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…

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…