Author: David

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

SRA International, Inc., a leading provider of IT solutions and professional services to government organizations, today launched Stratify(TM), a secure cloud computing solution. The Stratify solution allows federal agencies to address cloud security and compliance gaps by delivering a practical cloud-centric architecture that enables mission success. SRA will be discussing the benefits of Stratify at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit on Sept. 10 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C.

While agencies across the federal government recognize the operational efficiencies that can be achieved by migrating applications or workloads to the cloud, chief information officers and chief security officers remain concerned about the risks of losing control and visibility of their systems and data. Stratify(TM) provides the architecture, tools and processes to help agencies quickly implement cloud security and reporting mechanisms while maintaining cyber situational awareness of their data, leveraging existing enterprise IT investments and meeting compliance requirements…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

The first thing I had to ask Paul Maritz, CEO of the VMware spin-off Pivotal, was whether he had received any interesting calls from the Microsoft board on the heels of Steve Ballmer’s departure. Not surprisingly, Maritz said he would go "nowhere near" that question. But here’s why he is considered a potential successor: During his14-year stint at Microsoft, Maritz oversaw the development and marketing of some of the company’s most successful products, including Windows 95, Office, and SQL Server, and later presided over four years of impressive growth as CEO of VMware.

Maritz comes under the category of "visionary" CEO, a classification few would associate with Ballmer. But vision is a tricky thing. With Pivotal, Maritz is building a PaaS (platform as a service) for developing the next generation of applications — infused with big data and the onslaught of events that will flow from the Internet of things. The release date for Pivotal One, which will combine Cloud Foundry and Hadoop among other technologies, is set for the end of 2013. Is Pivotal too far ahead of its time? Or is the moment just right for building a platform to underlie massively interconnected, highly adaptable Internet applications?…

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

A March 2013 survey of 625 technical professionals across a broad section of organisations on their adoption of cloud computing has highlighted the importance of what it calls ‘cloud maturity’. That’s a measure of the experience organisations have with cloud computing, and the greater it is the more benefits they are able to derive from it and the better they are able to handle challenges of security compliance and governance.

The survey was undertaken by RightScale, a provider of cloud management technology. It concludes: "bottom line: as organisations move forward with cloud adoption and gain experience with cloud technologies, they’re able to unlock increasingly greater levels of value for their organisations."…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: GetApp.

SaaS applications are a double-edged sword. On one hand, they offer benefits like low cost and anywhere computing. However, their siloed nature can be a problem for management and productivity. This week we will take a look at a solution that lets companies and employees manage all of their corporate SaaS applications in one place to provide a seamless work environment and enhanced user functionality. Bitium is a SaaS app that lets you access, manage, and control SaaS apps in your organization. In this Bitium Review, we will look at its features and interface, and see how it can be of use to you.

An Operating System to Manage Your Apps

According to its website, Bitium functions like a SaaS operating system. Much like an operating system, Bitium is a place to manage and control different SaaS apps from a single application. Thus, you do not need multiple logins or credentials; by using Bitium’s Single-Sign-On functionality, you can check your social media accounts, send important emails, administer your website, or respond to customer service requests through SaaS customer relationship apps, without having to remember any of the underlying passwords. More importantly, from a management standpoint, administrators can easily assign and revoke employee access to SaaS apps from one place and save substantial time onboarding and offboarding employees. They can also view reports on app usage, integrate with authentication systems like Active Directory or Google Apps, and organize apps into groups for convenient management…

Grazed from 24x7PressRelease.  Author: PR Announcement.

Your request to automate the company’s AP process has been approved. Now how do you go about finding the right provider to match your company’s needs? Corcentric, a leading provider of Accounts Payable automation and e-invoicing solutions, shows how to distinguish true SaaS providers from the imposters in its most recent blog. The Corcentric blog is a knowledge center for accounts payable professionals to explore automation best practices along with the latest trends and news in financial process automation.

SaaS solutions have become prevalent in a variety of disciplines including sales, HR, marketing, and accounting. The Corcentric blog defines what SaaS is and how prevalent it is in most people’s everyday lives. It then details what the advantages are to implementing SaaS rather than in-house solutions. According to the blog, the real challenge is trying to distinguish between true SaaS providers and those that purport to be SaaS, but are, in fact, imposters…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Louis Columbus.

Gaining insights into cloud computing hiring trends is invaluable to understanding the competitive landscape and direction of new application and platform development. It’s also invaluable for any company looking to recruit cloud computing professionals. For qualified job seekers, staying on top of these trends can and does lead to well-timed career moves, higher salaries and greater chances for professional growth.

Real-time business intelligence of the talent marketplace is a fascinating area to track. Wanted Analytics is a leader in this field, and their analytics applications and advanced data sets are used for competitive analysis, sourcing new hires, analyzing employment and economic trends, and lead generation. I’ve never worked for Wanted Analytics and they’re not a client. They were kind enough to provide a test-drive account for this analysis. The Wanted Analytics platform is based on 25,000 employment sources that together account for 950 million job posts.  Here are the key take-aways from an analysis of cloud computing job opportunities:…

Grazed from Telepprise.  Author: Marko Spremo.

Transitioning to cloud computing, applications, storage, and infrastructure makes IT management’s job infinitely easier. While many business leaders focus on the cloud’s low cost or on its flexibility, IT managers know its real benefit: The cloud eliminates most of the hardest parts of their jobs.

High Stability Rates

A rate of 99.9 percent reliability may sound like an excellent real-world goal for a corporate network, but a network that spends one entire business day per year down is actually more than 99.9 percent reliable. IT leaders live in fear of downtime, especially during business hours. Even well-managed corporate IT departments frequently lack the staff, the equipment, or the scale to properly prepare for disasters or handle system utilization spikes…

Grazed from Genesis10.  Author: Joe Sclafani.

Ask most information technology (IT) specialists and they’ll tell you that choosing to include “cloud computing” services is more about finance than technology.  Imagine that you acquired an apartment building or an office tower and you rented the entire thing to one tenant.  Their rent would have to cover all of your costs including debt service, maintenance, operations, insurance, and a reasonable profit for you.

If the building contained, say, 70 rentable units you could split that cost 70 ways and charge each 1/70^th of those costs.  Simple.  The exact same analysis can be applied to cloud servers.  Originally when a company purchased a “server” it was to run one operation that all employees could share.  There was a server that enabled users to share files, another to share communications, another to share email, others to share specific software applications…

Grazed from Qubole.  Author: Moran Altarac.

Scalability of cloud databases and the potential of big data cloud computing is the most challenging aspect when designing an elastic data architecture. It is technically complex to scale data storage and computing. At the same time premature optimisation for potentially superfluous scalability carries a sizeable economic risk and opportunity cost. 

Today, technology firms and departments contemplating scalable database architectures have numerous database management systems and options of running them. Specifically NoSQL systems with flexible, de-normalized data schema have gained increasing market share with the rise of big data. Cloud and virtual computing resources and particularly Hadoop as a service are a paradigm shift. They introduced flexible architectures with managed technology and they transformed capital expenditure to operational one. Together NoSQL and cloud computing promise to bridge the gap between cheap and scalable data architectures…

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author:  Zeeshan Naseh.

Enterprises today are reeling from unprecedented disruption to their business models and effects of globalization that inflict new competitive and pricing pressures. These dynamics have put CIOs under the gun to meet twin goals that would seem to form a paradox:

• To construct and operate an agile IT infrastructure capable of scaling quickly and securely to meet evolving business demands.
• To reduce IT operating costs and total cost of ownership.

In response to these competing demands, CIOs are turning from old computing resources – resource-intensive on-premises data centers that often are duplicated, siloed and underutilized – to the Cloud. Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service models can help achieve some goals, especially related to cost…