Grazed from MBTMag. Author: Ed Talerico.

After years of debate and numerous predictions as to when cloud computing would reach widespread adoption, it seems that 2014 was the year when it finally came of age. With 69 percent of enterprises running either applications or infrastructure in the cloud today, up 12 percent from 2012, it is difficult to dispute claims that the ‘fluffy stuff’ has hit the mainstream.

The drivers behind this acceleration are three-fold. First, a reduction in the cost of cloud computing has made it increasingly difficult for companies to ignore. Research shows that most organizations rapidly realize significant cost savings that actually increase over time as a result of the many indirect costs related to on premise software…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Linthicum.

Cloud governance and security typically work together, so you can’t select the right security approaches and technology without first understanding your governance strategy. What’s more, cloud governance comes in many flavors, including service level, data level and platform level. It’s important to understand each type of governance before choosing the best option for your organization.

Service-level or API governance installs policies around access to services exposed by public or private clouds. Users who request access to cloud services have to go through a centralized mechanism that checks the requester’s authorization. This mechanism also forces compliance with predefined policies that dictate when and how to access the cloud services…

Grazed from HSToday. Author: Amanda Vicinanzo.

Although government agencies understand the benefits of migrating services to the cloud, nearly three quarters of federal cloud users remain wary of fully committing to cloud computing, according to MeriTalk, a public-private partnership focused on improving the outcomes of government IT. Meritalk’s new report, Cloud without Commitment, underwritten by Red Hat and Cisco, examined federal barriers to cloud adoption including migration, data portability, integration and future agility.

Surveying 150 public sector IT professionals, Meritalk found most federal cloud users want to migrate more services to the cloud, with nearly one in five saying they deliver some of their agency’s IT services fully or partially via the cloud. However, security and control concerns are preventing them from fully embracing the cloud…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

The future of enterprise IT is cloud, and the future of cloud is PaaS. Infrastructure is metal, plastic, and silicon. It has kinetic potential, but sits and waits to be animated. Software is ethereal – dynamic, wildly alive, and transformative. Without PaaS, the twain shall never meet. No animation, no dynamism, no computing.

With cloud computing, you can buy the use of infrastructure and you can buy software. You don’t necessarily need to know much about running the infrastructure, and you don’t need to know how the software was written. But you need to learn in great detail how to use the PaaS. You must know how to PaaS…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

If you’re an IT manager or executive, you’ve probably started your cloud journey. You’ve likely migrated applications to the cloud, or deployed cloud as your primary hosting environment. And now, you think you’re a cloud veteran. Well, you’re just getting started. Few users have discovered the full impact of cloud — but every business could benefit by doing so.

First, the cloud isn’t an IT strategy — it’s an application architecture and a new computing model. For decades, IT struggled to get closer to the user. Today, cloud computing technology makes that possible with a global computing fabric that can touch any smartphone, tablet, laptop or wearable device. But since we’ve never seen anything like cloud, IT has yet to fully exploit it…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Mike Vizard.

While interest in all things Big Data is clearly high, the ability of most organizations to actually manage it is severely limited. With that issue in mind Datapipe announced that the MSP is acquiring GoGrid, a provider of a cloud services that automates the deployment of Big Data applications. Craig Sowell, chief marketing officer for Datapipe, said that ability to test Big Data applications and then deploy them with a single click across multiple cloud computing platforms was the primary reason Datapipe made the acquisition.

Big data and the cloud

Going forward, Sowell said Datapipe anticipates that demand for Big Data applications in the cloud will grow significantly; primarily because the laws of data gravity generally result in applications being deployed as close as possible to their primary sources of data. Given the relatively low cost of storing large amounts of data in the cloud, the weight of all that data is pulling more applications into the cloud, said Sowell…

Grazed from CircleID. Author: David Eisner.

Your company can’t ignore cloud computing: Some kind of distributed-access model is now necessary to tap global markets, manage big data and get access to best-in-class software. But with increased cloud adoption comes the issue of management, since it’s no longer enough to simply spin up a cloud and hope for the best. Here are five of the top cloud management trends to watch this year — and the risks of opting out.

Standardization

According to a recent Cloud Tweaks article, there’s a growing need for cloud industry standards. Organizations such as the Cloud Security Alliance and ISO are on the forefront of this standardization effort — through 2015, expect to see SLAs and other cloud contract start adopting this change by including "typical" language and clear-cut descriptions of service availability…

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Patrick Boynton.

For what must have been a frustrating moment in the Venn diagram of history, Americans could buy light bulbs but not the electricity to power them. As early as 1878, Americans could order bulbs from the Edison Electrical Company, but it wasn’t until 1882 when Thomas Edison built his Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan they could actually toss their private generators at the curb and connect to a shared power grid.

With the innovation of a grid, the per-unit cost of electricity dropped from the combined effects of comparative advantage, pooling and economies of scale. If we were to peel away our cities’ concrete shells today, we would uncover the pipes and wires of four utility grids, including electricity but also natural gas, water and sewage…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: David Roe.

The only things everyone seems to agree about when it comes to hybrid cloud computing is that it’s going to be around for a long time to come — and many vendors have many ways of approaching it. For M-Files, the unique selling point is a system that can manage all your content without repositories. That sounds like a big claim … and maybe it is. However, M-Files has been developing this for years, first in Europe and now in the US, and the proof of its claims are clear in its continued and staggering growth rates.

Growing With Metadata

Companies like Alfresco and Accenture are all making strong moves in the hybrid space. But M-Files has a unique selling point in that it offers enterprises the possibility of managing content using metadata only. In fact, M-Files can attribute at good portion of its success over the past few years to its ability to convince enterprises that this is an effective way of surfacing all the content that is stored within the firewalls…

Grazed from GCC Summit.  Author: PR Announcement.

The British Government’s first Director of Transparency, Andrew Stott, will give the Guest Keynote  presentation on ‘Economic Growth and Better Public Services through Big and Open Data’ at Dubai’s  GCC BIG DATA & ANALYTICS  SUMMIT  in March 2015.

 Mr Stott will be the first in a series of specialist presenters looking at the role of Big Data in building smart nations and smart cities across the GCC region.  Other speakers from the public sector will include senior representatives of Etisalat, ADWEA, ADNOC, Daman Health Insurance, Injazat Data Systems, Emirates Group and Etihad Airways…