Grazed from TheStack. Author: Martin Anderson.

IBM has announced that it is providing hybrid cloud solutions to the U.S. Army’s logistics system – one of the biggest of its kind in the United States. The army’s Logistics Support Activity (LOGSA) division has migrated to an on-premise IBM-supplied hybrid cloud environment handling 40 million data transactions daily, and claims to have achieved cost savings of 50% with the new arrangement.

LOGSA houses the Logistics Information Warehouse (LIW), a military depositary for logistics data which employs business and analytics tools to provide logistics information to over 65,000 end-users and 150 trading partners worldwide. General Manager for U.S. Federal at IBM Anne Altman said in the report:…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.

In only a handful of years, cloud computing has transformed the way many enterprises do business. However, according to Verizon’s 2014 Enterprise Cloud Report, about a third of all organizations still haven’t made a move to using any cloud services. For the others who have invested in cloud computing, the journey was likely a bumpy ride—especially if the migration was their first.

Given that cloud isn’t going away, developing a seamless migration path to the technology can help IT minimize mistakes and, more importantly, attain objectives. However, if enterprises think all their data management and IT issues will be resolved with a move to the cloud, they’d better think again. Cloud hype is as rich in misnomers and falsehoods as it is in promising value and efficiency…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

In a case that first began in December 2013, Microsoft is still refusing the government’s demands to hand over emails of one of its users. The government wants the emails as part of a drug trafficking investigation. The problem is the emails are stored on a server in Ireland and Microsoft says that the US government doesn’t have the jurisdiction to demand them, at least not from Microsoft.

Last summer, Microsoft lost its appeal on the matter. On late Wednesday evening, Microsoft filed a legal brief reply on the matter, once again arguing that it should not be compelled to turn over emails stored in a foreign country, Microsoft’s head lawyer, Brad Smith explained in a new blog post…

Grazed from Barrons. Author: Tierman Ray.

Amazon.com (AMZN), hosting its “AWS Summit” in San Francisco for its Amazon Web Services, today, announced a number of new initiatives, including a “Marketplace” in which to buy desktop applications delivered over the Internet, a new set of tools for managing files, the “Elastic File System,” and a new service for helping companies make predictions.

The company also made a pitch that more and more companies are moving all their computing to AWS, and talked up companies that are doing so, such as publisher Time Inc. Amazon shares rose 47 cents to $381.67 following the presentation. The EFS is the “missing piece” in Amazon’s cloud computing initiative, said Andy Jassy, senior VP for AWS. He billed it as a “file system that grows and shrinks, automatically.”…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Cloud service providers (CSPs) can no longer treat security as a luxurious add-on, and customers have to ensure their providers take care of the issue, a new report asserts. The research, the latest cab off the rank from Ovum and FireHost entitled “The Role of Security in Cloud Adoption within the Enterprise”, offers sound advice to vendors and users alike. True, it’s stuff everyone will have heard before – but it’s worth repeating.

“On too many occasions, security has been positioned as an afterthought when new technology initiatives have been brought to market,” Ovum analyst Andrew Kellett writes. “Any service that includes access via public networks cannot ignore user and data protection requirements.”…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

A new report from ABI Research estimates that the volume of data captured by IoT-connected devices exceeded 200 exabytes in 2014. The annual total is forecast to grow seven-fold by the decade’s end, surpassing 1,600 exabytes—or 1.6 zettabytes—in 2020. Principal Analyst Aapo Markkanen says, “The data originating from connected products and processes follows a certain journey of magnitudes.

The yearly volumes that are generated within endpoints are counted in yottabytes, but only a tiny fraction of this vast data mass is actually being captured for storage or further analysis. And of the captured volume, on average over 90% is stored or processed locally without a cloud element, even though this ratio can vary greatly by application segment. So far, the locally dealt data has typically been largely inaccessible for analytics, but that is now starting to change.”…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

Since cloud computing hit the commercial market, cloud service providers have exploded in popularity, with a huge variety of different services each tailored to its own unique variety of client. For clients, though, this presents a challenge: how to find the right provider? Out of all the numerous options, which one is best for your business?

Of course, in order to answer that question, you first need to know what needs a cloud provider will serve. In other words, what is your unique set of priorities in making the selection? For most people, the primary benefit of cloud computing is that it reduces costs, and so price will be a prime consideration in choosing a service provider…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are finally gaining steam and vendors offering cloud solutions are starting to significantly outpace those that are slower to embrace cloud options, the H1 2015 Technology Value Matrix for ERP from Nucleus Research finds.

“While customers have been slower to migrate to cloud-based ERP compared to other enterprise software, such as CRM, we are now seeing a tipping point where the cloud is starting to take charge. Given the cloud benefits of lower cost, more flexibility and faster deployment times, we predict cloud ERP will only accelerate and quickly become the dominant solution. Cloud is changing the pace of ERP innovation,” said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Caroline Donnelly.

HP has dismissed reports that it’s planning to exit the public cloud market, after one of its senior vice-presidents admitted the supplier has given up trying to compete with the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. According to a New York Times report, HP thought it would be battling it out with the aforementioned public cloud giants for market supremacy, but things didn’t work out that way.

To back this point, HP senior vice-president of cloud product management, Bill Hilf, is reported to have said: “We thought people would rent or buy computing from us. It turns out it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head.” The comments have been seized on by some quarters of the tech industry as an admission the technology giant is giving up on the public cloud market – a point of view HP has been quick to correct…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Avi Networks, the Cloud Application Delivery Company, today announced that Computer Technology Review (CTR) has named the recently announced Avi Networks Cloud Application Delivery Platform (CADP) as a 2015 Most Valuable Products Award winner for uniquely delivering the benefits of a hyper-scale approach to application delivery for any infrastructure, at any scale, for on-premise and cloud-based applications.

Founded in 1981, CTR is one of the most respected editorial authorities in the computer storage, networking and information technology industries. In fact, CTR was the first storage publication to have a Web presence. Today, the CTR website has a very loyal following and is one of the largest sites devoted to data storage and data management. The complete list of 2015 winners can be found at CTR at http://wwpi.com/mvp-award-winners/…