Author: David

Grazed from CloudReviews. Author: Editorial Staff.

As more and more companies are migrating from traditional software systems to cloud-based SAAS alternatives, the competition among SAAS providers has increased tremendously. In an article on ZDNet, writer Kevin Kwang says the cut-throat level of competition in the SAAS space has resulted in a lot of providers sacrificing profitability in order to meet their customer acquisition targets.

This is not very unexpected. The benefits of SAAS largely outweigh the cons and consequently, most of the traditional enterprise software providers are now focusing on offering a SAAS alternative to their products. This has been the primary reason to the heightened level of competition…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud-based Data Protection for NetApp is the latest addition to Arrow Electronics’ ArrowSphere cloud aggregation marketplace, as part of a strategic partnership between Artisan Infrastructure and Arrow that was announced today.

According to Brian Hierholzer, CEO of Artisan, an Austin, Texas-based wholesale-only provider of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), this is the first partnership between the two companies. The new partnership enables Arrow partners to sell the service — which includes NetApp data protection infrastructure and a suite of services to speed time to market, simplify billing and contracts, and reduce management overhead — to their enterprise and to small- and medium-sized business (SMB) customers…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloudian, the market-leading cloud storage software company, today announced that its Cloudian Connector for Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager 2.1 has been verified as Citrix Ready. The Citrix Ready program helps customers identify third-party solutions that are recommended to enhance virtualization, networking and cloud computing solutions from Citrix Systems, Inc. The new Cloudian Connector completed a rigorous verification process to ensure full compatibility with the newly announced Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager 2.1.

The Citrix Ready program makes it easy for customers to identify complementary products and solutions that can enhance Citrix environments. Customers can be confident that the Cloudian Connector has successfully passed a series of tests established by Citrix, and can be trusted to work effectively with Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager 2.1 in order to offer a turnkey on-premise cloud storage solution that gives enterprises a small start option with full S3 compatibility…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

The warnings keep coming that malware increasingly will affect mobile devices, and one of the ways organizations are keeping their devices safe is by turning to the cloud. Mobile threat prevention services are coming onto the market, and the latest one is from FireEye, which has announced the upcoming launch of FireEye Mobile Threat Prevention for Android devices.

The cloud-based platform is slated to be available before the year is out, ready to protect the estimated 1 billion Android devices and 1 million Android apps. FireEye’s platform was designed to detect and report mobile threats, but it aims to do so in a unique way. Instead of relying on malware signatures, FireEye Mobile Threat Prevention "detonates Android apps within the FireEye Multi-Vector Virtual Execution (MVX) engine to provide automated mobile threat assessment."…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud Technology Partners, the leader in transforming businesses with cloud solutions, today announced the public beta availability of PaaSLane™, a software solution that dramatically reduces the time and effort required to optimize applications to run in the cloud. Traditionally, cloud migration assessments are a labor intensive, time-consuming process that can take months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. PaaSLane automates the process and ensures its success by continually evaluating application source code for issues that may affect performance, stability, security, and scalability in specific cloud platforms.

"As cloud adoption accelerates, our customers are looking for ways to automate assessing for cloud readiness across hundreds of applications. Software development organizations need an effective way to clearly identify issues and estimate the effort required to optimize applications for the cloud," said John Treadway, senior vice president at Cloud Technology Partners. "PaaSLane finds issues and estimates the time required to address them in a matter of minutes, giving management an objective measure of cloud readiness across application portfolios, while providing development teams with a roadmap to start fixing them immediately."…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

In another sign that the stakes have been raised above and beyond basic cloud infrastructure services, Savvis is adding big data to its portfolio in the form of managed versions of the Cloudera and MapR Hadoop distributions.

A statement from the company, a unit of CenturyLink, positioned Savvis Big Data Solutions as a full suite of services to give big business and government customers access to the compute, storage and high-bandwidth network capabilities to handle high-power analytics applications as well as the analytics themselves…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Kevin Chew.

Even if you’re not a technologist, I want you to understand that hybrid cloud computing is all about choice: Choice about where your data resides. Choice about how your data is managed. Choice about where your data processing actually happens. Choices can be used:

• to make economic decisions to lower the total cost of ownership of data,
• to maximize your quality of services, or
• to comply with regulatory constraints on data sovereignty.

In today’s environment, vendors are moving fast. If we wind the clock back a year, the main cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Amazon, Terremark, or Rackspace were fairly proprietary, closed environments. But they all quickly realized that IT heterogeneity is what customers want…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Market research firm Infonetics Research released excerpts from its 2013 UC Strategies and Vendor Leadership: North American Enterprise Survey, which explores enterprises’ plans for unified communications (UC), including cloud deployments, and their perceptions of UC vendors.

“The biggest change we’re seeing in unified communication deployments is the adoption of video,” notes Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics Research. “Businesses have been implementing more mobility into their UC architectures over the past year and now are looking toward videoconferencing to help drive further productivity.”…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Piyush Pant.

Cloud computing has transformed the way IT resources are utilized, but the externalization of infrastructures and applications has brought with it the perception of increased risk, which seem to swirl around visibility and control. This perception of increased risk has prevented the adoption of cloud solutions in a number of industries, so the key question is how to make decisions about moving your organization’s IT solutions to the cloud while considering the risks involved. Let’s review the key advantages of cloud computing:

* Economies of Scale: Traditional IT and IT outsourcing runs on infrastructure that is costly to create and maintain. In contrast, the cornerstone of cloud is cost efficiency, as the cloud does not require a capital investment to set up the infrastructure, or an in-house team of IT experts. Moreover, an organization pays only for the storage capacity it consumes, meaning enterprises can readily scale up and down processing and storage needs without spending a lot on overhead. Organizations end up saving time and critical resources, and can transform IT into a strategic team that focuses on more innovative initiatives…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Leonel Navarro.

Security in the cloud has been a hot topic for a long time now, yet many individuals and organizations fail to realize the implications of security, while others have not performed enough due diligence to seize the necessary solution. Cloud computing requires controls for addressing threats that jeopardize confidentiality, integrity and availability. The purpose of this article is to delineate existing cloud security implications and determine which cloud archetype is best suited for a particular business case.

Security implications change based on cloud use case and the chosen cloud archetype. The most common cloud computing use cases relate to infrastructure, since organizations leverage from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to migrate data centers to a virtualized environment. However, two more archetypes promise even more value when it comes to applications. These fall into Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and can be leveraged from cloud provider web services and even fully functional applications through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). To better understand the security implications, let’s focus on the infrastructure and applications use cases…