Grazed from CIO-Today. Author: Dan Heilman.

CRM giant Salesforce unveiled updates to its Analytics Cloud on Thursday that it says will fuel the next wave of mobile Relevant Products/Services innovation. With the new updates, users will be able to import and analyze new data Relevant Products/Services sources, build entirely new dashboards and share insights in just seconds from their phones.

In addition, a free "playground" version of the Analytics Cloud was released for desktop and mobile devices. With that product, users can employ Analytics Cloud using their own imported data or a variety of preloaded data sets…

Grazed from Entrepreneur. Author: Ann C. Logue.

The average cost to a U.S. business of a lost or stolen record containing customer information is $201, according to the 2014 Cost of Data Breach Study conducted by the Ponemon Institute for IBM. The most expensive incidents are due to malicious attacks, not to human error or process failure. That’s a problem for your business.

Mega-retailer Target may have had to pay cash to counter its late-2013 data hack, which reportedly affected up to 110 million customers, but it was lucky. Similar breaches have resulted in the destruction of companies. “If you get it wrong, your business can be erased,” says Ken Ammon, chief strategy officer at Xceedium Inc. in Herndon, Va. Xceedium sells platforms used by government and major corporate customers to manage access privileges on information systems…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

Hybrid cloud is becoming more popular among enterprises, which is reflected in new data from RightScale. RightScale’s "2015 State of the Cloud Report" showed that many enterprises are focused on implementing a hybrid cloud strategy that encompasses public and private clouds along with existing virtualized environments.

Additionally, RightScale researchers found that enterprise central IT teams are now making the majority of cloud spending decisions in organizations worldwide. "As enterprise IT has become more open to public cloud and more comfortable with cloud security, it is now in a strong position to broker cloud services to internal customers and drive cloud adoption forward," RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said in a prepared statement…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-research/02192015/rightscale-do-enterprises-want-private-public-or-hybrid-clouds

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Cloud computing and storage deals are set to rise in 2015, which should cause a jump in solutions well suited for more types of industries and businesses, including midsize firms. It’s an opportunity for MSPs to expand their offerings and target the growing midsize market.

Mergers Matter

A new market forecast report by 451 Research featured in Enterprise Tech found that technology mergers and acquisitions trends that flooded the cloud, software and storage market in 2014 should continue through 2015. One segment, cloud computing, is set to add layers of new services to complement current offerings…

Grazed from Fujitsu.  Author: PR Announcement.

Fujitsu today announced that it will migrate all internal systems to a new cloud platform, underlining the benefits of cloud computing as a more efficient, flexible and cost-effective solution even for the largest global companies. It will consist of approximately 640 large-scale and complex systems across some 13,000 servers globally that encompass a mixture of legacy and cutting-edge systems.

The transition will proceed in stages starting in February 2015 and is scheduled to be completed within five years with an expected reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) of 35 billion yen...

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: David Roe.

Put your money on hybrid cloud computing — and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Rackspace. But be forewarned: Security (or lack thereof) is still a concern and one of the chief reasons for underuse of cloud resources. The findings, contained in RightScale’s State of the Cloud Report for 2015, paint a picture of a technology space that is well established but still immature in some respects.

It also confirms that hybrid cloud deployments are the preferred path for enterprises movement to the cloud, which explains why leading vendors have invested so many resources into their hybrid cloud portfolio…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Natalie Gagliordi.

IT cloud services startup ScienceLogic has closed a $43 million Series D round of funding led by Goldman Sachs, the company announced today. Previous investors NEA and Intel Capital also participated. The startup says it plans to use the cash influx to accelerate sales, marketing and product development, and to expand internationally.

ScienceLogic makes software that allows IT teams to monitor their infrastructure from the cloud or on premises — allowing the firm to enjoy the rising popularity of the hybrid cloud model. Its software can automatically visualize the entire on and off-premise infrastructure of an enterprise, map out the cross-technology and cross-cloud dependencies, and the instantly apply appropriate monitoring policies…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-monitoring-firm-sciencelogic-lands-43-million-from-goldman-sachs/

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Greg Baumann.

Will NSA-linked hard-drive spying help Silicon Valley find its grit? One might think that the news that the National Security Agency has apparently hidden spying software on hard drives produced by Silicon Valley companies would prompt outraged calls for urgent change. Unless one looked back and saw how little has changed since initial reports that the NSA was tapping data lines and building backdoors into security protocols.

The latest disclosure, based on a report by Russian computer-security firm Kaspersky Labs and validated by Reuters reporter Joe Menn, will renew the discussion in Silicon Valley as to how much government spying impacts U.S. technology company sales. But costs mount as that discussion plays out…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Arthur Cole.

By now, most enterprises have begun the transition to the cloud. Whether this results in an all-cloud infrastructure, a cloud-first footing or a combination of hybrid/traditional environments remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: The change so far has not been as easy or as productive as it first appeared.

According to recent research of INetU and Think Strategies, nearly half of all companies launching a cloud strategy in the past year reported a halt to their hosting implementations, with more than 70 percent instituting a design change. About 27 percent said they were “extremely satisfied” with their cloud vendor. As has been noted in previous studies, security remains the most significant stumbling block, followed by compliance, capacity planning and monitoring…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.

It was fun while it lasted, as developers and business units had their day of unfettered access to public cloud resources. But now, it’s time for IT to take back control. Between unpredictable and runaway costs, security lapses, lack of visibility and management complexity, organizations are beginning to put the kibosh on free cloud love in favor of policy-based access, provisioning and centralized management.

Additionally, organizations promote secure and economical internal private cloud use alongside a public cloud. And this lays the foundation for true hybrid clouds. "When a company goes to a cloud model and the users can provision whatever they want, you lose control of your costs," said an infrastructure capacity management specialist at a global entertainment firm…