Grazed from TechTimes.  Author: Robert Lawson.

Cloud storage is now viewed as a commodity and the result is a bidding war between the major consumer and enterprise solutions offered by tech companies such as Google Drive, IBM SoftLayer, Dropbox, Box, Apple iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive and Web Services (AWS/S3). 

The mantra of the day is, "it’s in the cloud," a phrase that, several short years ago, would have held a completely different meaning to consumers. But because of the exponential shift in the worldwide information economy, the "consumerization of IT" has taken hold and placed a premium on value in terms of flexibility, scalability, reliability, cost and mobility…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Sue Poremba.

Cloud computing solutions may be growing in use, but a new survey of 400 global IT professionals by Enterprise Management Associates finds that cloud migration is fraught with failures and unexpected challenges. As InformationWeek reports, the survey reveals that companies are turning to cloud computing in order to keep up with technology innovations. Charles Babcock puts it simply: "The enterprise now wants the advantages of cloud computing, and IT needs to deliver." By migrating to the cloud, companies of all sizes — especially small and midsize businesses (SMBs) — are able to stay more competitive.

At the same time, however, the report adds that cloud migration appears to be overwhelming IT departments, which is leading to unexpected challenges such as monitoring and correcting problems on the fly. By not being able to meet these challenges, IT departments are seeing computing failures. "Unfortunately, many IT organizations lack the skills they need to perform these tasks," InformationWeek quotes from the report. "In part, this is because clouds represent an entirely new platform — from their pricing models to their operational metrics — and thus require entirely new expertise."…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Red Hat (RHT) is introducing a new incentive for enterprises to adopt its open source OpenStack cloud computing solutions. Now, the company will certify cloud-management solutions for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The certification offering comes as part of Red Hat’s OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, which the company calls "the world’s largest commercial ecosystem for OpenStack." Through the program, Red Hat will provide certifications for integrating channel partners’ cloud-management products into RHEL OpenStack.

Red Hat is pitching this initiative as a way for enterprises to take full advantage of the diversity of OpenStack solutions now available on the market without having to commit to a single vendor’s offerings. Instead, they will be able to adopt any of a wide range of the certified OpenStack management tools and integrate them into RHEL OpenStack…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Users of Dropbox for Business will now be able to share folders with colleagues without necessarily giving them rights to edit their content. Giving users read-only access to folders hasn’t been possible until now: Dropbox for Business users by default granted edit rights to the people they shared the folders with.

Dropbox makes this move as it faces heightening pressure both in the consumer and enterprise cloud storage and file share markets from rivals like Microsoft and Google. Dropbox hasn’t rolled out the new feature to all of its business customers, but admins can turn it on for their users. The company plans to gather feedback from early adopters and make it broadly available later on…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Jose Castano.

Technology is moving at a blistering pace. In today’s era of data-centric, complex environments where the lines between business and technology are becoming increasingly blurred, organizations are moving beyond virtualization to cloud computing to meet new challenges and keep up with the pace of change. Critical investments are needed to keep companies competitive, and chief among these technologies is cloud computing. In fact, Gartner expects cloud computing to become the bulk of new IT expenditure by 2016. The bottom line is, if you’re not already looking at cloud as an essential investment, you’re risking your survival into the next era of computing.

The emerging cloud-based model of computing requires systems that can provide very fast response times to huge volumes of requests. And, mission critical services such as healthcare, finance, transportation, public utilities, and other industries require very high levels of availability, security and other industrial-strength capabilities. Those attributes, qualities and requirements make the mainframe the ideal platform for such mission critical cloud-based workloads…

Grazed from GeekWire. Author: Todd Bishop.

Amazon is suing a former Amazon Web Services strategic partnerships manager, Zoltan Szabadi, alleging that his new job at Google Cloud Platform violates the terms of a non-compete agreement that he signed when he originally joined Amazon. The suit will be closely watched in the tech industry as a new test of the standard employment agreements that Amazon and some other large tech companies require employees to sign when they’re hired, restricting their activities if they leave.

The case also underscores the growing rivalry between Amazon and Google in the cloud. “Szabadi was directly and integrally involved with the marketing of Amazon’s cloud computing business to its partners and resellers, and played a significant role in developing Amazon’s business strategy and direction in this area,” the suit says. “Szabadi was involved in developing, implementing and managing Amazon Web Services’ strategy for many of its partners, and was the first point of contact for most partners who were considering working with Amazon.”…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Chris Carroll.

Can you name a single activity that consumes more IT staff time and presents more potential exposure to enterprise security risks than maintaining desktop and laptop computers across the enterprise? Despite the widespread use of remote desktop management tools, administrators must periodically descend upon offices and cubicles to upgrade or troubleshoot PCs.

Most organizations have grown accustomed to distributing PCs to employees, maintaining and upgrading them, and then replacing them every few years. But you can now disrupt this repetitive cycle and drive down the costs of acquiring and maintaining PCs for your connected workforce. Desktop virtualization is an increasingly popular approach that allows the enterprise to reduce desktop IT costs, improve operational efficiency, and increase control over desktop computing environments…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

My last post noted that the IT industry appears to suffer from cloud computing ennui, as the number of Google searches for the term over the past two years has dropped significantly. I also said that other evidence indicates that many IT users appear to have put cloud computing in the "done and dusted" category despite not really understanding it very well.

I went on to say that, far from being completed, cloud computing growth is accelerating. The biggest challenge to IT is that end users, frustrated with the leisurely pace of internal IT group cloud implementations, will solve their problems by placing applications in public cloud computing environments…

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Microsoft has added encryption safeguards to the Outlook.com webmail service and to the OneDrive cloud storage service, in part to better protect these consumer products from government snoops. “Our goal is to provide even greater protection for data across all the great Microsoft services you use and depend on every day. This effort also helps us reinforce that governments use appropriate legal processes, not technical brute force, if they want access to that data,” Matt Thomlinson, vice president, Trustworthy Computing Security, at Microsoft wrote in a blog post.

The move follows similar ones from other cloud computing providers. For example, Google announced end-to-end encryption for Gmail in April, including protection for email messages while they travel among Google data centers. It recently announced similar encryption for its Google Drive cloud storage service…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Maginatics Inc., an emerging leader in distributed enterprise storage solutions, today announced that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named the Maginatics Cloud Storage Platform as a 2014 Cloud Computing Excellence Award winner. The Cloud Computing Excellence Award, presented by Cloud Computing magazine, recognizes companies that have most effectively leveraged cloud computing in their efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market.

"Recognizing leaders in the advancement of cloud computing, TMC is proud to announce Maginatics Cloud Storage Platform as a recipient of the Fourth Annual Cloud Computing Excellence Award," said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. "Maginatics is being honored for their achievement in bringing innovation and excellence to the market, while leveraging the latest technology trends."…