Month: November 2015

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Anthony Spadafora.

In an effort to improve its cloud offerings, HP Enterprise (HPE) has just announced a partnership with Microsoft. HPE will be working alongside Microsoft to implement its cloud computing platform Microsoft Azure to handle its enterprise cloud services. Under the new agreement, Microsoft will become a preferred public cloud provider of HPE and HPE will likewise become a preferred provider of Microsoft Azure services.

What brought these two companies together is that they share similar beliefs in regard to a hybrid approach for enterprises. HPE and Microsoft both see a chance to simplify hybrid infrastructure for their consumers through this partnership. HPE is planning to close down its own public cloud service next year which will allow Microsoft to step in and fill the void experienced by HPE’s current customers…

Grazed from InfoSecurity. Author: Eldar Turvey.

The Big Switch is a book by Nicholas Carr, first published in 2008, that – while making many arguments about the social and moral implications of the modern digital world – drew a strong comparison between cloud computing and the electricity grid. Before the arrival of grids, factories, farms and even some households had their own electricity generators. Each generator owner paid for their own upkeep, maintenance and fuel, and were responsible for their own power supply – and therefore carried 100% of their own risk.

Clearly, this was in many ways inefficient, insecure and unreliable. And so, electricity grids were created. These broke the siloes of access and served local areas, towns and eventually countries. Costs were shared and maintenance and supply were centralized and everyone benefited from better and greater resources being available to all…

Grazed from LifeZette. Author: Dave Taylor.

Created any documents on your computer recently? Updated a spreadsheet while on a flight to Seattle, or edited a short movie for your child’s presentation? How about your smartphone: Taken any photos lately that you’d like to keep forever? Every single one of those files is as risk even as you sit and read this.

Storage devices and memory cards are much more reliable, but the problem is that we humans are still, well, human, and we spill coffee on our laptops, drop our cellphones and break them, and even lose tablets on airplanes in the hustle and bustle of getting off the flight and into the arms of loved ones. It’s inevitable, just as it’s inevitable with computers you’ll power up at some point and see an error message telling you that the hard drive is kaput…

Read more from the source @ http://www.lifezette.com/popzette/benefits-of-cloud-computing/

Grazed from CBR. Author: Editorial Staff.

Huawei and Telefonica are collaborating on a global scale to promote migration to the cloud. The two companies will work together to help businesses to migrate their servers to the cloud, using Telefonica’s data centres for computing, storage and backup services. The services are being made available without infrastructure investment and on a pay-per-use basis.

Huawei’s role in the partnership will see it deploy Telefonica’s Open Cloud service, which is based on OpenStack, in eight of its partner’s data centres. Telefonica will tap into Huawei’s knowledge in the public cloud market in China. The collaborative services will be rolled out firstly in Brazil, Mexico and China during the first quarter of 2016, with five additional locations later in the year.

Grazed from Computing. Author: Peter Gothard.

The average company in Europe is running 987 cloud services, with the vast majority coming under the heading of shadow IT. So says director of EMEA marketing at Skyhigh Networks, Nigel Hawthorn, after presenting the results of a survey carried out by his company today. Speaking at Computing’s Enterprise Security and Risk Management 2015 conference, Hawthorn asserted that "the number[s] of sanctioned IT is enormously outweighed by shadow IT".

"For these, the first thing you need to do is ask ‘What’s going on?’," he said. Describing the survey, Hawthorn said: "It’s not asking people for their opinion, it’s finding out how much traffic is coming at [companies] from around Europe over six-month periods." Hawthorn said the cloud services being installed by end users are "not consumer – these are corporate", but many continue sending and receiving data over the weekend outside office hours. "How are you managing your risks 24/7?" he asked delegates…

Read more from the source @ http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2436738/your-company-is-running-987-cloud-services-and-you-dont-know-about-most-of-them

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Jennifer Klostermann.

Amazon has just launched its fourth renewable energy program, increasing its data centers’ use of green power thanks to a new wind farm to be built in rural Paulding County, Ohio. Starting in May 2017, this green plant will generate 320,000-megawatt hours of electricity yearly, specifically to provide power to Amazon’s cloud data centers. But investment in green technology isn’t the only way IT giants are promoting a greener world – the Cloud and Big Data are making their own meaningful impact.

Cloud as a Green Solution

1) Pay for Use: Cloud infrastructure is typically pay-as-you-go, encouraging users to consume only what they need and turn off resources not in operation. This encourages both energy and resource efficiency as users only consume what they need…

Grazed from EconoTimes. Author: Jungwoo Ryoo.

You’re sitting at home minding your own business when you get a call from your credit card’s fraud detection unit asking if you’ve just made a purchase at a department store in your city. It wasn’t you who bought expensive electronics using your credit card – in fact, it’s been in your pocket all afternoon. So how did the bank know to flag this single purchase as most likely fraudulent?

Credit card companies have a vested interest in identifying financial transactions that are illegitimate and criminal in nature. The stakes are high. According to the Federal Reserve Payments Study, Americans used credit cards to pay for 26.2 billion purchases in 2012. The estimated loss due to unauthorized transactions that year was US$6.1 billion…

Grazed from CIO-Today. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

The next evolution of VCE’s Vblock System has emerged with a little help from Cisco. This version integrates the networking giant’s Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, or ACI, to help developers build secure, flexible data centers that can adapt more rapidly — and with less effort — to business and app requirements as they change.

That sounds like a tall order but it’s the potential fruit that the partnership between Cisco and VCE could deliver by tapping into software-defined innovations to drive operational efficiencies. The proposed endgame: to help customers be more successful in a competitive cloud era…

Grazed from CloudWards. Author: Ritika Tiwari.

According to a research done by CompTIA, more than 90 percent of businesses are now using cloud technology. Another research paper done by IBM reveals that by the end of 2015, half of the world’s video games will be played on the cloud. While most of the businesses are moving towards the cloud mainly to cut costs, there are certain companies which are trying to bring something new to the table with the help of cloud technology.

In fact, “The Power of Cloud,” an IBM Institute of Business Value, found in a survey that 16 percent of organizations are using cloud tech to innovate and come up with something new. Cloud technology has undoubtedly become a major part of the IT industry today and more and more companies are embracing it. Yes, there are concerns about:..

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudwards.net/cloud-computing-services/

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alan R. Earls.

Each year, a new crop of startups enters the ever-active cloud computing market. Given the tough competition, most won’t go far. But some of these cloud computing startups will thrive, prosper and maybe even go on to change the technology landscape. The odds seem good that in 2016 we’ll see some new cloud vendors begin to have a real impact — and perhaps enough market traction for IT decision makers to take a closer look. Here are five cloud computing startups that caught analysts’ attention this year, and are worth following in 2016.

Velostrata

Colm Keegan, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), an analyst firm in Milford, Mass., says his organization has been focusing on how traditional businesses are incorporating cloud and how those spending decisions will flow through the industry…

Read more from the source @ http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/Five-cloud-computing-startups-to-watch-heading-into-2016