Grazed from Smart Data Summit.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Middle East’s biggest Smart Data Summit, reopens its doors with an even more exciting second edition featuring stimulating presentations, roundtable sessions and case studies from an array of global experts, sharing their thoughts on enhancing customer experience across industries and sectors using smart data and analytics. This 2 day summit will be held at Sofitel Dubai The Palm Resort and Spa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates during May 25-26, 2015.

 Over 300 delegates across the GCC and worldwide are expected to attend the Smart Data Summit, which will explore the future of data management and how smart data and analytics can drive revenue growth. Focusing on using analytics to ensure superior customer experience and loyalty, the summit’s topics explore the myriad ways in which predictive big data and analytics can have a very real impact on business performance in industries such as retail, telecom and services…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Platform9 is hoping to make it easier for organizations to adopt private cloud with the introduction of Platform9 Managed OpenStack. The company is describing the new solution as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that "transforms an organization’s existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud within minutes."

And it makes sense, as OpenStack has really found its niche (a rather large and growing one) in the private cloud realm. The launch of the Platform9 OpenStack solution comes after six months of beta testing the service with various enterprise and service provider customers. During the beta, organizations deployed thousands of virtual machines on the SaaS-y solution every day…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-and-open-source/platform9-launches-managed-openstack-private-cloud-solution

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Matt Asay.

Cloud may feel like old news, but most enterprises have yet to do more than scratch the surface on cloud adoption, according to a new Goldman Sachs report. In 2014, cloud accounted for 5% of the $300 billion enterprise IT market, a number that will climb to 11% by 2018.

This is good, and a testament to Amazon Web Services (AWS) leadership. But clearly, more needs to be done, which is why it’s disappointing that OpenStack doesn’t appear to be doing much to take the cloud forward. If anything, by enabling overly complex private clouds, OpenStack has taken the industry backward, not forward…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)’s decision to focus most of its efforts on cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security seems to have been the right one. Headquartered in Armonk, New York, Big Blue on a Tuesday earnings call with investors said its total cloud revenue for fiscal year 2014 hit $7 billion, up 60 percent from the prior-year period.

“We are making significant progress in our transformation, continuing to shift IBM’s business to higher value, and investing and positioning ourselves for the longer term," said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer, in a statement. Big Blue also reported that its cloud delivered as a service revenues of $3 billion are up approximately 75 percent year over year…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Kelley Katsanos.

As businesses increasingly seek to partner with MSPs for their cloud business needs, they will want assurance that selected services will meet their business requirements before making a commitment. New insight indicates that MSPs should consider building a customer engagement plan using a "high touch" process in order to achieve successful cloud onboarding and ultimately reassure businesses of their decision.

Three Key Areas

A recent MSPmentor article suggests that MSPs should implement three key areas of the cloud onboarding process: assessments, transitional and cutover plans, and ongoing performance analysis. Before MSPs embark on a new cloud project, they will first need to include key business players, such as sales and executive management…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

The newest feature added to VMware’s vCloud Air public cloud is the ability to spin virtual machines up and down with just a few clicks and pay for them by the hour. This better positions VMware to go head-to-head with public IaaS cloud vendors Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, but analysts say VMware still has lots of catching up to do.

VMware’s stronghold in the virtualization market has made it an important cloud computing vendor to watch. The company, touting a software-defined data center strategy since its VMworld event last year, has helped many customers migrate their virtual environments into private clouds via automation and self-service provisioning features…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Nicholas Rando.

Trust is one of the most important factors in any relationship. And that sentiment holds true in a cloud provider-user relationship, as well. When a cloud service provider guarantees a certain level of performance, the user needs to know those expectations will be met. That’s where a service-level agreement comes into play.

Each cloud service provider has its own service-level agreement (SLA) that covers a range of service limits and guidelines around performance, availability, costs and more. An SLA might look good on paper, but a user should understand all the details to be satisfied with their service…

Grazed from TheLinuxFoundation. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the release of its 2015 report “Guide to the Open Cloud: Open Cloud Projects Profiled.” This is its second paper on the open cloud and adds many new projects and technology categories that have gained importance in the past year. The report covers well-known projects like Cloud Foundry, OpenStack, Docker and Xen Project, and up-and-comers such as Apache Mesos, CoreOS and Kubernetes.

The purpose of this guide is to serve as a starting point for users considering which projects to use in building and deploying their own open clouds. Taking a deeper look into cloud infrastructure, the paper includes storage, provisioning and platform projects. New categories outline emerging cloud operating systems, Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies…

Grazed from FedTech. Author: Nicole Blake Johnson.

The Department of Defense’s vision for cloud computing is about more than hosting public websites and data in commercial facilities. DOD is pursuing several opportunities for migrating sensitive military data to the cloud to reduce costs and boost performance. Options include cloud hosting in facilities outside the United States, moving defense enterprise cloud services such as email to a commercial environment, and modernizing milCloud, the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) private cloud offering.

“As we work through using commercial providers, DOD CIO is going to make a determination as to whether or not those commercial providers can be used for all unclassified workloads, even national security systems,” DISA’s Chief Technology Officer David Mihelcic, told FedTech during the Federal Cloud Computing Summit in Washington, D.C., last week. “National security systems are things that, even if unclassified, are defined as mission critical. They are things that DOD needs to go to war.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.fedtechmagazine.com/article/2015/01/how-dod-navigating-cloud-landscape

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

Most IT organizations are going to approach hybrid cloud computing from the perspective of their data centers out. After all, they’ve already made substantial investments in existing IT systems. With that idea in mind VMware (VMW) today extended the scope of the VMware vCloud Air initiative by adding new disaster recovery capabilities, the ability to support hundreds of virtual network connections, and announced the general availability of the VCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand service.

Scott Collison, vice president for the hybrid platform at VMware, said that while public clouds have been widely used to test and deploy stand-alone applications, it’s clear that the move to hybrid clouds is being driven by a desire to extend the reach of existing IT environments into the cloud. Given those requirements, most enterprise IT organizations are looking for the cloud service that most seamlessly provides those extensions…