Grazed from FierceMobileIT.  Author: Fred Donovon.

As more companies grapple with the challenges of allowing employees to bring their own devices to work, they can perhaps gain some insight from a bunch of rocket scientists at NASA.  Surprising as it might sound, the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) at NASA has embraced BYOD and implemented some innovative BYOD measures, a report by Lifehacker explains.

Tom Soderstrom, IT chief technology and innovation officer at the lab, says that to keep ahead of IT trends he maps out three-year IT increments and crowdsources innovation during seminars with JPL staff…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Yevgeniy Sverdlik.

Mirantis, which helps companies stand up OpenStack clouds of their own, has launched the latest release of its distribution of the popular open source cloud architecture. Mirantis OpenStack 6.0 is based on OpenStack Juno, the most recent release of the open source software package.

Juno came out in October 2014. This is the first OpenStack distribution companies can write their own plug-ins for that can be installed and deployed automatically. Lots of vendors want to be part of the rapidly growing OpenStack ecosystem and want customers to use their products as part of their OpenStack clouds…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Stuart Crawford.

The year 2015 has just started, and the smell of change is in the air. Last year was full of upheaval for the MSP world, and if you haven’t started making a gameplan to keep up with the evolving industry we find ourselves in, you’re going to find yourself left behind. Listen to an interview with BJ Farmer on what his MSP in Houston is doing to win in 2015. Click here to check out the interview.

BJ Farmer from Houston Microsoft Award-winning company CITOC knows that this has always been the case for our industry. “CITOC, the company name, stands for ‘change is the only constant,’” says BJ. “That holds true in the technology world. We need to be surfers — we need to ride different waves all the time. Don’t get stuck on any one wave, you’ll get squished; you need to keep moving to new waves.”…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Editorial Staff.

The National Institutes of Health aims to launch an electronic “Commons,” a community-controlled cloud infrastructure that would support collective uses of computing, storage and data for biomedical research by NIH and its academic and industry collaborators. NIH’s Office of Data Science is in the process of prototyping the Commons, which it described as “a shared computing environment that takes advantage of emerging cloud computing and existing high-performance computing resources.”

In a sources-sought notice for contributors, NIH noted that its biomedical and health sciences research was fast outgrowing the means – through journal articles, scientific conferences and simple networks – to circulate data to the research community. Instead, biomedical researchers need a new mechanism that is scalable, straightforward to use and could take advantage of emergent cloud and high-performance computing resources, said NIH…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ping Li.

Big data, cloud services and mobile technology are having a revolutionary impact on business. Not only are these innovations fueling the modern enterprise, they are also sending security risks sky high. Traditional network perimeters are dissolving as businesses reshape their organizations around these burgeoning technologies.

I actually have a lot of empathy for CISOs. They have one of the hardest jobs in the world these days, especially as the traditional perimeter-based approach to network security rapidly loses its relevance. Enterprise security has changed because the enterprise has changed, drastically so…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Douglas MacMillan.

After months of delays, the initial public offering for online storage company Box Inc. is finally a go. Box said Friday that it plans to register as many as 14.4 million shares, expected to price between $11 and $13 a share, and sees raising as much as $186.9 million. It began its road show pitching the stock to investors, putting it on track to have its shares trading by the end of January.

The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “BOX.” The IPO would value Box at more than $1.5 billion. The company said in its filing that it expects to receive about $134.3 million in net proceeds that it plans to use for general purposes…

Grazed from TechCocktail. Author: Rick Delgado.

Businesses can’t seem to stop talking about cloud computing. It feels like the term is everywhere, with many companies acting like it’s the solution to every issue your organization faces. There’s little doubt that the cloud has become extremely popular in the past few years, but some companies are reluctant to take that final step.

Your company might be one of them, constantly asking basic questions like, “What is cloud computing?”, expressing concerns about such a major transition, and essentially feeling uneasy about the cloud and all that it offers. While there’s nothing wrong with showing a little bit of caution with new technology, worries over your company’s readiness for the cloud might be a bit overblown. In fact, you’re likely already using it, even if you don’t know it…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jaikumar Vijayan.

Google Wednesday released a beta version of a software-debugging tool that it says will give application developers a way to quickly diagnose performance bottlenecks in production applications running on the company’s cloud computing platform. Google Cloud Trace works with applications running on Google App Engine or using a Google Cloud Platform managed virtual machine.

It helps developers gain visibility into software code while it is running, to see which line or lines of code might be dragging down application performance. In the event of a performance bottleneck or other problems, the tool generates a report containing details on what might be causing the issues…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Sharon Gaudin.

With some of Verizon’s enterprise customers about to lose their cloud service for up to two days, now is the time for them to prepare for the extended downtime. "One of the major selling points of cloud computing is that it takes the burden of IT management off the shoulders of the customer, but with this outage, Verizon’s customers are right back in the thick of things when it comes to IT management," said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group.

"They’re going to have to figure out how to minimize the impact of the Verizon two-day fail on their business." Verizon confirmed to Computerworld this week that it will shut down its Verizon Cloud service to do maintenance for up to two days, starting at 1 a.m. ET Saturday. Users are being told to shut down their virtual machines at least an hour ahead of time…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Lindsey O’Donnell.

Solution providers are expecting accelerated growth in the managed services space but stress that MSPs must transform as the need for cloud, mobility and big data solutions rises. A study released Wednesday by research and consulting firm MarketsAndMarkets predicted the demand for managed services will jump drastically in the next five years, with the global market slated to grow from $101.2 billion in 2014 to $193.3 billion in 2019.

Kyle Cebull, CMO of Fort Myers, Fla.-based solution provider Entech, said customers are looking to managed services to increase efficiency and reduce in-house costs. “Managed service providers are a more sophisticated way of handling information technology,” he said. “Companies are becoming more sophisticated in general about looking for new ways to excel…