Grazed from Yibada.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft, a U.S.-based multinational technology firm, overtook ExxonMobil, an American oil and gas company, as the second most valuable company next to Apple Inc.  Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has proven to be a strong leader for the firm this year. The CEO reformulated the company’s budgeting while also downsizing jobs.

Nadella pledged to put more effort into developing the company’s mobile technology, which it did through the acquisition of the Nokia Lumia line of smartphones…

Grazed from Sci-Tech.  Author: Shirley Siluk.

hanging IT needs will drive more enterprises away from in-house data centers to off-site facilities in coming years, according to a new forecast from the analyst firm IDC. The future will also see a rise in super-size "mega datacenters," leading to a decline in the overall number of data centers around the world even as total data center space keeps growing, the report stated.

According to the IDC forecast, released earlier this week, the total number of data centers will peak at 8.6 million in 2017 and then start to decline. However, total data center space will increase globally, rising from 1.58 billion square feet in 2013 to 1.94 billion square feet by 2018…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview.  Author: Dan Kuznetsky.

Marc Crespi, CEO of OneCloud Software , came by to introduce his company and its product, OneCloud Recovery (OCR). OCR is designed to integrate virtual data centers created on-premise and move them to Amazon’s Web Services (AWS). Doing this task quickly, reliably and manageably is the challenge OneCloud Software has had to face.

OneCloud’s Secret Sauce

The secret sauce, OneCloud Software would say, is its Automated Cloud Engine (ACE), which has the ability to reach into the customer’s VMware infrastructure. Here’s how the company describes ACE:…

Grazed from PolicyChargingControl.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Toshiba and Cisco this week signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the aim of enhancing the progress of a new Smart Community by extending collaboration on new ways to utilize the Internet of Everything (IoE) to improve processes, productivity and experiences in manufacturing, transportation and city environments. The global collaboration is intended to bring together the Cisco Fog Computing network environment featuring Cisco’s network-wide security solution with the Toshiba Group’s endpoint management technology.

Toshiba seeks to generate new value by connecting its energy, health care, storage products and services using cloud computing, big data and analytics technologies, with the goal of creating a Human Smart Community: a safe, secure, and comfortable society…

Grazed from EnterpriseTech.  Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

The idea behind cloud computing, as pioneer Amazon Web Services believed when it launched its first utility compute and storage products eight years ago, is to abstract away the underlying hardware and provide raw resources to programmers for applications to run on. This hardware is a competitive advantage for AWS, as it has been for its parent online retailer, and that is why AWS very rarely talks about its datacenters and systems. But with Google, Microsoft, and IBM all talking up their investments in cloud and the innovations they have come up with, Amazon has to lift the veil a bit.

The reason is simple. The Amazon online retail business may be a $70 billion behemoth, but it does not throw off a lot of cash. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is not interested in profits as much as he is about transforming the world around him, but the cloud computing business is one of the most capital intensive businesses there are in the world…

Grazed from Talkincloud.  Author: Dan Kobialka.

A new IBM Institute for Business Value survey of 750 technology executives revealed 71 percent of respondents recognized that IT infrastructure "plays an important role in enabling competitive advantage or optimizing revenue and profit."

However, the survey, titled "Continuing the IT Infrastructure Conversation: Why Building a Strong Foundation Requires More Than Technology," also showed that only 22 percent of respondents said their businesses have a well-defined enterprise IT infrastructure strategy in place.  IBM noted its most recent survey findings correspond with an IT infrastructure report that it released in July…

Grazed from MSPMentor.  Author: Michael Brown.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its final version of the US Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap, Volumes I and II recently. The roadmap provides international guidelines, objectives and “Priority Action Plans” for cloud computing, with the hope of improving cybersecurity for the United States’ critical infrastructure and individual organizations.

Taking into consideration over 200 comments from other nations worldwide, this document covers a wide range of relevant ideas, challenges and recommendations related to cloud management and deployment. But is there really a point in trying to impose standards and define a technology that is still at the very beginning stages of its evolution?…

Grazed from GCN. Author: William Jackson.

Cloud computing offers both unique advantages and challenges to government users. The advantages are well-advertised: Greater efficiency, economy and flexibility that can help agencies meet rapidly changing computing needs quickly and cheaply while being environmentally friendly.

Among the challenges, security is the most commonly-sited concern in moving mission-critical services or sensitive information to the cloud. To address this, a recently released roadmap from the National Institute of Standards and Technology recommends a plan to ensure cloud offerings meet government security needs while being flexible enough to adapt to the policies and requirements of multiple tenants, including foreign governments…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

One of the things about Microsoft’s (MSFT) cloud computing strategy that isn’t always fully appreciated is the enormity of the ecosystem being built around Windows services in the cloud. For example, with the recent addition of Rackspace to the number of cloud service providers running the same core Microsoft Cloud OS platform now extends to well more than 100 different companies.

Based on Windows Server 2012, the Microsoft Cloud OS platform provides a consistent set of IT services customers can invoke consistently no matter where Microsoft provides them via its Azure cloud platform or any one of more than 100 other cloud service providers. In stark contrast to that ecosystem, the cloud services from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM and others are only available via a single provider…

Graze from TechTarget. Author: Ofir Nachmani.

The market recognizes AWS and Google as the leaders in cloud computing. However, because of its range of cloud capabilities up the stack, AWS is currently leading the race. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right choice for your company. One way to decide is to compare both clouds on price, global reach and capacity. And even then, it may be difficult to settle on AWS, Google or both.

The price/performance debate: Industry experts and research show a balance between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Compute Engine (GCE). Google’s price per hour for the same instance specifications (more or less) is lower and it provides better performance results compared to AWS…