Author: David

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Eric Lundquist.

When the chief marketing officer, the human resources manager, the vice president of sales and the chief finance officer all tore off chunks of the technology budget, the obituaries for the Chief Information officer position were many and morbid.  A corporate executive without budget is soon a corporate executive without a job went the thinking. And for a while as organizations including Gartner proclaimed that the marketing department would soon wield a bigger tech budget than the CIO, the predictions of the demise of the CIO’s role appeared prescient.

But, stealing a title from Joseph Heller’s great novel about corporate life, “Something Happened” along the way. CIOs and those with different titles, but in the top technology position have the opportunity to retrieve their status due to the very thing which was supposed to relegate them to irrelevance. Software as a Service and the greater cloud computing universe in general is the driver in the CIO rebirth…

Grazed from BusinessSpectator.  Author: Robert Gottliebsen.

What is happening at Cisco should be an alert not only to those in the information technology industry but to all companies and governments.  Frankly, how companies adapt to cloud computing will determine whether they succeed or fail in the current environment.  In Australia we have bloated government costs and cloud computing represents a rare opportunity to reduce those costs and improve services – but you have to get it right.

As we saw with the Virgin breakdown, new systems can cause chaos if they get into trouble.  For IT companies like Cisco this is make or break time. Get it wrong and you head on a rapid road down. Earlier this month I described how vital cloud computing would be to banks and how SAP was attempting to transform itself as part of that revolution (A dividend danger is clouding bank fortunes, August 8)…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Louis Columbus.

Synchronizing new product development, supply chain, production and Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul (MRO) strategies across Aerospace and Defense (A&D) manufacturers while reducing costs continues to make cloud platforms a viable option in A&D.

With sequestration having an impact on these industries from both a budget and merger & acquisition (M&A) perspective, the economics of cloud computing are becoming even more attractive. Teri Takai, CIO of the Department of Defense (DoD) published the DoD Cloud Computing Strategy in July of last year and many of its findings are reflected in the current state of cloud adoption in A&D.  She recently published the presentation DoD CIO’s 10-Point Plan for IT Modernization, which is available for download from the department’s website.  The following is a summary of key DoD IT Modernization initiatives…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing solves a number of problems, but compliance is not one of them. If anything, cloud computing complicates compliance, with shifting responsibilities for everything from user data to the physical data center. Hybrid clouds further cloud a murky situation by providing additional overlap and confusion.

Earlier this year, the PCI Security Standards Council released a set of guidelines outlining roles and responsibilities for compliance in public cloud scenarios. Since that time, a number of businesses and service providers have implemented those recommendations and attempted to extend those recommendations into more-complicated hybrid cloud environments…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CareCloud, the fastest-growing provider of cloud-based practice management, electronic health records (EHR), and medical billing software and services, today announced it has secured an additional $9 million from Adams Street Partners as part of the Company’s Series B financing round. On June 18, 2013, CareCloud announced it had secured $20 million in Series B funding, led by Tenaya Capital and included existing investors Intel Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.

This additional funding was the result of continued interest from investors to participate in CareCloud’s latest round, which is now closed at $29 million, and brings CareCloud’s total funding to $55 million. Adams Street Partners is one of the world’s largest managers of private equity for institutional investors and currently manages over $25 billion of committed capital for institutional investors…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

GetCloudServices, a leading Cloud Services Provider announce immediate availability of a new suite of SSD powered cloud services powered by CumuLogic, Citrix CloudPlatform, and Solidfire. GetCloudServices provides users with instant access to services, such as fully managed and scalable Relational and NoSQL Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Elastic Load Balancer and distributed in-memory Cache-as-a-Service. Free 30-day evaluation accounts are being offered for a limited time to new or existing customers looking to try GetCloudServices’ SSD-based PaaS and cloud services.

GetCloudServices PaaS and Cloud Services is the advanced service suite for crafting and managing complex distributed applications in a cloud environment. Developers and DevOps engineers now have all the key foundational services to build, deploy and manage native cloud applications plus web and legacy applications migrated to a cloud…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Editorial Staff.

On May 21, VMware announced the launch of its own public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)—the vCloud Hybrid Service. Since then, we’ve had hundreds of conversations with our customers and partners, who have made it even clearer there is a need for —and much enthusiasm about—a true hybrid cloud service.

For more details, watch this short video with Bill Fathers, VMware Senior Vice President and General Manager, Hybrid Cloud BU, discusses VMware’s move to IaaS. A common theme in our conversations about hybrid cloud was the (healthy) tension between:

• business teams striving to launch new products and services, move into new markets, and generally drive growth, and
• overloaded IT organizations that are rewarded for avoiding outages and cutting costs…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Druva today announced a new deployment option for its inSync endpoint data protection platform that is designed to help large enterprises solve the scalability challenges of backup and file sharing across hundreds of thousands of users without moving to a public cloud. Built on the OpenStack open source cloud computing platform, the new option allows inSync to be deployed in a private cloud environment utilizing OpenStack Swift object storage to achieve an out-of-the-box scaleout architecture without the server expense or management overhead of block storage.

OpenStack’s object storage allows enterprises to deploy inSync on commodity hardware, easily scale data storage both vertically and horizontally, and automatically write files to multiple disk drives as well as replicate them to new locations in the cluster for high availability and faster disaster recovery in the event of a server or hard drive failure. Druva is the first endpoint backup and IT-managed file sharing provider to offer these capabilities…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

EarthLink, Inc., a leading IT and communications provider, today announced that Ron Penna, one of EarthLink’s top Cloud thought leaders, will participate in ITEXPO Las Vegas, the world’s largest and best-attended communications and technology trade show. Penna will speak during two panel sessions, entitled "Do Your Customers Trust Your Cloud?" and "Business Value of Mobile Cloud." ITEXPO Las Vegas is held August 27-29 at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

"I am pleased to play a role in this year’s ITEXPO, joining other industry thought leaders who are helping to drive innovation in the communications and technology markets," said Ron Penna, EarthLink. "The event promises to stimulate discussions about issues of trust and security in the Cloud and how the integration of cloud-based collaborative technologies is driving today’s successful business operations, which hinges on mobility to decrease dependence on any physical location and support remote workers."…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: David Clements.

Enterprise adoption of cloud computing is at an interesting juncture.Egg-McMuffin On one hand, cloud computing has unleashed a new degree of innovation, enabling line-of-business users to become incredibly nimble. Gartner last year famously predicted that CMOs would spend more on IT than CIOs within the next five years. We see that happening already in organizations such as Vail Resorts, where the CIO and CMO are collaborating to make consumer-facing apps that drive their business forward.

On the other hand, central IT departments face growing pressures to manage costs, security, and other aspects of governance that are critical to the overall success of their organizations. Robert Grazioli, CIO of SAP Cloud, recently wrote a great primer on tackling cloud fears…