Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Greg Arnette.

Given the rising cloud adoption, the increased interest in data visualization tools and the rise of internal enterprise app stores, 2015 is expected to be a big year for the cloud. Cloud adoption has reached a tipping point with a majority of businesses deploying at least a portion of their processes to the cloud. Debate still surrounds whether organizations should embrace public cloud versus private cloud deployments, but businesses, as well as consumers, are becoming more and more comfortable with the technology and flexibility provided by cloud deployments.

In this slideshow, Greg Arnette, CTO and founder of Sonian, a pioneer in cloud-based archiving, provides insights on the factors he predicts will have a major impact on the cloud industry this year…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author:  Louis Columbus.

Employees would most recommend Google, Parallels, Virtustream, HubSpot, AppDirect, Mirantis, MuleSoft, Zenoss and OpenDNS to their friends looking for a job in cloud computing.

These and other insights are from an analysis completed in response to readers’ requests and questions on who the best cloud computing companies are to work for. In order to be completely impartial and fair about which vendors are included in this analysis, the latestComputer Reseller News list, The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2015 was used…

Grazed from CSO.  Author: PR Announcement.

Dimension Data, a $6.7 billion global ICT services and solutions provider, today announced it has been positioned by Gartner Inc. in the Challengers quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting (CEMH), Asia/Pacific. There were no Leaders in this year’s Magic Quadrant. The report was published Dec. 10, 2014, by analysts To Chee Eng, Arup Roy, Vincent Fu, and Kenshi Tazaki.

According to the report’s definition, “The CEMH market deals in standardised, productised hosting offerings that combine a cloud-enabled system infrastructure (CESI) platform — comprising compute, network and storage hardware — with cloud management platform software to facilitate self-service and rapid provisioning with managed services.”…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author:  Caron Beesley.

If your agency is making the move to cloud services, it can expect cost-savings, improved service delivery, and all the great things that the cloud brings. But for procurement and purchasing officials whose practices and contracting vehicles were designed to help managers provision hardware and software, not on-demand services like the cloud, it can all cause a bit of a frenzy.

But cloud procurement isn’t as problematic as it might first appear. Here are a few quick tips and insights that can help guide you through the solicitation, award and termination phases:…

Can you improve your company’s productivity in less than 60 minutes? 

Accept and take this challenge from Unifyle to earn $50 and a chance to win an iPad! 

Grazed from TheVarGuy.  Author: Michael Cusanelli.
 

Avaya is partnering withVMware (VMW) on a new enterprise hybrid cloud service that leverages the vCloud Air platform. Avaya’s Hybrid Engagement as a Service platform is designed to enable users to bridge private and public clouds to deliver a flexible approach to implementing enterprise communications.

“This new set of cloud services from Avaya provides additional flexibility and cost efficiency to enterprise customers who want to take advantage of a public cloud model for our customer and team engagement solutions,” said Joe Manuele, vice president, SI/SP, Alliances and Cloud at Avaya, in a statement…

Grazed from BloombergNews.  Author: Josh Petri.

Amazon Web Services is introducing Amazon WorkMail, a secure cloud-based enterprise e-mail and calendar program to compete with Google’s Gmail and Mirosoft’s Exchange products.

AWS already dominates cloud computing market, but until recently hasn’t had many consumer-facing products. WorkMail is the third product aimed at a general consumer. It follows Zocalo (Amazon’s cloud-based file sharing product) and Workspaces (virtual desktop).

Read more from the source @ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-28/amazon-launches-enterprise-e-mail-service

Grazed from Marketwire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Bitcasa, the company that makes storage simple and secure, was recognized at the 2014-2015 Cloud Awards last night, winning the "Best Infrastructure" category for Bitcasa CloudFS.

With CloudFS, developers, OEMs, and other service providers can leverage Bitcasa’s global cloud infrastructure to rapidly integrate cloud storage into applications and services. Offering a full set of APIs, including pre‐built files and folders along with upload, download, sync, and other media services, CloudFS accelerates application development on public cloud storage…

Grazed from CloudComputingInfo.  Author: Kenneth Van Surksam.

Platform9, which exited stealthmode in August last year last weekreleased it’s Software as a Service (SaaS) solution based on OpenStack. This platform aims to reduce operational complexity offering non-disruptive setup and upgrades, a single pane of glass (unified management) for KVM and VMware vSphere, a native support for teams collaboration and a solid OpenStack base.

All you need to do is sign up for a Platform9 account, and pair your servers with it. The Platform9 dashboard starts offering visibility into your infrastructure across compute, storage, network and existing workloads…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

IBM has announced the launch of Identity Mixer, a cloud-based technology which aims to protect personal data by only revealing the bare minimum for transactions, on its BlueMix developer platform.

The release, which has not coincidentally been pegged for Data Privacy Day, uses a cryptographic algorithm to only reveal selected pieces of a user’s information, such as date of birth, home address, and credit card number, to third parties…