Grazed from BrookingsInstitute. Author: Joshua Bleiberg.

Since 2009 the federal government started the process of replacing local computers with cloud platforms. A recent report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) provides an interesting view into the progress of these investments. It reveals the benefits that public agencies gain when using cloud services and the barriers they face when making the transition.

Advantages of Cloud Computing

Cloud computers are superior to locally-run data centers for a variety of reasons. The CRS report identifies six specific cloud benefits:…

Grazed from Rappler. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Philippines moved 4 notches up in the 2014 Cloud Readiness Index, landing on the to the 10th spot. Cloud – whether public, private, or hybrid – involves deploying groups of remote servers and software networks to allow centralized data storage and online access to computer services or resources.

The country’s ranking in cloud readiness improved from 14th in the 2011 release of the report, thanks to the continuously booming business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, one of the cloud-friendly industries. BPOs played a big part in this improvement, as cloud use is essential to accelerate the industry and give it an even higher competitive edge, said Bernie Trudel, chairman of the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA)…

Grazed from TechWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknas.

New documentation shows how to configure basic hybrid cloud testing environments, which use a mixture of public and on-site computing resources, and how to run a SharePoint intranet farm as well as other applications on top of it. These testing environments use a local Internet connection and a public IP address to set up a functioning, cross-site Azure virtual network.

Once the testing environments have been configured, IT staff can use them to begin application development, experiment with IT workloads, and gauge the performance of VPN connections, Microsoft said in a blog post on Thursday. Even if the hybrid cloud concept is easy to understand, taking the leap to actually building one isn’t always an easy decision. More in-depth testing increases the chance of a successful roll-out…

Join hyperconverged infrastructure and virtualization experts Scott D. Lowe and David M. Davis on February 24th to learn about the data center trend that is rocking the infrastructure market and forcing organizations to rethink their data center strategies: Hyperconvergence.

Because of the huge potential in this technology, there are many vendors jumping into the space, each with unique offerings, unique approaches, and unique outcomes. Gaining a solid understanding of these different approaches can be a time-consuming effort.  So make sure to join this one time only event, and evaluate SIX of the hottest Hyperconverged Infrastructure Vendors back to back at one time!

ActualTech Media has partnered with Gridstore, HP, Maxta, Scale Computing, SimpliVity, and Stratoscale to bring you this prize-filled, 1/2 day online event specially designed to help you evaluate and compare each vendor’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution!

Grazed from NetworkAsia.  Author: Mark Bentkower.

A recent Gartner report predicts that the number of connected ‘things’ will reach 25 billion units by the year 2020. The Internet of Things (IoT) holds great potential for business leaders, offering the possibility of viewing, analyzing and leveraging statistical information about unstructured, big data in an instant. According to Gartner, IoT will be the next critical focus for data/analytics services.

In fact, it has already started to change the face of big data storageand analytics in 2014, and it is becoming a core investment strategy for organizations across all industries. In Asia Pacific, the IoT adoption is expected to grow to US$57.96 billion by 2020…

Grazed from TechWeekEurope.  Author: Ben Sullivan.

CloudStack is an open source cloud software platform which is designed to deploy networks of scalable virtual machines in an Infrastructure-as-a-Service environment. It is often likened to OpenStack, and provides on-premises cloud computing as part of a hybrid cloud solution.

The ‘stack’ refers to the entire range of features companies look for in an IaaS solution such as  cloudstack orchestration, Network-as-a-Service, user management, and an open API.  CloudStack supports VMware, KV, Hyper-V, and Xen hypervisor…

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Antony Saavas.

There are a number of concerns among organisations considering moving into the cloud.  These include not having the expertise and internal skills to do it, the perceived cost of cloud deployments, and in some quarters the belief that the cloud is an immature market.

Throw in serious data security concerns, industry compliance obstacles, some users not convinced of cloud benefits, and issues around cloud reliability, and it’s fair to say that the cloud market has a battle on its hands…

Grazed from MSPAlliance.  Author: Editorial Staff.

In a move I have predicted long ago, Canada is one of many countries making moves to establish cloud computing guidelines to protect end-user data. While some countries are making very superficial steps, Canada is actually following the path of Germany, Brazil, and other nations, by wanting to establish transparency guidelines to know precisely where Canadian cloud data resides and who is accessing that data.

Oh, Cloud Canada!

The proposed guidelines seem to deal only with cloud computing as it relates to Canadian government projects involving the cloud. However, if the government adopts such a framework, it could be likely that private industry within Canada could also adopt such a stance, at least regarding certain types of data…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Editorial Staff.

IBM (IBM) today announced a deal to help Marriott International (MAR) offer faster digital services to its guests.  The global hospitality company said it plans to migrate many of its core IT systems and applications to the IBM Cloud platform over the next few years. Additionally, Marriott will deploy IBM analytics software-as-a-service (SaaS) called Big Insights so it can collect and leverage big data to find new ways to better serve its guests.

"IBM Cloud provides the analytics to see early-stage data patterns and the scale and flexibility to enable timely, innovative new services that will meet guests’ expectations in a predominantly digital world," Bruce Hoffmeister, Marriott’s global chief information officer, said in a prepared statement…

Grazed from SmartData Collective.  Author: Anand Srinivasan.

Cloud storage business has truly taken off in the past couple of years. According to a Markets And Markets study, the public/private cloud storage industry is expected to be worth $56.57 billion by 2019. For perspective, the public cloud storage industry was estimated to be just around $21 billion a couple of years back, according to Technology Business Review.

Besides cloud computing, one of the popular applications of cloud is in digital asset management, or DAM for short. For the uninitiated, DAM refers to the process of storing, cataloguing, searching and delivering of digital files, mainly audio, video, images and office documents. DAM is an extremely critical element of businesses like media and journalism that deal with lots of content. A typical media house, especially one that deals with videos, owns digital assets that are dozens of terrabytes large. In terms of data volume, it is common for these media houses to own northwards of a hundreds thousand files. Tagging every file, along with storing and retrieving them is a lot of work…