Grazed from WSJ. Author: Shira Ovide.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spent his first year on the job making the company less dependent on Windows. This week, when Mr. Nadella is scheduled to show off the next version of Microsoft’s most famous product, will reaffirm the operating system’s key role in his company’s fate.

At a day-long press session Wednesday, Mr. Nadella and other Microsoft officials are expected to give the most detailed glimpse so far of Windows 10, slated to launch later this year. Microsoft also will explain how Windows will work more seamlessly with upgrades to the popular Office productivity software bundle and the Xbox videogame system, and it may offer views of a voice-activated digital assistant and a new mobile Web browser…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dan Kusnetzsky.

The folks from DivvyCloud, Brian Johnson, CEO, and Peter Scott, CSO/CMO, came by to introduce the company and talk a bit about what they’re doing for their clients. After learning about the good, the bad and the ugly of using cloud computing as a platform while at Electronic Arts it became clear to them that managing in-house and off-premise platforms was a complex process. So, they decided to get together a team to make cloud use and administration easy.

DivvyCloud Management Platform

The company’s primary offering is a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) designed to gather cloud infrastructure and the needed cloud application lifecycle management data together and make it easy for developers to use DivvyCloud’s dashboard or write their own applications or use their on business intelligence tools for each cloud service they’ve chosen to use…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The majority of Microsoft’s service errors in the first quarter of 2014 were advisory, while there were significantly more service interruptions in the following three quarters, according to analysis carried out by CloudEndure. The figures, taken from Azure’s Service Health Dashboard across last year, saw three full service interruptions in Q1, a whopping 28 in Q2, 16 in Q3 and zero in the final quarter.

The highest number of errors came in Q1 (259), yet also produced the lowest number of partial service interruptions (88), compared to 134, 129 and 127 for the other three quarters. The analysis came about after Azure suffered two debilitating outages last year; one in August, and one in November, which was caused by storage blob front ends going into an infinite loop – a process which went undetected during testing…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2015/jan/19/disaster-recovery-experts-dig-down-azure-cloud-outages-over-past-12-months/

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Rhonda Sherwood.

There’s no denying it: the cloud industry has reached maturity. And businesses are lining up to make a move to the cloud. According to Gartner, organizations will store 36% of their content in the cloud by 2016, a big jump from the meagre 7% they stored in 2011. Managed service providers (MSPs) who want to tap into this growing market will have to decide how to approach the cloud. They’ll have to assess their customers’ needs, what kind of offering they can deliver and what kind of strategy will ensure their success. What kind of MSP are you? Here are three common profiles.

The Risk-Taker

This type of MSP likes to be in control. To make sure he has complete ownership of the infrastructure, he won’t go with any public cloud provider. He’ll build his own cloud. The biggest benefit? 100% control. Guaranteed. From the infrastructure’s components to updates and maintenance, everything will be in the hands of the service provider…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2015/jan/19/msps-and-iaas-what-to-do-in-2015/

Grazed from CBROnline.  Author: Amy-jo Crowley.

SAP is looking to expand its presence in cloud computing and ecommerce across China, which it believes will bring "tremendous growth and change".  In an Interview on SAP TV, Mark Gibbs, president of SAP Greater China, said the software giant is aligning with partners to provide "great support and leadership to help China run better".

"We are doubling down and really focusing by industry across China, and I think we are aligning the whole of SAP and our partners by industry, and I think this will bring tremendous growth and change," he explained.  He pointed to areas in e-commerce, referring to China as the "e-commerce capital of the world", and cloud computing as opportunities for growth…

Grazed from StockWise.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is trying to interconnect business and social networking for the second time around. The world’s biggest internet retailer have quietly launched the app, called DingTalk, in December of last year. DingTalk, which the company says is still in its beta phase, is an attempt at “versatile mobile communications app that fills a gap in the market for corporate mobile messaging,” an Alibaba spokeswoman said, cited by Reuters.

Previously, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has launched a mobile messaging app called Laiwang, but it was never successful, losing out to WeChat of archrival Tencent Holdings Ltd. DingTalk, however, currently targets Alibaba’s active consumers…

Grazed from EvergreenInvestor.  Author: Viki Mickel.

Box Inc. the cloud service provider is expected to go public this year and has filed for an initial public offering. It is imperative to state that the company had filed for an initial public offering for the first time last March. The company is seeking a valuation of $1.6 billion according to the documents filed by the company with the exchange and the regulatory authorities. The company had delayed the initial public offering the last time around because of the unfavourable market conditions for technology stocks last March. The company consequently raised $150 million through private funding last July.

Box Inc. valuation this time around is 33 percent less than what it had initially filed for last time around. The company plans to raise $163 million through the initial public offering by issuing 12.5 million shares in the price range of $11 – $13 per share according to the regulatory filing. The company currently has 32 million registered users and the largest competitors for the company are Microsoft, Dropbox and Citrix…

Grazed from UnionGazette.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Given that the start off of the 21st century, safety has emerged from scare-story status to grow to be one of IT users’ largest difficulties &ndash as survey after survey confirms. Along the way a quantity of uncomfortable lessons have been learned, and are still getting discovered.

The initially lesson is that security technology should generally be deemed in a human context. No one particular nevertheless believes in a technological repair that will put an finish to all safety problems, since time and once again we hear of new kinds of cyber-attack that bypass sophisticated and safe technology by targeting human nature &ndash from alarming emails ostensibly from official sources, to friendly social invitations to share a funny download. Or indeed a harmless seeking USB stick ‘accidentally’ dropped by the office entrance, or a fake policeman demanding a couple of private specifics to confirm that you are not criminally liable…

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Dina Bass and Jing Cao.

Brian Lillie, chief information officer at data-center company Equinix Inc., had a salesman with a password problem.  Remembering the 15 separate logins to use the Redwood, Calif., company’s tools proved challenging, the salesman told Lillie, so he was writing them all down. That rendered them pointless if the paper were to be lost or stolen. So Lillie started testing programs to let people use a single password for everything, and implemented one across the business a couple of years ago.

The CIO’s role is changing quickly in a world where the spread of mobile devices and Internet-based programs is resulting in a more employee-led approach to new technology. Companies’ top information-technology executives now must track the use of workers’ own devices and applications and decide which of these programs to roll out companywide. That’s a break from the past, when they had more control over evaluating what software and hardware to buy before it reached the staff…

Read more from the source @ http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-cio17-20150117-story.html#page=1

Grazed from BiometricUpgrade.  Author:  Stephen Mayhew.

Apple recently announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted its patent application for an iCloud-based fingerprint storage and cross-device syncing solution, a system that could potentially eliminate manually setting up Touch ID and power next-generation Apple Pay-enabled POS terminals, according to a report by Apple Insider.

In the patent application, entitled “Finger biometric sensor data synchronization via a cloud computing device and related methods,” Apple details how fingerprint data may first be gathered on a primary device and uploaded to iCloud to distribute among secondary devices…