Author: David

Grazed from ITBusiness.ca. Author: Jeff Jedras.

Sage North America put cloud computing and a mobility strategy front and centre as it opened its Summit partner conference on Monday, but CEO Pascal Houillon (pictured) warned those that want Sage to move faster into the cloud that its approach will be deliberate.

“Some have accused Sage of moving too slowly on cloud computing,” acknowledged Houillon. “(But) let’s not move to the too fast category.”

Despite that note of caution. Sage executives made several cloud-related announcements and outlined a hybrid cloud strategy that will see Sage’s core platforms focus on key business functions, with additional functionality available through the cloud on a subscription basis, allowing customers to pick just features they want and need. Houillon is also focusing Sage’s research and development focus more tightly, with hybrid cloud offerings being the priority…

Grazed from DailyFinance. Author: Sean Williams.

You know the old saying about how an idea is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Well, cloud computing really is the best thing to happen to the tech sector since Al Gore invented the Internet.

OK, so that’s a joke that’ll never die, but according to estimates from Cisco Systems, global data-center IP traffic is expected to increase by a compound annual growth rate of 33% between now and 2015, with cloud workloads increasing to 57% of all data-center workloads by 2015 from just 21% in 2010. These figures are as real as its gets, and they demonstrate that the movement toward data sharing and storage is huge and rapidly transforming both large and small businesses.

With so much money being invested in virtualization, storage, and data transmission in the cloud, today I want to look at five different ways you can put your money to work in this segment for the long term…

Grazed from CloudTimes.org. Author: Xath Cruz.

SAP’s yearly event for their partners and customers, called Sapphire, served as the launching point for SuccessFactors as a SAP company. SAP has created a new division called Cloud Computing, with SuccessFactors CEO and founder Lars Dalgaard helming the division, overseeing its 5000 employee-strong team, all of which are assigned to help SAP’s cloud strategy.

According to Dalgaard’s update on Successfactors, they currently have 3500 customers, with as many as 15.6 million unique end users. This makes SuccessFactors the largest cloud company, with a userbase 15 times the size of its competitors. SuccessFactors is currently used in 60 different industries spread out across 168 different countries.

According to their stats, the 15 million SuccessFactors users have used the suite to accomplish as many as 29 million performance reviews, complete 45 million learning items, commit 61 million goals, and process 23 million job applicants. While that’s already an impressive performance, there are still plenty of developments announced during the event…

Grazed from Windows IT Pro. Author: K.B. Winstead.

Does your company use a cloud service to store sensitive or confidential data? If so, where does the responsibility lie for keeping that data secure? These are a couple of the questions addressed in a new study released by Thales e-Security. The study, titled "Encryption in the Cloud," also focused on data encryption with cloud solutions and where such encryption is applied.

One of the big surprises in the survey data comes from how many companies are using the cloud for sensitive or confidential data: nearly half, 49 percent, of respondents do so currently, and another third said their companies likely would do so within the next two years. With that amount of sensitive corporate data going to the cloud, data security must be a primary concern — or so you might think.

Another section of the survey, which was conducted by the Ponemon Institute, looked at where companies felt the responsibility fell for keeping safe that data they were sending to the cloud. Here, 44 percent of respondents said they felt the primary responsibility for data security was with the cloud provider, while only 30 percent thought primary responsibility was with the data owner (i.e., the company that’s sending sensitive data to the cloud). Another 24 percent thought there should be a shared responsibility…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dana Gardner.

A fascinating global ocean studies initiative helps best define some of the IT superlatives around big data, cloud computing, and middleware integration capabilities.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and its accompanying Cyberinfrastructure Program aims to provide an unprecedented ability to study the Earth’s oceans and climate using myriad distributed data centers and literally oceans’ worth of data.

The scale and impact of the science’s importance is closely followed by the magnitude of the computer science needed to make that data accessible and actionable by scientists. In a sense, the OOI and its infrastructure program, a major undertaking by the National Science Foundation, are constructing a big data-scale programmable and integratable cloud fabric for oceanography…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The Security, Trust & Assurance Registry (STAR) is an initiative by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) to document security controls offered by cloud computing providers. The registry recently received its biggest vote of confidence, as Amazon AWS, one of the first and biggest cloud providers, joined.

The CSA STAR started slowly in August 2011. Six months after its launch only three cloud providers had joined: Microsoft Office 365, Mimecast and Solutionary. Now nearing its one year anniversary, the CSA STAR now includes a a dozen cloud providers, among them major players like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Box.com…

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Bert Markgraf.

Many midsize businesses are comfortable putting their email online and using the cloud for storage, but there are barriers to going beyond that. Ready-made cloud computing solutions are expensive, and IT departments are concerned about vendor lock-in. If the purchased system doesn’t meet expectations or if your needs change, do you have to scrap your investment and start over? Open source solutions such as OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus are available, but there have been few high-profile implementations.

network spheresThe eBay Project

Now eBay has announced that it is using OpenStack open source software as the basis for virtual networks that it will use to develop and test applications for its website marketplaces. An article on InfoWorld describes the project. The company is running Nicira Network Virtualization on the OpenStack cloud computing platform to let it start up separate virtual networks for its projects. Its multi-vendor approach led it to implement the already integrated Nicira/OpenStack solution rather than relying on its existing VMware cloud. Cost was also a factor. Jean-Christophe Martin, who is a cloud architect for eBay, says, "Before, we were mostly looking at vendor-provided solutions. I think that right now we are switching to more of an open source strategy."…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

In the era of cloud computing and big data, chief marketing officers can either sink or swim depending on their ability to recognize the importance of the consumer information available to them and ability to capture and put it to use.
marketing

Depending on what research you believe, chief marketing officers are either more powerful than they’ve ever been — or they’re on their way out. Early this year, a Gartner predicted that CMOs will have bigger IT budget power than CIOs by 2017. Naturally, that analysis was quickly bandied about by CMOs…