Grazed from RPCMag.  Author: Gladys Rama.

As solution delivery increasingly involves cloud-hosted services, solution providers regularly find themselves in the business of taking on new vendors who provide key services from datacenters over which the solution provider has no control. The vendors might be giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), Google Inc., Rackspace Inc. or Microsoft, with their own massive datacenters.

They might be smaller vendors providing their services from their own purpose-built datacenter. They might be a co-location arrangement with a services provider of any size. Or they may simply be reselling the service of another vendor, abstracting the whole question…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.   Author: Marissa Tejada.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is affecting the future of IT from various angles, according to a new IDC report that examines network capacity, security and cloud computing trends.

Network, Cloud and Security Concerns

The IoT will strain networks in coming years, IDC’s latest predictions show. Within four years, 40 percent of IoT data will be stored and processed at the edge of a network. The IDC report, featured in ZDNet, also concludes that security will continue to impact IT professionals, with 90 percent of firms experiencing an IoT-related security breach in the next two years. Finally, 90 percent of IoT data will live on cloud service provider platforms, enabling a less complex melding of IoT data — a plus for smaller firms…

Grazed from SeekingAlpha.  Author: Editorial Staff.

With the increase in cloud computing and big data analytics by business, the future looks bright for manufacturers of data-farm equipment. In particular, there is an increasing need for storage that is both denser in its form factor and more efficient in its use of power. The companies that are poised to benefit most from this in the long term are those that have the ability to manufacture in volume and able to pivot from fabricating hard disk drives to fabricating hybrid drives (for the short term) and completely solid state drives (for the long term).

Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) is a well-known hard drive manufacturer that has yet to take a commanding market share in the small but growing solid state market. However, with recent acquisitions, it looks like it is making a stronger push into the market…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols.

If you want to see where enterprise Linux is going, you should look at Red Hat‘s community Linux distribution, Fedora, today.  It’s in Fedora that Red Hat explores the cutting edge of Linux and open source software developments. While not everyone will like where Fedora is going — for example, Fedora’s init systemsystemd still has many detractors — it’s still the bellwether for Linux. If a software library or program isn’t in Fedora at some point, it’s not likely to ever show up in mainstream Linux.

The latest Fedora, which has been the case for the last few updates, arrived a bit late. Never the less, it works well.  Instead of focusing on the desktop, as was once the case, Fedora now comes in three different variants: Fedora 21 Cloud, Fedora 21 Server, and Fedora 21 Workstation…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Threat Stack, the provider of security solutions purpose-built for the Cloud, has raised an additional $5M in funding from Atlas Venture and .406 Ventures. The additional funding will be used to further develop and commercialize Threat Stack’s cloud security monitoring service, which officially launched last month, and expand its footprint with customers using Amazon Web Services.

Threat Stack’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provides continuous security monitoring on application workloads, helping companies detect malicious activity and protect their systems from intrusions and data loss. Optimized for the cloud, Threat Stack uses a lightweight agent on the host to enable fast deployment, auto-scaling and flexibility in elastic environments. After a highly successful and over- subscribed beta program, Threat Stack launched on-stage in November at Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogel’s Start-up Launch keynote during the AWS re:Invent Conference…

Grazed from TheStack.  Author: Alice MacGregor.

Chip maker giant Intel announced yesterday that it is to introduce what will be known as the Intel IoT Platform, providing an all-in-one solution for enterprise IoT deployment.

The platform will incorporate x86-based processing power, cloud computing infrastructure, as well as tailored software. It will connect to the cloud through Wind River Edge Management Systems to “facilitate device configuration, file transfers, data capture, and rules-based data analysis and response.”…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Mike Vizard.

As part of an effort to ensure that implementations of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment are consistent with one another, the Linux Foundation, in conjunction with EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP and VMware, announced today the formation of the Cloud Foundry Foundation project.

Jim Zemlin, executive director for the Linux Foundation, says the primary goal of the Cloud Foundry Foundation is to make certain that applications developed for Cloud Foundry can actually be ported between implementations. While multiple vendors have committed to embrace Cloud Foundry, Zemlin says implementations of an open source project can vary widely…

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence.  Author: Ian Finlay.

The business challenges of shadow IT have emerged from the darkness and are now firmly in the spotlight. With PwC estimating that shadow IT accounts for between 15 and 30% of IT spending outside of the IT enterprise budget, it not only presents a real blind spot for enterprises, but has a significant impact upon both the security and integrity of company information, and customer confidence.

IT departments no longer have control over all IT solutions implemented within the organisation. With many trying to lock down their infrastructures to prevent shadow IT the balance has been tipped too far. By bringing it out of the shadows and into plain sight, enterprise IT Directors will be able to regain control and ensure their entire infrastructure – wherever it is – is transparent and compliant…

Grazed from TopTechNews.  Author: Editorial Staff.

It’s official.  The Cloud Foundry Foundation has launched as an independent, nonprofit foundation to manage the global open standards for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology. The foundation will be managed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and will be governed by a team of open source experts from founding Platinum Members EMC, HP, IBM,Intel, Pivotal, SAP, and VMware.

Cloud Foundry is currently the leading PaaS platform and has seen a 36 percent increase in community contributions over the past year, with more than 1,700 "pull requests" for contributions to the open development project. The Pivotal Cloud Foundry, IBM Bluemix, HP Helion, and Canopy Cloud Fabric are among the most notable deployments, thus far…

Read more from the source @ http://www.toptechnews.com/article/index.php?story_id=021000CJALVX

Grazed from ChicagoInno.  Author: Editorial Staff.

With private cloud hosting companies, enterprises receive the same agility and control that they would with a public cloud provider (like DigitalOcean or AWS), but with fixed economics and superior hands-on service. Because of this, ‘Hosted Private Cloud Solutions’ has been SingleHop’s fastest-growing and most popular product category in 2014.

To meet this demand, SingleHop – a Chicago-based provider of cloud computing and IT infrastructure – launched a brand new, state-of-the art $30 million data center today that features key capabilities designed specifically for hosting private clouds…