Grazed from ITWorldCanada.

The other day I had a problem with my iPhone — a 4S, with 64GB running iOS 8.1 — so here’s my story: First, some context. I have 420 apps taking 22.78GB storage and 4,000 songs taking 7.82GB of storage on my phone, and a few miscellaneous items such as photos and calendar data. I use iTunes on my PC as an intermediary, and iCloud.

I am still waiting in line for an iPhone 6 Plus from my local cable provider. I am an IT strategy/management consultant, and my focus is currently on cloud computing and its impact on systems. I am neither a bits-and-bytes technical specialist nor am I a programmer. I do try to keep my apps up-to-date, however, and I sync and backup my iPhone frequently (sometimes daily)…

Grazed from BSMInfo. Author: Megan Williams.

Answering your clients’ needs in responsible ways means that no one can ignore the benefits that cloud computing can bring to the healthcare space. With all the benefits of flexibility, location independence, and cost-savings that cloud computing carries with it, the risks that it poses to the industry can’t be understated, especially when you consider the sheer number of regulatory violations that can occur. Thankfully, with advancements in the sector, staying HIPAA compliant while reaping the benefits of cloud computing is very much possible.

Data Collaboration

Sharing files outside of the healthcare space is simple, especially with the proliferation of services like Dropbox and Google Drive. Within healthcare’s boundaries though, HIPAA compliance can become a huge challenge, especially for business associates like VARs and other IT solutions providers. Citrix has introduced a new and helpful offering to the field…

Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Adam Ewing.

A decade ago, telephone pioneer Ericsson (ERIC) managed to reinvent itself as a maker of network equipment, selling pricey hardware to telecommunications companies struggling to keep up with mobile subscription growth. Suddenly, the Swedish company was more relevant than it had been since the 1920s. Now, with its biggest customers slowing the pace of their expansion or shifting more of their data crunching to the cloud, Ericsson is trying to follow.

About 40 percent of the world’s wireless calls and data move through Ericsson’s network hardware. The company, with a market valuation of $39 billion, sells to and often operates the equipment for carriers including AT&T (T) and Vodafone (VOD). Ericsson’s revenue fell in three of its past five quarters, and analysts are projecting that the company will see a third straight year with little or no sales growth…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Microsoft (MSFT) on Thursday announced it has bought Aorato, an enterprise security solutions provider. According to Microsoft’s blog, the Israeli-based company leverages machine learning to detect suspicious activity on a company’s network. The Redmond, Washington-based software giant did not disclose the terms of the acquisition.

Tech Crunch today, however, reported that its sources put the deal at approximately $200 million in July, which is when the two companies began talking. "We are making this acquisition to give customers a new level of protection against threats through better visibility into their identity infrastructure," said Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of Cloud and Enterprise Marketing at Microsoft, in the blog post…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-mergers-and-acquisitions/microsoft-buys-security-solutions-provider-aorato-hybrid-cl

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

There’s a huge change going on in the tech industry that will create a whole new crop of winners and losers: cloud computing. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently declared that Microsoft was already in with the winners. "We absolutely caught the trend … it’s no longer up for debate, whether we get the cloud," he said. One reason he gave to back up his claim: Microsoft’s cloud business is on track to be a $4.5 billion business. But sources tell Business Insider that this $4.5 billion number isn’t as straightforward as it seems…

The Dirty Secret

The $4-billion-mark is a major milestone for cloud computing companies. Pure cloud company Salesforce.com just hit over $4 billion in revenues in its last fiscal year and expects to hit $5.3 billion at the end of its current fiscal year. It took it 15 years and a major acquisition, marketing automation company Exact Target…

Read more from the source @ http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-cloud-business-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-2014-11#ixzz3IzVGfPZ3

Grazed from ARS Technica. Author: Peter Bright.

At its AWS re:Invent cloud computing conference today, Amazon announced AWS Lambda, a way of performing computing in the cloud in response to events without the need for virtual machines, compute instances, or any kind of administration. The usual model when performing computation in cloud services is to create some kind of a persistent application, such as a Web server on a virtual machine.

Sometimes the developer manages everything on the VM. Sometimes aspects of this are abstracted away—Azure’s Web roles, for example, leave management of the base operating system and server up to Microsoft, letting developers focus solely on the Web content—but those persistent deployments, with their time-based billing, have become the basic model of cloud computing…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Dan Kobialka.

Avnet Technology Solutions (AVT) has unveiled a cloud toolset to help its American and Canadian managed service provider (MSP) and value-added reseller (VAR) partners "govern, consolidate, manage and track cloud accounts across multiple cloud providers." The Phoenix-based IT solutions distributor this week launched the Avnet Cloud Toolset (ACT) to help partners support their Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM SoftLayer customers.

Avnet said ACT gives its partners better visibility and usage data across various cloud platforms providing insights on how to optimize cloud resources. ACT provides Avnet partners with:…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

Now that it’s become fairly routine for IT organizations to manage smartphones and tablets via the cloud, starting this week Hewlett-Packard is looking to apply that concept more broadly via the new HP Touchpoint Manager service that can manage workstations, tablets, PCs and smartphones running Android, iOS or Windows.

Aimed at small to medium businesses, a subscription to the HP Touchpoint Manager service is available for free for the next six months to any organization that signs up for a basic server agreement. A professional version of the service with additional functionality is available for $5 per user, per month for the first six months…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Jordan Novet.

Amazon Web Services isn’t only announcing new services at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week. Of course, it’s adding new low-level instances — slices of physical servers — in its market-leading public cloud. “The new C4 instance is the highest-performance one that you can get,” Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, told the crowd at the conference.

And the instance results from a tight partnership with Intel, which is giving Amazon an exclusive on the new Xeon E5-2666 v3 chips, said Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel’s data center group. Here’s the lineup of the new C4 instances:…

Read more from the source @ http://venturebeat.com/2014/11/13/aws-c4/

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Jason Bystrak.

I recently read a success story about Computer Services Inc. (CSI), a financial services company worth $213 million that acquired a managed services practice two years ago, and is now reporting record revenue growth. What I found most intriguing about CSI’s story wasn’t the immediate success it experienced from selling managed services. It was the initial struggle it had selling cloud services.

What makes CSI’s experience particularly noteworthy is that the company had so many standout strengths: nearly 50 years in business, a staff of 1,100 employees and unmatched expertise in the financial services market. Many smaller IT service providers would assume that it’s these traits — which they don’t possess — that are the reasons why they’re not experiencing success selling cloud services…