Month: September 2015

Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Duncan Macrae.

With the proliferation of cloud computing, SaaS could be a good option for your business, but it’s not for everyone. Ian Finlay, COO, Abiquo, discusses how to tell if it’s right for you. Although cloud computing is still in its first flush of youth, it’s continually evolving at a fast pace and has made a large impact on the modern business – as has its cousin, cloud-based software as a service (SaaS).

Many organisations are actively considering adopting the cloud, with Gartner predicting cloud computing as one of the ten strategic technology trends for 2015. Global cloud services spending reached $56.6bn last year and will grow to more than $127bn in 2018, according to recent data from International Data Corporation (IDC)…

Grazed from CIO-Today. Author: Shirley Siluk.

A new team feature for easier collaboration on Dropbox is rolling out to both Basic and Pro users over the coming week, the company said Monday. The feature, available today, is designed for the more than 60 percent of users who primarily employ Dropbox for work.
Among the new collaboration tools is a team folder option that creates a single, centralized location for members of a work group to "meet" and share documents online.

Each team member will have automatic access to any new files added to that team folder. Dropbox’s new team feature also enables users to create groups within work teams, and to add new members to those groups at any time. Adding new members automatically gives them access to all the documents in that group’s folders…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio-today.com/article/index.php?story_id=112001UV5F3K

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

Red Hat, the company behind a flavor of the Linux operating system popular with businesses, should hit $2 billion in revenue this year, chief executive Jim Whitehurst told analysts on the company’s second quarter earnings call Monday. But how much of the pie will come from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), OpenShift, or other products running in the cloud is an open question.

Some history: Red Hat RHT 0.00% which sells support and service for RHEL and other software, hit the $1 billion mark in 2012 making it what some called the first billion-dollar open-source company. And now, Red Hat, like every other tech company, is managing a shift in customer workloads from on-premises facilities to cloud deployment where the customer may not own or operate the servers running its workloads…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Katherine Noyes.

Netflix, Tinder and other major websites were affected for a time Sunday by glitches in Amazon Web Services’ Northern Virginia facility, offering a cautionary lesson to other companies that rely on the cloud service for mission-critical capabilities. The problem manifested itself primarily in the form of higher-than-normal error rates. Sites affected reportedly also included IMDb and Amazon’s Instant Video and Books websites.

At the heart of the snafu were issues with AWS’s DynamoDB database, but it spread to include other services such as EC2, the mobile-focused Cognito service and the CloudWatch monitoring service, according to the AWS Service Health Dashboard. "The root cause began with a portion of our metadata service within DynamoDB," AWS explained in a dashboard update posted at 4:52 a.m. PDT on Sunday…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jaikumar Vijayan.

With the number of paying organizations using Google Drive crossing the one million mark earlier this year, Google appears to be ramping up its efforts to bolster the cloud storage service’s security features. The cloud services giant introduced new features on Sept. 21 that are intended to give organizations more visibility and control over business files stored and shared by workers in Google Drive.

The new features add retention and legal hold capabilities to the existing collection of e-discovery capabilities available with Google Drive. The new functions are similar to those available from Google for email and chat, and they’re designed to help businesses fulfill their legal obligations pertaining to data archiving and removal…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Pajaree Suntudkarn.

We are hearing news about wearables and connected devices every day. The Wi-Fi-enabled fridge and a number of Wi-Fi-enabled household items have already hit the stores. Coca-Cola unveiled internet-connected vending machine while Burger King—the Coca-Cola company—installed over 2,000 internet-connected soda fountains called Coca-Cola Freestyle all over the US.

So, there is no doubt the estimation of over 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020 could well be true. The Internet of Things (IoT) is on the verge of revolutionizing the way people live, but what does it mean for businesses? IoT brings about a paradigm shift in the way brands establish and maintain the relationships with customers…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

CloudBolt Software recently added a host of new features to its flagship cloud management platform, including support for new cloud platforms, software-defined networking and container services. CloudBolt customers can now virtualize their networks with access to VMware NSX directly through the platform, with additional support for Docker and Kubernetes for app containerization.

The company has also added support for IBM SoftLayer, HP Helion and CenturyLink Cloud, raising the total number of cloud platforms compatible with CloudBolt to thirteen, according to the announcement. “In the past year, we have seen a marked increase in the number of enterprises that want to take advantage of the benefits of SDN and container technologies,” said Jon Mittelhauser, CEO of CloudBolt, in a statement…

Grazed from InsideHPC. Author: Editorial Staff.

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Gemma Church reports that the wind energy industry is increasingly looking to the cloud and to modeling and simulation to solve its engineering problems. Wind power is a staple renewable energy source that is often described as relying on mature technology. In many ways, this assumption is correct as wind farms pop up across the globe in increasingly diverse and remote locations. But a lot of innovation is going on behind the scenes.

Many difficulties remain with the way we build and deploy wind turbines, which raises doubts over the profitability of such systems. The physical size of the turbines has increased and this makes such systems more complicated, increases the costs, and adds significant financial risk to projects that can cost hundreds of millions of pounds to complete…

Grazed from BusinessCloudNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing has been hailed as the strongest technology investment sector for the third time in a row in a survey that gauges confidence among capital, private and growth equity speculators. The cloud sector came out strongest in the 2015 Global Venture Capital Confidence Survey compiled by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

The study quizzes 200 speculators on the general venture capital environment as well as other market factors such as conditions in industries and across regions. While biopharmaceuticals and robotics reported the highest levels of confidence growth, and the Internet of Things (IoT) was recognised for the first time by the study, cloud computing was the top tech trend for the third year in a row…

Grazed from SiliconRepublic. Author: Editorial Staff.

Following the first anniversary of the publication of ISO 27018 – an international privacy standard governing the processing of personal data in the cloud — Mason Hayes & Curran looks at how successful the new standard has been and the challenges customers and cloud providers are facing following its adoption.

Last summer, the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) published ISO 27018, the first privacy-specific international standard for cloud services. The new standard specifies the roles of a data controller and a data processor in maintaining the security and privacy of personally identifiable information (PII) stored in a public cloud environment…