Author: David

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Centrify Corporation, the leader in Unified Identity Services across data center, cloud and mobile, today announced Centrify for Office 365, the industry’s most comprehensive solution for Active Directory-based single sign-on, user provisioning and mobile management for Office 365. With Centrify, organizations can simplify and speed Office 365 migrations and initial deployments within a matter of an hour for employees, reduce helpdesk burden, improve access controls, and leverage their existing Active Directory infrastructure and skillsets. Centrify is also announcing that Microsoft has evaluated Centrify for Office 365 across key user scenarios and has qualified it as a "Works with Office 365" solution.

Centrify for Office 365, an Azure-based service, delivers full support for Office 365, simplifying the deployment of federated identity, providing a rich catalog of pre-integrated SaaS apps, and delivering "Zero Sign-On" (ZSO) for rich mobile clients that require access to Office 365. Centrify for Office 365 delivers seamless integration with Active Directory in minutes — without the hassle of managing server clusters in the DMZ, creating security issues by poking more holes in the firewall, replicating identity information to the cloud, or acquiring and maintaining public certificates. The solution will be unveiled and demoed publicly for the first time this week at TechEd 2013 in Centrify’s booth No. 2418…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

We always open up with something like “Cloud Computing offers cost savings because you pay-as-you-go and because of economies of scale” or “Cloud Computing offers elasticity and seemingly infinite computing resource as long as your wallet is also infinitely flowing” in our write-ups and articles. I know I just did. This is because one of the unspoken tenets of Cloud Computing is “minimal barrier to entry and economic scaling”, so it is ingrained into everyone who knows about Cloud Computing that the main reason for moving to the Cloud is cost savings. But the pay-as-you-go model is a double-edged sword, it can also hurt you.

We call Cloud Computing as utility computing where it is treated like electricity or water, you only pay for what you use. But here is where the similarity ends, water and electricity use are not particularly variable, they are often stable. They very seldom get usage spikes even when there are special occasions in your house. So the utility bills that arrive every month will look fairly similar, only varying slightly. But the cloud is seldom predictable as usage will change depending on the time of day or external events that happen across the globe, and, so usage spikes become unpredictable…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Christine Burns.

According to Piston Cloud Computing’s CTO, the rate at which his customer’s pilot projects turn into production private clouds is pretty typical of most OpenStack-based providers – and it’s pretty low. “Roughly for every 20 pilot projects we open up, we see one of them make it into production,” says Josh McKenty, who prior to founding the Seattle-based Piston, worked at NASA and served as a technical lead on the project that evolved into OpenStack, one of three open source infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platforms vying for enterprise attention.

So why do the other 19 drop off? Good question, admits McKenty. According to analysts, developers and cloud practitioners, the answer turns on miscommunication (between corporate IT department and their potential “customers”), dependencies (on beloved features of gear sitting in the data center or on the network) and unruliness (of applications not built to run on the cloud at inception)…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Alex Williams.

Piston Cloud Co-Founder Joshua McKenty says the OpenStack customer ecosystem has four emerging market segments. On one side are the customers who hire consultants to build them a cloud. On the other side are the IBM customers who will always be IBM customers.

And in the middle are two classes of customers who have one thing in common, McKenty said. They have a data problem and with that comes deeper interest in the infrastructure, be it their own or a third-party that manages it for them…

Grazed from GoLime. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

The decisions your IT team must make when considering Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS, will affect the future path of your enterprise in regards to success and growth. Each organization has different needs. No matter what these are, your stakeholders are going to have to choose a vender that best accommodates the company. With so many vendors now out there, the decision must be approached carefully. The basic steps to coming to a final decision include:

• Research: The only way you’ll know if what the vendor offers is right for your enterprise is to research its reputation and services. Look into the type of cloud infrastructure, the storage and bandwidth, and quality of service provided.
• Longevity: Look into not only the lifespan of the provider and its services (Many providers are just getting started in IaaS, but have at least some technology expertise), but the kinds of equipment and software it uses. Also consider the future as to whether the service can be scaled with the growth of the enterprise.
• Service Level Agreements: What the provider guarantees makes them accountable for service outages and other issues, while outlining how these impact monthly fees. Availability times, performance demands, and trial period privileges are implemented here too…

Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications.  Author: Fred Donovan.

Verizon (NYSE: VZ) is beefing up its global IP network by deployed 100 gigabit Ethernet (GE) technology to the edge routers of its Private IP network to give enterprises faster speeds and increase bandwidth for cloud and video services.  Enterprise cloud services are on the rise, with three-quarters of enterprises recently surveyed by cloud management firm RightScale saying they are adopting cloud computing.

The 100GE technology is designed to provide enterprises with the bandwidth and speed needed to access data securely at remote storage locations as more applications and data are moved to the cloud, Verizon explained in a release.  "Governance for all" is more than an end goal written in a plan; it’s a strategy that unites IT and business content owners. Now you can learn to create a governance strategy to suit all your needs. Learn More…

Grazed from Tech2.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

Nine years ago when Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical started shipping Ubuntu, he had declared his #1 bug as "Microsoft owning the majority share in the market". Shuttleworth now declares the bug closed as personal computing market has a healthy amount of competition and is not dominated by Windows any more. Needless to say, it wasn’t the popularity of Ubuntu that has helped achieve this, and he has thanked OSes like iOS and Android. Though Ubuntu has played a very small part in the shift, he thinks it’s important to recognize that the shift has taken place and from Ubuntu’s perspective, the ‘bug’ is now closed.

Mark Shuttleworth wrote, “Personal computing today is a broader proposition than it was in 2004: phones, tablets, wearables, and other devices are all part of the mix for our digital lives. From a competitive perspective, that broader market has healthy competition with iOS and Android representing a meaningful share. Android may not be my or your first choice of Linux, but it is without doubt an open source platform that offers both practical and economic benefits to users and industry. So we have both competition, and good representation for open source, in personal computing.”…

Grazed from The Next Web.  Author: Scott Gerber.

Thanks to a growing selection of Software as a Service (SaaS) apps, the mundane yet tedious activities of any business strategy can now be automated. These apps can capture the nuances of a customer’s online behavior while leaving no room for human error — why waste employee man hours on a repetitive process when there’s a game-changing app that’ll do it for you?  These SaaS apps are only getting better and better. I asked a panel of 8 successful young entrepreneurs the following question:

What newer SaaS do you think has the power to change the way we do business soon and why?

Below are their top picks. Which of these do you use, in or out of the office?…

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Much like Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law have fueled the utility of computing and networking industries over the past few decades, I’ve observed something else about the forward-moving nature of networking that seems to be rooted in some sort of universal law. Computers are driven to increasingly complex forms of networking to improve intelligence, efficiency, and productivity. Once networked, they never go back. Like life itself, computing is evolving into a higher form organism. With each new inter-connection, the whole system becomes smarter and more powerful. And we’re not just talking PC to PC, or smartphone to smartphone, it’s everything in between, including servers and APIs that connect people and things, consumers and enterprise.

Networking hates friction

While computing is driven to network, one of the biggest problems it introduces is how to secure each domain (e.g. protecting stuff behind the firewall), while simultaneously enabling transactions between the domains. It’s this last statement where we still have a massive problem today…