Grazed from BusinessStandard. Author: Manish Godha.

Shared computing services, whether applications or platforms available over internet, have granted small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) unprecedented access to technology sophistication. The potential inherent in information technology has been immense and the possible impacts are only getting more pronounced. Technology not only bolsters efficiencies but also influences fundamental changes in the business models themselves.

But getting technology to work for a particular business has traditionally been arduous, requiring significant expense, effort and skills. As such, access to ‘enterprise-class’ has been limited to large businesses that can invest in application and operational support. Cloud, however, allows access to technology without worrying about deploying, operating, maintaining and investing…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Andrea Goldberg.

At the beginning of a new year it is customary to size up the past year and look forward to what awaits. In the technology space, a lot of the hype in 2014 was around cloud computing, Apple’s new offerings, and the Internet of Things. To those unfamiliar with the term, the Internet of Things is simply the name given when smart devices are built into ordinary objects, such as clothing, so that the embedded devices can provide data back and forth from the cloud.

This transfer of data enable insights and determines actions. While cars have had this type of technology for a while, this year gave us smart watches, connected toothbrushes, contact lenses, and tennis rackets. You no longer need to go to a tennis clinic to have your swing analyzed, just purchase a connected device and plug into the cloud…

Grazed from SysCon Media.  Author: Pat Romanski.

Cloud Foundry open Platform as a Service makes it easy to operate, scale and deploy application for your dedicated cloud environments. It enables developers and operators to be significantly more agile, writing great applications and deliver them in days instead of months.

Cloud Foundry takes care of all the infrastructure and network plumbing that you need to build, run and operate your applications and can do this while patching and updating systems and services without any downtime…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

As promised back in October as part of an expansion of the Microsoft’s hyperscale cloud capabilities, the company has made its new G-Series virtual machines (VM) for Azure generally available.

G-Series is the new king of Azure VMs, according to Corey Sanders, director of program management for Microsoft Azure. "G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD [solid-state drive] of any virtual machine size currently available in the public cloud," he said in a Jan. 8 Azure Blog post…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Steve Herrod has seen a lot in the enterprise IT space, having spent 12 years at VMware — the last several years as CTO and vice president of R&D — before leaving in 2013 to join venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners.

And right now, after seemingly dozens of high-profile cyberattacks in as many months, Herrod has security on his mind. He came on the Structure Show podcast this week to tell how he’s thinking about that space…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada.  Author: Don Sheppard.

Last year I would have called this my IT predictions for 2015.  This year my crystal ball is pretty cloudy (no pun intended).  It’s safe to say that Apple Watches and Windows 10 will be delivered in some form.  Although cloud computing will certainly continue to make progress towards maturity, 2015 may be the year that the term “cloud computing” is finally retired (or perhaps re-invented with a new meaning).

Let me note that lots of predictions for 2015 are already available.  For some reason, 2015 seems to be a magic year.  One vision that first appeared in 2011, the Intel Cloud 2015 Vision, has been well publicized.  Gartner, Forrester and IDC have published their 2015 predictions.  It’s certainly nice that we can make totally new predictions every year!…

Grazed from University of Luxembourg.  Author:  Dejene Boru, Dzmitry Kliazovich, Fabrizio Granelli, Pascal Bouvry, Albert Y. Zomaya.

Cloud computing is a computing model where users access ICT services and resources without regard to where the services are hosted. Communication resources often become a bottleneck in service provisioning for many cloud applications. Therefore, data replication which brings data (e.g., databases) closer to data consumers (e.g., cloud applications) is seen as a promising solution.

In this paper we present models for energy consumption and bandwidth demand of database access in cloud computing datacenter. In addition we propose an energy efficient replication strategy based on the proposed models which results in improved Quality of Service (QoS) with reduced communication delays…

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

ITaaS is an IT operational method, providing an enterprise with the required amount of hardware, software, and support. Nowadays, companies have been using the ITaaS model to increase the usage of virtualization as it is not limited to cloud computing technology models such as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.

Various benefits associated with the ITaaS model include the simplification and standardization of products and services delivered by IT, reduced cost of consumption, increased IT efficiency, and improved financial transparency, which leads to an increase in business agility and flexibility at the same time.  Analysts forecast the Global IT-as-a-Service Market to grow at a CAGR of 31.0 percent over the period 2014-2019…
 

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

A leading enterprise hybrid-cloud platform technology and technical service provider inChina, Shanghai KeyTone Information Technology Co. Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "KeyTone Cloud", www.keytonecloud.com ), announced today that Cisco will make a strategic investment in KeyTone Cloud and that the parties have signed a memorandum of strategic cooperation to bring hybrid-cloud technology to Chinese IDC & Telco service providers and enterprises.

KeyTone Cloud is a cloud computing technology provider and a managed hybrid-cloud service provider. In earlier 2014, KeyTone Cloud completed Series-A funding co-led by Gobi Partners and CBC. In September 2014, KeyTone Cloud released its OpenStack-based cloud platform called KCloud, with some advanced elastic service functions such as of Auto Scaling and Live Vertical Scale-up of VM instance implemented on top of OpenStack…

Grazed from MelodiesProject.  Author: Jon Blower, Debbie Clifford, Pedro Gonc alves, and Manolis Koubarakis.

Environmental applications of space-derived data typically require the integration and fusion of multiple diverse datasets. Increasingly many such datasets are being made available at no cost and with liberal licences enabling wide reuse.

These data encompass both scientific data about the environment (from the ESA Climate Change Initiative, the present and future Sentinel missions and from other observing systems) and other public sector information, including diverse topics such as demographics, health and crime. Many open geospatial datasets (e.g. land use and mapping) are already available through the INSPIRE directive and made available through infrastructures such as the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS)…