and efficiency. Flexible programmable network is vital in providing service agility. Incumbent networking solutions are generally proprietary in nature with an emphasis on tight integration between custom hardware and software, leading to network solutions that are expensive, complex, without common management toolkits to orchestrate, automate, administer, operate, monitor and maintain. This complexity at the management plane, leads to increased vulnerability to both systems and operator errors, and high CapEx and OpEx cost structures.

According to the report, “Most service providers that are deploying DaaS are looking for simplicity in managing these complex and distributed environments, and that’s what IndependenceIT has developed. Now, with Microsoft RemoteApp support, IndependenceIT partners have yet another service to offer. In many cases, published applications are all that customers need for their end users, but the Azure RemoteApp tools to manage those environments across multiple clouds aren’t as robust as the ones that come with the CWS platform. Not only that, CWS is hypervisor- and cloud-agnostic, and those features have proven to be very important to DaaS customers and partners.”

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE provides a simple solution for backing up Windows-based desktops and laptops. It’s so easy to install that users can be up and running in just a couple of minutes. And it’s just as easy to use. With Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE, users can back up endpoints to an external hard drive, network shared folder or a Veeam Backup & Replication™ repository. If a user’s system crashes, hard drive fails, or files get corrupted or accidentally deleted, they can recover whatever they need in minutes. Even better, Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE enables the creation of bootable recovery media, which helps users to fix issues with their machine which may prevent the operating system from booting, or even reset the Local Administrator account’s password.

Citrix CloudBridge provides a unified platform that connects and accelerates applications, and optimizes bandwidth across public cloud and private networks. The only WAN optimization solution with integrated, secure, transparent cloud connectivity, CloudBridge allows enterprises to augment their datacenter with the infinite capacity and elastic efficiency provided by public cloud providers.

Citrix CloudBridge demo appliance updates

Citrix partners can now can order demo units for the full CloudBridge hardware appliance lineup: 400, 800, 1000WS, 2000, 2000WS, 3000, 4000 and 5000. This expanded offering gives you the flexibility to showcase the scale of the CloudBridge portfolio while demonstrating the current WAN optimization solution and the upcoming virtual WAN solution.