Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Rick Delgado.

The modern office is nothing like it was in the past. In fact, in many cases it’s not even a physical location. Improvements in technology have allowed us to work from anywhere, whether right at home or flying on a plane. Our lives have become increasingly demanding, meaning we require better tools to help us get the same amount of work done while we’re on the go.

This has significantly contributed to improvements in mobile technology. Within the past few years we’ve shrunk our machines, cut their wires and made our cell phones smarter. These developments aren’t just for personal convenience either. Sure, the ability to access social media and take quick pictures is great, but mobile devices are also incredibly useful for sending and accessing information from almost anywhere. It’s this benefit that has caused such rapid integration of smartphones into the workforce…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Steven Scheer.

Team8, an Israeli venture capital fund focused on the cyber-security industry, said on Tuesday it had raised $18 million in its first round of funding, including investment from Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco . Also participating in the round were Bessemer Venture Partners, Marker LLC and Innovation Endeavors, which was founded by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

Led by veterans of the Israeli army’s 8200 intelligence and electronic espionage unit, Team8 aims to develop cyber-security companies that offer more in-depth protection than the usual defence against hacking attempts by generic malware. Bessemer partner David Cowan said that could set them apart from the legions of security start-ups in Silicon Valley…

Grazed from GovTech. Author: Brian Heaton.

The Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) and Amazon Web Services have partnered to make it easier for state agencies and other customers of the DIR to move to the cloud. The DIR has negotiated a contract with Amazon that enables state customers to buy cloud services directly through the vendor.

Amazon is one of 22 companies the DIR has contracts with for cloud technology under its cooperative contracts program. Prior to the new arrangement, Texas agencies had to conduct their own separate procurements and vendor solicitations. While the DIR has contracts with various Amazon reseller businesses, the new contract is the first statewide agreement Amazon has held, according to Shannon Kelley, contract manager with the Texas DIR…

Grazed from DailyTech. Author: Jason Mick.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) on Jan. 29 submitted a pretty intriguing trademark finding to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In the filing it applies for a trademark on the term "Windows 365." The filing was first spotted by a reader of Neowin.

I. A Game Changer Quietly Steps Up

What at first looks like a ho-hum filing really hints at a potentially market-changing upcoming product. Imagine, for a second, a Lumia 635 budget smartphone that could destroy the most powerful Apple, Inc. (AAPL) iPhone in gaming graphics at a tenth the cost That’s the radical promise of Windows 365. The description given is as follows:…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Last week, the second-largest U.S. health insurer, Anthem, announced that as many as 80 million customers had their account information stolen. Not much is known about which systems were hijacked, but Anthem said all of its businesses were affected, so it’s easy to figure that the attack was far-reaching.

"’The names, addresses, birth dates, and Social Security numbers stolen from the Indianapolis-based insurance giant are gold for criminals,’ said James P. Nehf, a professor of law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis," USA Today reported. Once again, there is a major data breach on internal servers…

Grazed from AppDeveloperMagazine. Author: Richard Harris.

Piston Cloud Computing and ActiveState Software are partnering together to use Piston with ActiveState’s Stackato Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities to offer an OpenStack and Cloud Foundry PaaS based private cloud environment. Piston provides a turn-key infrastructure management and automation layer while Stackato provides a platform to manage, develop and deploy software.

With the combination of Piston and Stackato, customers can deploy a production-ready IaaS plus PaaS stack in a single day. Stackato is based on the Cloud Foundry and Docker open source projects. It provides development teams with built-in languages, frameworks and services on one single cloud application platform…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Bitglass, the Total Data Protection company, announced today that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing. Bitglass is a Cloud Access Security Broker that delivers total data protection as enterprise data moves beyond the firewall — in the cloud, on mobile devices and anywhere on the Internet.

The service enables some of the world’s most security-conscious and regulated organizations to adopt public cloud apps by closing security and compliance gaps. The SaaS-based solution deploys in minutes and works without installing software agents on employee devices and without changing the user experience…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Most businesses believe their private clouds have failed, according to a survey by research firm Gartner. Gartner analyst Tom Bittman says 95% of respondents reported that some aspect of their IaaS private cloud has gone wrong. In other words, 19 out of 20 private cloud implementations are leaving something to be desired. The obvious question is: why? In a recent blog post Bittman lists the top six reasons he believes private clouds fail. Here’s a link to his blog, but in summary they are:

-Focusing on the wrong benefits: Many times cloud projects are pursued as a money-saving endeavor. That’s missing the point of all the benefits a true cloud strategy can bring.

-It’s not really a cloud: Many people mischaracterize highly virtualized environment as a private cloud. It may not have features such as self-service or rapid elasticity, key tenets of a true IaaS cloud…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Elizabeth White.

CommVault has announced an arrangement with NaviSite, Inc., to extend the data protection capabilities of Simpana® software to NaviSite’s NaviCloud® portfolio. CommVault will provide data protection and management capabilities for customers using NaviCloud Director, an enterprise-class cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution offered directly to customers via an intuitive self-service portal, and also delivered in conjunction with NaviSite’s broad portfolio of managed services.

"Our clients come to us for solutions that can readily scale to meet their enterprise level requirements, while reducing risk and providing value back to the business," said David Grimes, chief technology officer, NaviSite. "Simpana software satisfies our requirements and provides the capabilities of multiple point products we were evaluating within a single solution — providing a great degree of flexibility for our clients, while resulting in less complexity and costs for our internal organizations."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Kelly Sheridan.

All data centers share a few commonalities: They generate massive amounts of heat while draining equally large amounts of energy. However, some businesses are getting creative with how and where they store data. Data centers are more than just massive facilities packed with overheating servers and air conditioners.

Most contain the best hardware and software available in modern technology, with the capacity to send and receive millions of pieces of data per second, which is especially important as cloud computing matures and more companies invest in moving apps and data to the cloud. As more businesses begin to invest in cloud capabilities, the use of data centers becomes less of an option and more of a priority. Small and midsize businesses are especially exhibiting a strong growing interest in new forms of data storage…