Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Tom Henderson.

The cloud can be an enormously cost-effective way to increase storage and computing musculature, and also, sadly, a way to further add misery to those seeking privacy—or who just want to be left alone. It’s rare to see organizations stand up and shout, "we’ll not give your data to anyone!" or "the life of all stored data, except opt-in assets you want us to store, is always 90 days!" or "yes, we can determine in absolute certainty that your data has been erased to protect you and your identity."

The cloud, in some warrens, has become a storage ground for the various factories of "big data," whose ideals are generally to sell things to consumers and businesses. Correlating facts is huge. Ask Target, whose insight into discovering pregnancies helped them capture a nicely profitable market in the pregnancy and new mother world. Smart, you say. There is a downside to this…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.
 

Cloudy software provider Salesforce has announced its latest financial results, with $5.37bn (£3.46bn) in total annual revenue and another billion dollar quarter.  The results were in line with Wall Street’s expectations, with earnings per share at $0.14 and a year on year growth of 26.1%.

It certainly seems a long way since 2009, when Salesforce’s first billion dollar annual figures arrived, and late 2013, when the first billion dollar quarter arrived. CEO Marc Benioff saw the latter, understandably, as a major achievement initially – it’s now almost de facto…

Grazed from CustomerThink.  Author: Gary Gould.

What we can expect from the Cloud over the next ten years.  In the United Kingdom, almost seventy per cent of businesses are using at least one cloud based service.  That’s a huge leap from five years ago, when the Cloud would barely crop up in conversation.

Nowadays, we are forever reading about cloud technology, the Internet of Things, virtual desktops and wearable technology. For the small business owner, there’s a lot to keep up with. After all, you never know when the next generation-defining innovation is going to be launched, and you need to be prepared to use it to its full potential when it finally drops…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Research conducted by Tata Communications, a leading provider of A New World of Communications™, has found that organisations with 500+ employees are seeing tangible benefits from cloud computing. 85% say cloud had lived up to industry hype, with 23% declaring that cloud had exceeded their expectations.

According to the global survey, this groundswell of positive opinion has been contributed to by enterprises experiencing tangible benefits when using cloud services – with 83% of enterprises feeling they have experienced benefits they did not expect to see. The most popular of these benefits cited by respondents were: increased productivity (69%), better access to data (65%), and reductions in costs (63%)…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

IBM announced today that Forrester Research has positioned the company as the leading supplier in the global infrastructure outsourcing segment, based on an evaluation of most significant suppliers.

In a new report, "The Forrester Wave™: Global Infrastructure Outsourcing, Q1 2015," IBM scored the highest or among the highest among 13 suppliers across all three high-level evaluation criteria: Strategy, Current Offering and Market Presence. Forrester recognized IBM’s vision for the future of infrastructure services, noting that cloud services has become a major element of IBM’s infrastructure management strategy…

Grazed from CloudWedge.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

Want to build your own cloud company or even launch a public cloud service? OpenStack is an open source software resource that aims to let you do all of that. It competes with other notable software offerings such as vCloud (paying) from VMware and CloudStack (also open). At another level it also competes with cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft that offer instant cloud computing. But if nonetheless you’re chewing over open and home-grown as the way to go, here are some points to ponder while you plan.

OpenStack is Open

Ho ho, sounds obvious, right? As open source software, anyone can obtain and use the source code, modify it and feed those modifications back into the OpenStack community. This is good for innovation and market-driven development…

Grazed from CloudComputingToday.  Author:  Arnal Dayaratna.

On Tuesday, Mirantis announced the integration of OpenStack with Kubernetes, the open source framework developed by Google to manage containers. The integration between OpenStack and Kubernetes enhances the portability of applications between the private cloud infrastructures typical of OpenStack and public cloud environments such as the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure that support Kubernetes.

Even though Docker containers are well known for enhancing the portability of applications across infrastructures, transporting applications and workloads from private clouds to public clouds remains challenging…

Grazed from CFO.  Author: Keith Button.

The cloud computing bandwagon continues to pick up speed, with software-as-a-service (SaaS) arrangements now outselling licensed software. Moreover, cloud computing is winning corporate converts to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which offers virtual hardware, storage capacity, network connections, and so on; and platform-as-a-service (PaaS), which enables users to build software applications over the Internet.

It’s not surprising that so many companies have migrated to the cloud, given its promise of cost savings, increased flexibility, and greater ease of use. But they still face choices among public, private, and hybrid public-private cloud arrangements. Moreover, there are a number of cost-benefit considerations and risks to address. And for certain applications, on-premises software may still be the best bet…

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Alex Barinka.

International Business Machines Corp. formed a partnership with Juniper Networks Inc. to create networks with built-in analytics, harnessing big data to improve mobile and other applications.

IBM and Juniper will design and sell tools to help businesses analyze information, update operations, reduce costs and improve how applications run, according to a statement Tuesday. This could involve customizing experiences for watching videos, running business apps or managing Web-connected devices…

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

SingleHop, a leading provider of on-demand hosted private clouds and managed hosting, today introduced storage-agnostic backup-as-a-service (BaaS) capabilities through Veeam Cloud Connect©, enabling enterprises to efficiently backup data to the cloud. Veeam Availability Suite v8 users can immediately take advantage of SingleHop BaaS with no additional hardware, software, or upfront costs and without the cost and complexity of managing an offsite infrastructure. SingleHop is among a small handful of companies to offer Veeam-powered backup to extend customer data protection outside of the data center.

Cloud-based backup has emerged as the choice alternative or complementary method to tape, disk, on-premise, and 3rd party co-location scenarios because of the reduced risk, lower costs and improved business continuity the cloud model delivers…