Grazed from Wired.  Author: Angel Luis Diaz.

The amount of change in the IT industry over the last few years has been incredible. A challenge for some, an opportunity for others, a whirlwind for many. One theme runs through all of the most impactful trends causing change: open technologies. 

The evolution of open cloud computing, or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), has brought forth a wide range of new options to IT infrastructure deployment. The provisioning of compute, storage and related network technologies that used to take multiple weeks or more can now be accomplished in hours or even minutes — depending upon the level of sophistication of the request. Learn more about the market-leading IaaS ecosystem here...

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

By now we’ve all seen that Western Digital commercial for the "personal cloud," in the form of My Cloud. Western Digital is the latest company to push the concept, with compelling TV commercials, such as the one below.

The premise is not new. Other storage companies have brought similar products to market that let you set up your own storage cloud at home with access to files using your home network or over the Internet, even when you’re away. The feature is often part of higher-priced routers, too…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Marissa Tejada.

Mobile cloud computing is reaching more people than ever. New research shows that more people are using mobile devices and that this growth is directly affecting the mobile app market as well as the need for top cloud computing solutions.

Growth Predicted

The mobile cloud market currently stands at $9.43 billion globally and is set for impressive growth. A Research and Markets report featured in Cloud Times predicts that the mobile cloud market will reach nearly $47 billion by 2019, which is a compound annual growth rate of 38 percent within the next five years. Meanwhile, mobile software and applications are set to gain market share thanks to cloud computing making new and innovative solutions possible…

Grazed from InformationManagement.  Author: Editorial Staff.
 

IBM Corp. and Docker Inc. are partnering to help businesses build and deploy applications more rapidly. The relationship could help corporate IT departments to more rapidly roll out Big Data applications both on-premises and in public clouds.

"Enterprises can use the combination of IBM and Docker to create and manage a new generation of portable distributed applications that are rapidly composed of discrete interoperable Docker containers, have a dynamic lifecycle, and can scale to run in concert anywhere from the developer’s laptop to hundreds of hosts in the cloud," according to a prepared statement from both companies…

Grazed from GeekWire.  Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

CenturyLink announced today that it has acquired DataGardens, a company that offers services to help firms recover from problems that pop up in the cloud. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The DataGardens team will remain in Edmonton, Alberta, but will report to CenturyLink CTO and former Tier 3 CEO Jared Wray, who’s based in the company’s Bellevue, Wash., cloud office.  CenturyLink purchased Tier 3 last year, using the acquisition for its base of expansion into the cloud computing arena…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Kelly Katsanos.

Many businesses choose to deploy cloud solutions for agility and to reduce IT infrastructure requirements. However, these businesses may face cloud computing challenges in the areas of security, integration and information governance.

Advantages and Drawbacks

Cloud computing is becoming a common element in business. According to a recent IDG study featured in Forbes, 69 percent of enterprises had at least one application in the cloud in 2014, a 12 percent increase from 2012…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  AuthorL: Thomas Claburn.

Add windows to a room and everything looks brighter. Add Windows to a platform and you open doors to new customers.  That’s just what Google has done as it races with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other companies to attract business computing clients to the cloud.

Google on Monday said that customers now can use Windows-based workloads on Google Cloud Platform. The company is offering Microsoft License Mobility for Google Cloud Platform, which allows Microsoft customers to run Microsoft software on third-party services…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM announced it has patented an invention that enhances the use of analytics for assessing and directing data in a cloud computing environment, enabling more timely and efficient application processing and management. The IBM invention, U.S Patent #8,639,809, "Predictive Removal of Runtime Data Using Attribute Characterizing," analyzes data from a variety of sources to avoid performance lags and processing delays.

Since not all data is equal and resources for processing, storing and managing information are finite, real-time analytics can be useful in expediting this process, IBM said. "Processing data in a cloud is similar to managing checkout lines at a store—if you have one simple item to purchase, an express lane is preferable to waiting in line behind someone with a more complicated order," IBM Inventor Michael Branson, who co-invented the patented technique with John Santosuosso, said in a statement…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Mike Vizard.

Big data is supposed to generate massive amounts of demand for storage, but it’s not at all clear how all that storage is going to actually be paid for. Conventional wisdom says IT organizations will pay for storage on a usage basis, but the folks at Logentries have a very different idea.

Logentries, a provider of a log analytics application delivered as a service, has unfurled a Logentries Unlimited, On Demand Log Management service that starts at $429 per month, which includes logging unlimited data from up to 40 hosts. To make that even more enticing the company is also making available a free 30-day trail offer…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Mike Vizard.

Knowledge Vault today announced the general availability of its namesake analytics-as-a-service platform that provides more insight into how documents are being consumed and shared beyond anything IT organizations could hope to accomplish on premise.

Knowledge Vault CEO Christian Ehrenthal says that starting with Microsoft Office 365 deployments, IT organizations can use Knowledge Vault to discover and audit content and apply governance policies to documents stored in the cloud. Next up, says Ehrenthal, will be support for Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and Box.net…