Category: News

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Nicholas D. Evans.

The Internet of Things (IoT) will be everywhere. According to Gartner, by 2020 the IoT will be more than a $300 billion market, with over 26 billion devices installed. In contrast, today we use 7.3 billion smartphones, tablets and PCs. Naturally, the IoT will run up against today’s other disruptive technologies, including social, mobile, analytics and the cloud. Let’s take a look at how the IoT is affecting and leveraging each of these areas, as well as its impact on cybersecurity.

Social

Many IoT applications have already gone social. Most prominent so far has been the "quantified self" arena, with countless runners, cyclists and triathletes sharing details of their routes and times with friends in their social communities. But we are also seeing other ways that social networking can interact with the IoT. In the "connected home" space, for example, Internet-connected, remotely operated door locks offer the ability to share access to your home with other family members and approved house guests…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM launched a series of new initiatives to bolster its SoftLayer cloud computing effort, including providing new resources to support SoftLayer ecosystem members as well as adding new disaster recovery and security services to the SoftLayer cloud platform. With an eye on beefing up its channel for cloud computing services, among the moves IBM announced are improved margin opportunities with richer earned-volume discounts for SoftLayer business partners without requiring a prior commitment.

IBM also said it is creating a new SoftLayer Services & Solution Provider program, which streamlines the SoftLayer hosting reseller and strategic partners program to improve clarity of eligibility requirement and benefits of the program. “Cloud computing is transforming the relationship between business partners and their clients, creating unprecedented opportunities to enter new markets and sell new services,” said Tom Blair, senior vice president of global sales for SoftLayer, in a statement…

Grazed from EarthNet. Author: PR Announcement.

Boulder, Colorado-based Earthnet announced that it has completed a $200,000 expansion of its cloud computing infrastructure. Earthnet CEO, Bahman Saless, said that the company has adopted a new private cloud platform, Fractus, that provides a level of security and accountability for small business that isn’t available in the conventional cloud environment. Fractus is hosted by the Dell Active System 800 Cloud Solution.

"Fractus is a HIPAA compliant private cloud system, hosted on our Boulder premises, that allows practitioners to access medical information directly, securely and from anywhere in the field," said Saless. "The system is also effective for industries that are security sensitive, such as law, finance and government contractors." Saless expects that the Earthnet infrastructure upgrades will allow the company to expand its customer base by a further 50 percent.

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Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Antony Savvas.

Over a quarter (28 percent) of mid-sized UK businesses don’t have a mobile strategy in place, according to research. Managed service provider Intrinsic commissioned market research firm Vanson Bourne to question 250 IT decision makers at mid-size companies – employing between 250 and 1,000 – about their attitudes towards mobility.

Intrinsic’s study shows that mobile technologies, including mobile devices and applications, voice and video conferencing and cloud computing, are now seen by almost all IT decision makers (92 percent) as the fourth utility for business, alongside electricity, gas and water. Despite this the study suggests that many businesses are not taking a concerted, strategic approach to embracing mobile, with 28 percent not having a mobile strategy, and 30 percent not having a continuity strategy when it comes to internet access…

Grazed from ArsTechnica. Author: David Kravets.

The question of whether online broadcast television is to remain in the hands of a stodgy industry that once declared the VCR the enemy is being put directly before the Supreme Court. Broadcasters’ latest legal target is 2-year-old upstart Aereo—which retransmits over-the-air broadcast television using dime-sized antennas to paying consumers, who can watch TV online or record it for later viewing.

Broadcasters like ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and others haven’t given Aereo permission to do that, and they say it violates US copyright law. The industry will ask the Supreme Court during a Tuesday hearing to kill the New York-based Aereo service. The high-stakes oral arguments come 30 years after Hollywood told the justices that the VCR—and its time-shifting elements—would doom television and its producers forever…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Greg O’Connor.

Cloud providers Google, AmazonWeb Services (AWS) and Microsoft are doing some spring-cleaning, and it’s out with the old, in with the new when it comes to pricing services. The latest cuts make it clear there’s a new business model driving cloud that is every bit as exponential in growth — with order of magnitude improvements to pricing — as Moore’s Law has been to computing.

If you need a refresher, Moore’s Law is “the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.” I propose my own version, Bezos’s law. Named for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, I define it as the observation that, over the history of cloud, a unit of computing power price is reduced by 50 percent approximately every three years…

Grazed from TheVarGuy.  Author: Michael Cusanelli.

VMware (VMW) announced this week that it is adding AIS (American Internet Services) to its growing list of service providers. AIS will take on the role of an Enterprise level member as the latest addition to the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP).

AIS has been a major provider of VMware-based cloud services in the U.S. Southwest since 2012, most notably with the company’s popular AIS BusinessCloud1 IaaS which utilizes VMware infrastructure, according to the press release. AIS also provides resellers with client-specific network, compute and storage resources for virtual data centers on internet accessible secure platforms, making it a prime candidate for the VSPP. "…

Grazed from CloudWiser.  Author: Eric Lundquist.

Red Hat says virtual containers will be an efficient way to distribute applications across the hybrid cloud infrastructures that are favored by enterprises.  The development of shipping containers enabled the global trade we now enjoy and made shipping your products around the world a simple transaction. As the opening paragraph in a book chronicling the rise of shipping containers (The Box) from the origins in 1956 onward stated, “The container made shipping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world economy.”

Now containers, albeit in a digital form, are being touted as the next big thing in cloud computing.  At the Red Hat Conference April 14-17 in San Francisco (which I did not attend but did watch the keynotes on YouTube), containers were a big piece of the news. “This [container technology] is one of the things that is really going to drive the future,” said Red Hat President of Products and Technologies Paul Cormier in his keynote address…

Grazed from CMSWire.  Author:  Steve Marsh.

No longer the latest IT buzzword, cloud computing has become a reality for a growing number of organizations as they seek to reduce IT costs, expand capabilities and improve their networks.

For SharePoint users in particular the cloud offers a way to replace the administrative burden and costs of managing and maintaining on-premises SharePoint platforms. Migrating to the cloud can be somewhat complex since SharePoint migration tools are limited in functionality or non-existent…

Grazed from TechAisle.  Author: Michael O’Neil.

It is stunning to see how much corporate IT realities have changed in the last five years. Today, an increasing proportion of infrastructure is rented rather than purchased, sourced with OPEX funds from remote suppliers. Agility has become the watchword for new automation projects, and acceptable timeframes are no longer calibrated in months. End-users can source applications, infrastructure and other needed services from a wide variety of online resources. And workers are tethered to the corporate infrastructure by their smartphones and tablets, not by the cables attached to their desks.

Most of these changes are attributable in part or in whole to cloud computing. Cloud infrastructure provides the basis for OPEX-based, flexible-timeframe infrastructure rentals. SaaS providers are able to deploy new automation in hours rather than months. Mobility is not really a discrete initiative so much as it is a key attribute of ubiquitous infrastructure. And IT now competes for corporate IT influence and budgets – it is no longer the “final word” on IT/business solution strategies…