Author: David

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Grazed from The Var Guy.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Satya Nadella, head of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise business and CEO Steve Ballmer’s potential successor, seems receptive to media questions. So, here are 10 of them from The VAR Guy.

Dear Satya: The VAR Guy heard a rumor that you’re receptive to media questions about Microsoft‘s (MSFT) cloud and enterprise business. (Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.) Rather than use the proper channels (does The VAR Guy ever?), our resident blogger figured he’d simply share his questions with the broader world. So what #MSFTCloud questions are on The VAR Guy’s mind? Here are 10 of them.  Before we get to public cloud stuff, let’s start with on-premises and enterprise questions.

1. Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V: It sounds like Microsoft has good momentum. But rivals like VMware (VMW) are pushing beyond server virtualization to the left (software defined storage) and to the right (software defined networking). Add it all up and you get the software defined data center (at least in VMware’s mind). What’s Microsoft’s take on software-defined everything?…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Karen Goulart.

Simplifying IT service delivery doesn’t mean going on autopilot Offering services should be intuitive and easily self-served, yes, but there must also be established mechanisms to fix problems or improve upon services, stresses Ian Clayton, senior vice president of operations at U.K.-based G2G3.

A common method for improvement is something IT organizations generally lack, he said — in part, because they do not regularly engage the business. "IT brokers need an engagement mechanism, so they can listen to changing needs and they can convert them into [the technology]," Clayton said…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Growing realization of the fact that optimum leveraging of cloud computing requires adoption of multiple approaches to cloud is resulting in healthy demand for cloud infrastructure services ranging from public, private to hybrid cloud infrastructure services. Public cloud infrastructure service, also known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), is emerging into a critical business model crucial to survival of enterprises in the 21st century.

IaaS provides the prefect platform to cost-effectively optimize enterprise work processes by allowing essential IT resources such as storage, processing power, security and network bandwidth to be hired and/or rented as a service over the internet. In addition to benefits such as flexibility, scalability, low costs, reduced investments and increased security, improvements in SLAs are playing instrumental roles in driving adoption by improving customer satisfaction. Currently, over 90% of enterprises express satisfaction with the ability of IaaS to deliver expected benefits and meet business goals…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

With all of the hype surrounding hybrid cloud computing, we may need to take a step back to take a look at the market’s growth from another angle — a more philosophical approach. Rackspace Strategy Director Scott Sanchez aimed to redirect our focus in a blog post on how hybrid cloud computing is like happiness, which may be a stretch in some minds, but maybe he’s onto something.

"Everything you do, every emotion that enters your mind, every interaction you have, you have a choice to make – to be happy, or not," Sanchez said. "It’s quite simple once you realize that. At first, it is work, and you’ll make the wrong choices. But eventually it just clicks and starts to feel right."…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Nathan Roberson.

With so much of our personal lives “on the cloud,” so to speak, it seems there is a slow shuffle toward this ethereal space in the business world. But why? Why would we trust the Google+ images cloud to be in charge of storing precious pictures of our newborns, puppies, wedding days, and first days of kindergarten but not trust them with an excel spreadsheet?

It seems the fear is based more in irrational thinking than in good business sense. In the work world, we tend to stick with what works, even years after it’s been outdated. Take a look around—is there a fax machine in your office? Exactly. There are at least ten other better ways to get information back and forth to people than a fax machine, yet they still sell, and we’re still using them. “Faxes” can now be sent via smart phone, and for phablets (phone-tablets) like the Samsung Note II, notes can be written, documents can be signed, and more, making the facsimile totally obsolete. But even those of us with a Note II in hand are still guilty of faxing the old fashioned way at least once in a while…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Linda Musthaler.

Any time a company decides it wants to host its applications in the cloud, or use a SaaS application where the company’s data will be stored in the cloud, the IT security professionals have to ask a series of questions. Can we encrypt the data? If so, who will have access to the keys? How will we perform key rotation? Can we sort and search on data that is encrypted? Is the cloud vendor using a proprietary encryption technology that prevents us from moving our data to another vendor? If we use 10 SaaS applications, will we have to manage 10 different sets of encryption keys?

These questions are tough enough to answer when the data and encryption technologies are in a company’s own data center where it has complete control over everything. Things get much more complicated when the company has to factor in third party hosts like Amazon and Rackspace or SaaS providers like Google Apps, Workday and Salesforce…

Grazed from TheDrum. Author: Tony Walford.

An M&A story I saw on The Drum earlier this week (Wednesday) really got me thinking about something – something someone said back in the 1990s, at the birth of the internet. This week’s story ran thus: Glasgow-based cloud computing specialists Iomart Group announced its acquisition of Backup Technology Ltd (BTL), a Leeds-based data recovery provider, for £23m (£19m in cash, £3.5m in shares).

But why does it matter to anyone else? Almost 20 years ago someone at Sun Microsystems – I can’t recall exactly who – said that the desktop PC was doomed, and that everyone would access files and programs through a “dumb” terminal. They wouldn’t need an expensive machine with a hard drive full of software; everything could be located on remote servers…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: HP.

The convergence of mobile technology, social media, big data, and the advent of cloud computing are driving a dramatic shift in the ways enterprises deploy and use IT. This shift requires new means and approaches for IT to help organizations accelerate progress towards solving their most pressing challenges—including speeding innovation, increasing efficiencies, enhancing agility, and improving financial management.

Today, many IT organizations have reached a high level of maturity with regard to virtualization and are starting to look into the automation, flexibility, and self-service capabilities that a cloud solution can provide. They see that this strategy provides them opportunities to develop and deploy new business strategies and delivery models that can enhance their ability to survive and thrive in a demanding and unpredictable world—a world where the cloud is a key component of their ability to accelerate innovation, to become significantly more agile and efficient, and to optimize costs across the enterprise..

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Joe Panettieri.

I’ve been waiting for this: The MSP market is finally converging with the OpenStack cloud market. An example: Blue Box is making noise as an MSP that allows customers to deploy hosted OpenStack private clouds. So where do managed services enter the picture?

Blue Box says its platform manages the underlying OpenStack orchestration, including monitoring and release management, allowing customers to focus on using OpenStack instead of managing it. OpenStack is an open source platform for building public and private clouds…