Grazed from PR.com. Author: PR Announcement.

Microsoft Office 365 allows companies of all sizes to leverage the combined power of productivity tools such as Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Office with the benefits of cloud computing. Instead of installing and deploying SharePoint Server on premises, any business can now simply subscribe to this service online to provide their employees with an enterprise grade solution for creating sites to safely share documents and information with colleagues, partners and customers.

But integration of existing corporate data is still difficult to implement. Layer2, as one of the leading providers of SharePoint add-ons in Europe and Microsoft Gold Certified ISV, today announced a new version of its Cloud Connector to seamlessly integrate almost any local or cloud-based corporate data sources with native SharePoint Online lists and libraries in the Microsoft Office 365 cloud. The connector extends the outstanding SharePoint features to existing data sets that will continue to reside within the corporate network or in other clouds, e.g. SQL databases, file shares or line-of-business systems…

Grazed from PEHub. Author: Angela Sormani.

Notion Capital, an entrepreneur-backed venture capital firm with a focus on cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service, has made its first investment from the recently closed $100 million, Fund 2. The fund has made a 2 million pounds ($3.1 million) investment in The Currency Cloud, a provider of a cloud-based currency conversion and international payments service. The investment comes on top of £2.5 million previous funding from Atlas Venture and the Anthemis Group.

Notion Capital, the entrepreneur-backed venture capital firm with a focus on Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service, today announced its first investment from the recently closed $100 million, Fund 2…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

For an economy still recovering from recession, firms are burdened on the aspect of spending for expensive software and hardware. An aspect which is not financially viable in today’s business environment. To counter the increasing cost and resources spent firms are now increasingly migrating towards cloud computing environments. To cater to needs of small and mid level businesses access the benefits of cloud computing, Asahi Technologies a custom software firm in New York has announced affordable cloud computing solutions for PaaS(Platform as a service), SaaS (Software as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a service).

Cloud computing is essentially the provision of hardware, networks, interfaces and storage as a service to a group of end users. “It is an evolution of computing which has brought infrastructure to business processes under one cloud, which can be delivered as a service wherever and whenever required,” stated Vinod Subbaiah, CEO of Asahi Technologies…

Grazed from The Times of India. Author: Editorial Staff.

The US Department of Defense has released a cloud computing strategy, saying it will move the department’s current network applications from a cumbersome and costly set of application silos to an end-state designed to create a more agile and cost effective service environment.

In announcing the strategy Wednesday, the Pentagon said the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has been named as the enterprise cloud service broker to help maintain mission assurance and information interoperability within this new strategy, reported Xinhua…

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Editorial Staff.

Nineteen of 20 agency plans for future cloud computing projects are missing important elements, a watchdog said Wednesday.

For example, seven of the 20 blueprints submitted to the Office of Management and Budget do not include any cost estimates, according to the Government Accountability Office report. None of the 14 plans that involve migrating existing services to the cloud includes the cost of retiring or repurposing legacy systems, the watchdog said.

Without that information it’s not clear if the agencies will be able to wring all possible savings from the cloud projects, GAO said.

Technology officials have estimated the government can save $5 billion annually by moving 20 percent of its information technology infrastructure from agency-owned data centers to more nimble cloud computing…

Grazed from FederalWeek. Author: Editorial Staff.

The State Department’s cloud computing environment doesn’t match the standards that the National Institute of Standards and Technology has established for clouds, according to a report from the department’s inspector general.

In the “Key Judgments” section of the report, issued in June, Deputy IG Harold Geisel wrote that State’s Systems and Integration Office (SIO) “has a knowledgeable, hardworking, and engaged management team that, for the most part, effectively dispatches its duties, which involve a wide range of new and old technologies, centralized and decentralized models of network management, budgetary items it can and cannot control, as well as colocated and dispersed physical locations.”…

Grazed from FedLine. Author: Nicole Johnson.

The Defense Information Systems Agency will play a major role in deciding how the Defense Department adopts cloud computing services and products.

DISA will serve as the department’s enterprise cloud service broker, which means all DoD components must acquire government or industry-provided cloud services using DISA, according to a June 26 memo from DoD chief information officer Teresa Takai that was released Wednesday. The only exception is to obtain a waiver from a review authority designated by Takai.

DISA will work on behalf of the department to manage the use, performance and delivery of cloud services and negotiate contracts between cloud service providers and DoD consumers. The memo does not detail how DISA’s relationship with DoD will work in the event that DISA is competing for DoD’s cloud business. Currently, DISA provides cloud email services for the Army…

Enterprise Clouds and Swiss Cheese

Grazed from Trefis. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) recently debuted its virtual cloud-routing and WAN optimization platform under the Cisco Cloud Connected Solution brand. The new product solution will help businesses take advantage of cloud computing to deploy cloud-related services and transition their virtual private networks into the cloud. It would also address the traditional cloud computing concerns of speed and bandwidth problems to “offer an optimal user experience at the lowest cost”. [1] With businesses increasingly looking to move their applications to the cloud, Cisco’s move will help it address the changing trends and drive its earnings higher in the future.

Cisco’s enterprise muscle

Enterprise routing is a Cisco stronghold with the company boasting of as many as 500,000 customers who have deployed its routing solutions worldwide. It has more than 77% market share of the global enterprise router market, as per our estimates…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Greg Ferro.

People are the No. 1 reason why private clouds fail. The traditional IT management team is composed of tactically oriented, powerless leaders who aren’t familiar with their core business and aren’t equipped to handle dynamic IT business challenges presented by private clouds. They’re more comfortable with sticking with what they know, avoiding change and ignoring the business risk of preventing change. They will be the downfall of your private cloud deployment.

Today’s IT management is unprepared for change and unable to map a dynamic IT environment like a private cloud into a static and unyielding business process such as that espoused by ITIL or The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). Everyone can see that business drivers are changing. Engineers have already embraced the new technologies of the private cloud. Management must deliver new accounting methods, better risk management and long-term funding to develop new private cloud infrastructures. At the same time, IT managers are refusing to change the existing business processes, accept risk and move their organizations forward…