Author: David

Grazed from InfoBoom.  Author: Megan Mostyn-Brown.

The race for the best cloud computing service is heating up. Last week Apple revealed details on the newest version of OS X, the Mountain Lion, which boasts a more integrated iCloud feature. Not to be outdone, Microsoft caused a stir with the announcement of its new, tricked-out version of SkyDrive for Windows 8. The urge is to jump on the bandwagon and pick the best brand, but before you outsource your storage, it’s important to take stock of whether or not it’s right for your company’s needs…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Armed with $26 million of Warburg Pincus’ money, former McAfee CTO George Kurtz is going to try to stop the rape and pillage of corporate and government IP assets that’s going on.

Warburg, where Kuntz was briefly executive-in-residence, plunked the first round money into his stealth start-up CrowdStrike, which says it’s going to use Big Data technologies to stop the rampant thievery by identifying the perpetrator.

Building higher walls, Kuntz says, is useless. The "economic predators" – who may have already secretly modified key processes and data, and may eventually take down critical infrastructure – will just go get taller ladders…

Grazed from EUObserver.com.   Author: Benjamin Fox.

Five EU countries rank among the world’s top ten for policies that promote cloud computing, according to a study published on Wednesday (22 February) by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), an ICT body representing Microsoft and other international software giants.

In third place, Germany was the highest rated country according to the BSA scorecard, which ranked 24 of the largest countries according to seven indicators, including data privacy, cybersecurity, cybercrime, intellectual property, technology interoperability and legal harmonisation, and IT infrastructure. France, Italy, the UK and Spain were all in the top ten, with Japan and Australia ranked first and second…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

OnLive, Inc., the pioneer of instant-action cloud computing, is pleased to announce the OnLive(TM) Desktop Plus service, bringing gigabit-speed(1) accelerated browsing with full Adobe(R) Flash(R) to devices with the OnLive Desktop App, regardless of the device’s local Internet speed and local computing capability, making OnLive Desktop Plus by far the world’s fastest mobile browsing experience, if not the fastest consumer browsing experience available on any device.

The free OnLive Desktop App, currently available on iPad(R) — and coming soon to Android(R), PC, Mac(R), TVs and monitors — delivers no-compromise, media-rich, instant-response Windows(R) applications including Microsoft(R) Word, Excel(R) and PowerPoint(R) software, and as of today, Adobe(R) Reader(R) for PDFs, along with 2GB of cloud storage. OnLive Desktop Plus, available for $4.99/month at desktop.onlive.com, provides all OnLive Desktop Standard features plus OnLive’s gigabit-speed accelerated browsing experience with full Flash player capability. With OnLive Desktop Plus, the iPad not only becomes 100% Flash compatible, it becomes the world’s fastest mobile Flash player…

Grazed from Computer Technology Review.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Dimension Data plc, an ICT services and solutions provider, unveiled Thursday a comprehensive range of cloud services aimed at making it easier for companies to accelerate their adoption of cloud computing. Available on a global basis, Dimension Data’s Cloud Services enable companies to be more agile, lower IT infrastructure management expenses and reduce cloud migration complexity and risk.

The global provider’s cloud offerings simplify planning, design, deployment and management of private, public and hybrid clouds. Dimension Data also introduced its Managed Cloud Platform, a global delivery platform for its cloud services, and Dimension Data CloudControl, its cloud management system that automates provisioning, orchestration, administration and billing…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Connectria Hosting, a global managed hosting provider, today announced that as of February 23, Connectria ranked an impressive 2nd in the North American market and 4th on a global basis in Cloud Computing Performance (over a 30 day period view) as measured by the Global Provider View on CloudSleuth.

Sponsored by Compuware, the technology performance company, CloudSleuth is the industry’s only partner-driven cloud performance community that fosters a collaborative exchange of strategies, best practices and resources for deploying and managing applications in the cloud. Connectria recently joined CloudSleuth in order to leverage its growing partner community. As part of its alliance with CloudSleuth, Connectria began participating in the Global Provider View, a free cloud monitoring service that objectively benchmarks page delivery performance and availability metrics of popular public cloud providers…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Callidus Software Inc., the leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing, announced today that a global provider of business communications and collaboration systems has selected the CallidusCloud(TM) Sales Coach solution to mentor and develop its sales talent in North America. The agreement was signed in the first quarter of 2012.

Sales Coach delivers a cloud platform that enables sales people to apply real-time coaching to their daily sales work. The solution delivers a fast and easy user experience that lets managers collaborate with their sales reps in real time to facilitate success on each deal, every time…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Jean-Marc Seguin.

Last time we met in this space, we talked about the importance of management and resource optimization planning in the path toward private cloud computing (see my last blog on Moving forward towards the private cloud). Today, I want to examine two other important areas for consideration as you plan for more mature processes and technology: service catalogs and controls, compliance and governance functionality.

Service catalog/request fulfillment: Request for services in the private cloud should be treated like all others – as service requests. Service requests are provisioned based on the defined internal approval processes of the enterprise. Requests should be based on a pre-defined catalog of services built upon a set of golden templates to ensure standards are met in a repeatable manner and that the turn-around time between request and release of service to your client are minimal…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Cloud Ventures.

Our next upcoming best practices white paper is going to be called ‘Cloud Computing and the Drummond Report‘ – A special feature on how Cloud might be employed to help realize many of the cost-saving goals recommended.

One of the headline topics is how to build “Government Hubs”, referring to internal service providers – A Government IT unit that sells IT services to other departments and agencies, implementing what’s known as shared services…

Grazed from NextGov.  Author:  Bob Brewin.

The Veterans Affairs Department plans to test email and other office software in a cloud computing environment and to try out potentially lower cost alternatives to Microsoft Office products — such as Google Apps — in two pilot projects set to kick off this year.

VA announced both projects in notices to industry posted Friday to the FedBizOpps website. The department asked vendors to detail their approaches in white papers submitted by March 15…