Category: News

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Big data analytics are driving rapid growth for public cloud computing vendors with revenues for the top 50 public cloud providers shooting up 47% in the fourth quarter last year to $6.2 billion, according to Technology Business Review Inc. The New Hampshire-based financial and technical research firm says the broader public cloud market, beyond just the top 50 vendors, grew 25% from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the fourth quarter of 2013 to be a $15.1 billion market.

Those figures are in line with estimates from firms such as IDC, which said the cloud was a $47 billion annual industry last year and will grow to be a $107 billion annual industry by 2017. Perhaps the most surprising result in TBR’s latest figures are the extent to which public cloud providers are using big data to drive their own operations, get new customers and expand product portfolios…

Grazed from MidSizeInsider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

The gloves are off in a fight for public cloud computing dominance. In the last two weeks, several cloud leaders have announced changes to their pricing structure in a bid to woo enterprise and midsize IT professionals who still have doubts about a shared cloud solution. There is another option: IT-as-a-service (ITaaS), which leverages IT resources in cloudlike form without resorting to full-on, distributed deployment. Some experts call it the answer to public cloud computing. Can it really make peace?

A Pressurized Environment

According to an April 2 ZDNet article, lower prices combined with higher availability make public clouds an attractive option for many companies; so attractive, in fact, that IT departments may find themselves under pressure from C-suite executives and shadow IT guerrillas who desperately want cloud access. One possible answer is to meet halfway through the use of ITaaS…

Grazed from RPCMag. Author: Kurt Mackie.

Some of Microsoft’s cloud-based services have been endorsed by the European Union’s Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) as meeting EU privacy law standards. According to an announcement on Thursday by Microsoft, the 28 DPAs issued a joint letter on April 2 (PDF) signifying approval. The DPAs represent local authorities within the European Union that oversee privacy protections for data services.

Products such as "Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Windows Intune" have met privacy standards for transferring data outside the European Union, according to Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel and executive vice president of Legal and Corporate Affairs. Microsoft plans to ensure compliance by issuing standard agreements with its EU enterprise customers, starting on July 1…

Grazed from CloudEndure. Author: Editorial Staff.

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then nine infographics are worth at least nine thousand. So here are nine cloud infographics that will get you up to speed on cloud computing without getting too heavy on the text:..

To view infographics and read more from the source, visit https://www.cloudendure.com/blog/nine-cloud-computing-infographics/

Subscribe to the CloudCow bi-monthly newsletter @ http://eepurl.com/smZeb

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the finalists for the eighth annual Red Hat Innovation Awards. The awards program recognizes customers, partners and communities for their outstanding use, innovation, and extension of Red Hat technology.

The Red Hat Innovation Awards finalists are recognized in five separate categories with category winners being selected by a panel of experts and ranked based on the uniqueness, complexity, and magnitude of their Red Hat implementation. The panel of experts included: Lee Congdon, CIO, Red Hat; Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat; Carl Lehmann, research manager, Enterprise Architecture, Integration & Business Process Management, 451 Research; Laurent Lachal, cloud computing research lead, Ovum; Sean Michael Kerner, senior editor, eWEEK; and Fredric Paul, blogger, Network World and contributor, CIO, IT World, InfoWorld, and other publications…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation (Nasdaq: VTSS), a leading provider of advanced IC solutions for Carrier, Enterprise and Internet of Things (IoT) networks, announced that its SynchroPHY™ 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) and 10GE PHYs with Intellisec™ IEEE 802.1AE MACsec technology are the world’s first to achieve Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 197 256-bit AES encryption certification.

FIPS 197 is a de facto benchmark encryption standard issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which specifies the approved cryptographic algorithm to protect electronic data. 256-bit AES offers exponentially better data protection and is required by the U.S. National Security Agency for highly sensitive data. The FIPS certification validates solutions correctly implementing the AES algorithm, enabling OEMs to dramatically accelerate end product qualification and entry into markets with stringent security requirements, including military, government, secure industrial, financial, and HIPAA-compliant IT infrastructure…

Grazed from Channelnomics. Author: Dave Long.

When Ingram Micro Inc. took the wraps off its latest cloud services offerings this month, partners on both sides of the distribution equation paused to consider the ramifications. Distributors like Ingram long ago shucked off the middleman mantle and moved toward a greater role in services that broaden and deepen the capabilities of channel solution providers.

Rarely, however, do such moves put the distributor in direct competition with the vendors it represents nor do they raise the hackles of partners made uneasy by the growing capacity of their trusted advisor and enabler. With Ingram Micro’s latest cloud services expansion, things are different…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

Whenever an item becomes commonplace (some might use the word “commoditized”) we see marketplaces and brokerages rise up to make money from this commoditization. Cloud computing is an area in which brokerages have been long talked about (ever since vendor Enomaly launched its ultimately ill-fated, but arguably prescient marketplace SpotCloud many years ago).

The theory behind these cloud brokers is that they allow the relationship between vendor and customer to be optimized such that better outcomes are delivered for both parties. Or that’s the theory at least – it’s fair to say that brokerages haven’t really taken off. True, the Deutsche Boerse did launch a cloud exchange platform, the so called Cloud Exchange AG but for whatever reason, the concept has never really taken off…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Mobile computing devices have made headway in the Electronics industry in the last decade. Devices such as smartphones and tablets have become indispensable to most people across the world. Companies are increasingly encouraging their employees to work from home or other remote locations to ensure that employees are accessible during work hours.

On a similar note, there are organizations that are also implementing bring your own device policies, allowing employees to bring their personal mobile devices and connect them to the company’s network. All of this has been facilitated by mobile computing devices. The analysts have conducted an in-depth research on select mobile computing devices and forecast the respective markets to grow at the following CAGRs during the period 2012-2017…

Grazed from HealthDataManagement. Author: Joseph Goedert.

Many healthcare organizations migrating information systems to a cloud-hosted service struggle developing an appropriate strategy for the task, says Ed King, managing director of healthcare consulting services at disaster recovery and cloud-hosting vendor Sungard Availability Services. The Wayne, Pa.-based company split from software and processing services vendor SunGard in March and became an independent entity.

Moving to the cloud is not just a new way of doing computing-on-demand; it’s also a new way for personnel in an organization to use the technology. Almost always, not every system moves to the cloud, particularly legacy systems, King notes. There are a growing number of electronic health records systems and newer ancillary products being cloud-hosted by a remote vendor, while older secondary systems–back-office, financial, pharmacy and laboratory, for instance–may tie to cloud-based systems but remain in-house…