Author: David

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Rick Robinson.

Dropbox now has 100 million users. Founder Drew Houston noted the benchmark in a blog post, and the company celebrated by giving away a gigabyte of storage space. The sheer number of users indicates that most of them are consumers, not businesses (and certainly not midsize firms).

All the same, this is significant news for the IT community at midsize firms. Cloud computing has gone mainstream, used by millions of people who may not even know that their data is "in the cloud." And some unknown–but probably significant–proportion of those 100 million users are using their personal cloud storage for business purposes. Convenient access to the cloud has spawned a whole added dimension to the "consumerization of IT" that has not drawn much attention. This has downsides relating to security and data management, but a big upside in terms of simplicity and flexibility…

Grazed from PublicService.co.uk. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Met Office has won a new award for its use of cloud services, also taking the prize for the most effective use of collaborative technology at the UK IT Industry Awards The winning Met Office Weather Observation Website (WOW) project, has used the Google App Engine to build and host web applications exploiting cloud and collaborative technologies.

WOW has enabled the Met Office to engage with weather enthusiasts, school students studying weather and climate and other organisations to create an active global online weather community…

Grazed from ITPro. Author: Caroline Donnelly.

Cloud computing is one of the private equity (PE) community’s top areas for future investment, according to a new report from financial advisors Grant Thornton UK. The firm’s “Where is the smart money going in Technology?” report claims more than 92 per cent of PE and venture capitalists consider cloud to be an “attractive” proposition, with half planning to invest in this area within the next two years.

The managed services industry also seems to have caught the imagination of investors, with 30 per cent of the 40 PE experts and venture capitalists who took part in the report expressing an interest in investing in this area…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

CloudBerry Lab has made an incremental update to its CloudBerry Explorer application, which aims to simplify file management on Amazon S3 so it’s as easy as managing files on local computers. Besides a few other small enhancements to the cloud application, the key addition to the v3.7 release is support for Amazon Glacier. Essentially, the new Glacier-related features revolve around Amazon S3 archiving to Glacier, giving Amazon S3 users the option of using CloudBerry Explorer to archive data stored on S3 to low-cost Glacier storage.

Amazon Glacier, launched earlier this year, provides a low-cost storage option for companies looking for longer-term storage that doesn’t require the high-performance and fast access of storage that is continuously being used and modified…

Grazed from NewEurope Online. Author: Editorial Staff.

For the first time, the Steering Board of the new European Cloud Partnership (ECP) met in Brussels on 19 November, kicking-off the process to help building an EU Digital Single Market for cloud computing.

The board, which aims making the most of the public sector’s buying power to shape the growing market for cloud computing services, brings together tech Chief Executive Officers and government representatives with responsibility for IT procurement. Besides, the committee is Chaired by Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia, and will deliver strategic advice to Vice President Neelie Kroes…

Grazed from AME. Author: Editorial Staff.

Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management, announced it has registered stable growth of 4% over the last quarter, as well as nine percent in the first nine months of 2012 for the Rest of the World reporting region that includes the Middle East. A particularly strong momentum was registered by the infrastructure, buildings, power, and IT business units.

The company stated the worldwide datacentre market has witnessed a growth of 22% in 2012, to $105bn from $86bn in 2011. The Middle East is the fastest growing sector in this category. The company also reported robust global growth in sales for the first three quarters of 2012, recording a rise of 14.9% for infrastructure and 18% for IT business…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

As cloud computing evolves, one particular use for it is beginning to stand out: big data. What exactly big data means and how it fits into the cloud conversation, however, are questions not easily answered. Medio Systems Inc., founded in 2004 as an application service provider (ASP), has recently reinvented itself as a cloud-hosted provider of big data analytics, with a focus on mobile platforms. The company is also marketing its inGenius Software as a Service, traditionally aimed at enterprise customers such as T-Mobile, Verizon, Disney and CBS, at small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs).

Brian Lent, co-founder and chief technology officer of Medio, and Ivan Sucharski, Medio’s data strategist, spoke about big data, the evolution of cloud computing and how the two trends affect each other…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Lockheed Martin UK has expanded its offering of cloud computing services available to the UK government after recently being selected to provide G-Cloud 2 IT support. This new contract succeeds the previous G-Cloud 1 program and will run for 12 months, allowing Lockheed Martin UK to provide an even wider range of services that includes infrastructure, software and specialist cloud capabilities.

Under the G-Cloud 2 framework agreement, better known as CloudStore, Lockheed Martin will now offer support such as computing and storage, e-mail and collaboration, cloud strategy and integration; cloud security; mission centric activities; green IT and energy optimization; cloud brokering; virtualization consulting; assessment for Oracle virtualization; and virtual desktop as a service assessment…

Grazed from The Washington Post. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cisco Systems Inc., the world’s largest maker of computer networking gear, said Sunday it is buying Meraki for $1.2 billion to expand its ability to let customers compute in the cloud. Cloud computing refers to the increasingly popular practice of storing software applications in remote data centers that are accessed over the Internet instead of installing programs on individual machines.

Meraki Inc. is based in San Francisco and also has offices in New York, London and Mexico. The privately held company was founded in 2006 by members of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. Meraki technology offers customers Wi-Fi, switching, security and mobile device management centrally managed from the cloud…