Author: David

Grazed from BRW.  Author: Marianna Papadakis.

It’s easy to be bamboozled by the chatter about the benefits of cloud solutions for business and what’s available. Deciding on the right mix of cloud versus having your own dedicated infrastructure is even more daunting.

So what exactly is on offer? At one end of the scale you have software-as-a-service, which allows businesses to use a provider’s cloud-based applications, such as web-based email systems. At the other end there is infrastructure-as-a-service, where companies outsource their entire operations, including servers and networks to a provider on a pay-per-usage basis…

Grazed from AME.  Author: Editorial Staff.

In today’s IT environment, more devices, a deluge of data, decreasing costs to transfer data, and server virtualization have triggered a transformation in the data center which will no doubt lead to multiple data center advancements during the next five years.  Earlier exclusively deployed by large enterprises, it is now common in the Middle East to see small and medium organizations with their own data centers. No longer are data operations handled from a server room and a switch closet.

Sufian Dweik, Regional Manager, MEMA at Brocade Communications, says that last year, network managers in the Middle East witnessed the growing popularity of Ethernet fabrics. The trends that were the driving force behind this are set to remain valid though 2013 as well. A sampling of analyst numbers reveals the true significance of these trends. According to IMS Research, 22 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Byron Deeter.

A few years ago, most people couldn’t tell you what the cloud was. They certainly couldn’t foresee a market in which the sexy, highly anticipated consumer Internet IPOs would be flops while the seemingly nerdy sectors of cloud and enterprise computing would end up driving returns within the technology markets. For entrepreneurs and investors in cloud computing, market valuations are skyrocketing as acquisition activity heats up, the IPO markets are open, and venture dollars are finally flooding into the segment. Simply put, for participants in the cloud computing market, our time has finally come.

Businesses are moving toward cloud-based operations in a permanent way, and the fundamental business metrics of the category leaders are enjoying staggering growth as a result. A few minutes of scrolling through a few pages here gives a clear sense of the scope and potential of the market…

Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Xath Cruz.

Israel has always had a great reputation as one of the best hubs of software innovation in the world, and so it is not a surprise that Israeli companies are also some of the early entrants into the cloud computing space. The cloud computing scene in Israel is made up of traditional fields of expertise in the global IT industry, such as security, web applications, HR management, IT management, telecoms applications, business intelligence, and other types of enterprise application domains.

In the past, Israel’s large software companies have been targets for acquisition by leading IT and software vendors. This resulted in many of said companies already making their mark even during the days when cloud technology was still in its infancy. What’s even better is that many of the cloud-related Israeli companies have been acquired at high company valuations. This is further bolstered by many of the acquired companies moving on to provide SaaS solutions in tandem with conventional on-premises offerings…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Caroline Craig.

Nothing is certain in this world except death and taxes — and lots of cloud outages.  The week started badly for Google Drive users as the cloud-based service for storing documents, videos, and Google Docs was down for several hours Monday. Users vented on social networks over their frustration, with one user tweeting, "Google Drive now back up like a limp horse struggling to move." Google moved quickly to acknowledge the issue on its Apps Status Dashboard but did not say what caused the problem or how many were affected.

On Wednesday, it was LinkedIn’s turn to roll over and play dead. Users hoping to reach out and connect via the social media network were greeted with a 503 error "Service Unavailable" message. The website suffered intermittent service disruptions throughout the morning, knocked out for about 45 minutes, got back up for 30 minutes, then experienced a second service disruption. To date, there’s been no word from LinkedIn on why the outage occurred…

Grazed from Motley Fool.  Author: Tim Beyers.

When it comes to storing most of our online entertainment, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG  ) and its Drive file system isn’t top dog. Neither is Microsoft‘s (NASDAQ: MSFT  ) SkyDrive or Amazon.com‘s (NASDAQ: AMZN  ) Cloud Drive. The winner? Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL  ) , says a new report from Strategy Analytics.

The survey asked respondents which digital locker services they use to store music or video. iCloud and iTunes topped the list with 27% using Apple’s services. Surprisingly, Dropbox ranked second, two percentage points ahead of Cloud Drive…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

For three in four IT security professionals, bring your own device (BYOD) is one of the “greatest inhibitors to effective cloud security”. That’s the result from a new report by AccelOps. Talking to 176 IT security personnel, the results put BYOD ahead of data control and data loss – traditional topics for cloud security worriers – as the main security threat.

Other cloud security pain points according to the research included enforcing security policies, compliance reporting and employee training; yet given data breaches and data loss were the top two security threats released by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) last month, this may be something of a surprise…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Google Drive, the cloud storage and applications suite used by millions at home and at work, has suffered three service interruptions this week, making it impossible at times for affected users to access their files and applications. As logged in the official Google Apps Status site, the first incident happened on Monday, and was an outage that lasted about three hours and affected 33 percent of Google Drive user requests.

Affected users got error messages, long load times and timeouts, according to an incident report posted on Wednesday. This problem was triggered by a bug in the Google network’s control software, which caused the system to shift traffic over to unaffected network connections and servers. Unfortunately, this traffic load-balancing increased latency in the servers and caused another glitch, this time in the software that manages Drive user connections and sessions, causing the access problems…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

While database software such as Oracle or MySQL has been available for some time on Amazon Web Services, only a handful of cases exist where a customer may go to a service provider and get a scalable, NoSQL database as a service. A predecessor service meeting that description is Amazon Web Services’ DynamoDB, which is still a beta offering.

Joyent is a San Francisco infrastructure-as-a-service provider that has marched to a different drumbeat from its entry into the cloud market. The firm’s staff includes Sun Solaris expertise and it builds infrastructure based on an open source derivative of Solaris that it calls SmartOS. Gartner has put Joyent in its "challenger’s" quadrant for the cloud marketplace…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cyber Innovation Labs and NEC have partnered to deploy the next generation of Big Data solutions. Using Cyber Innovations Labs’ Cloud in a Vault (CiaV) offering and NEC’s Nblock integrated IT infrastructure, the two companies are aiming to help enterprises deploy Big Data solutions.

IaaS provider Cyber Innovation Labs’ CiaV offering is a dedicated, fully managed and scalable private cloud that takes NEC’s Nblock IT infrastructure and combines it with security, compliance and monitoring in a hosted environment. According to the two companies, this enables organizations to "quickly and easily align business projects with infrastructure costs by allowing them to consume only the infrastructure they need, incurring only monthly operational expenses and zero capital expenses for equipment."…