Category: News

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

By this point, the financial benefits of cloud computing (and cloud-based file sharing) are becoming obvious to all. But as this article points out, there are quite a few more that don’t receive the attention they probably should. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the reasons besides saving money that companies may want to transition to cloud based file sharing:

Accessibility – Next to the financial benefits, accessibility is probably the most frequently mentioned advantage. In the mobile, multi-device world we live in, accessible data is paramount to the corporate world. Most people today have smartphones, tablets, laptops and work computers (or more!) and want or need to be able to access their corporate data on all of them…

Grazed from Fool. Author: Adrian Campos.

The cloud is poised for rapid growth in the the business world. A growing number of companies are swapping traditional IT systems for affordable cloud-computing services to improve efficiency. Aware of the cloud market’s huge potential, tech giant Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) is looking forward to offering a new cloud service. The networking company plans to spend $1 billion on this project over the next two years, called Cisco Cloud Services.

At first glance, Cisco’s new venture could be regarded as yet another cloud service. However, the service that Cisco plans to provide is well-differentiated. The company plans to use OpenStack technology — an open-source cloud-computing platform for private and public clouds — to create a global intercloud, which is a network of clouds designed for high-value application workloads. Cisco will likely employ an infrastructure as a service, or IaaS, model…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Amazon Web Services hopes to entice more Hadoop users to its Elastic MapReduce service with new virtual servers, one of which has 262GB of memory and 6.4TB of storage for big-data analytics. On Tuesday, the company launched 12 new virtual servers or instances that organizations can use to run their applications using Elastic MapReduce clusters. Potential applications include Web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, financial analysis, scientific simulation and bioinformatics research.

Hadoop is an open-source platform that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers. The MapReduce framework assigns work to nodes in the cluster. Amazon’s compute-optimized c3.8xlarge virtual server is aimed at tasks such as image processing. It has 32 vCPUs (virtual CPUs), 64GB of memory, two times 320GB of SSD storage and 10Gbps network connectivity…

Grazed from CNet. Author: Stephen Shankland.

Prime numbers are endlessly fascinating to computing and math fans, and there’s an infinite supply of them. A Microsoft contest succeeds in fleshing out the list of primes that aren’t actually the largest. A contest to promote technical education and Microsoft’s cloud-computing infrastructure has turned up a previously unknown prime number more than 342,000 digits long — and a bunch of other smaller ones.

The Microsoft Prime Challenge contest winner, a US resident who goes by the username PHunterLau, also turned up at least four other primes in the contest. The object of the competition was not to find the largest prime ever, but instead to find primes within the wide swaths of unexplored territory that current prime-number search techniques don’t scrutinize…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

It’s a tradition as old as the hills, from the BBC’s scoop on spaghetti trees in 1957 to Google’s Pokemon Maps earlier today. Not surprisingly the hype around cloud has prompted a few firms to try their own spoof stories on April Fool’s Day. Here are three of CloudTech’s favourites.

Digital Science, a technology division of Macmillan Science and Education, posted worrying findings this morning that “the computing cloud is drifting towards the North Pole.”

In a blog post entitled ‘Cloud computing suffers a major blow’, the company has evidence to suggest that “global warming and the changes thus caused in the Jet Stream pose a danger to ‘the cloud’.”…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Implementing cloud computing is a pragmatic decision that needs to be executed with painstaking attention to detail and a deep and broad understanding of an organization’s needs. The good news, according to Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com), is that it is possible to start the journey toward cloud computing one step at a time from wherever the organization is today, and even realize some efficiencies and performance rewards in the early stages.

It’s a challenging process that requires CIOs to clearly define where they are as well as where they want to be, but the payback is worth it: If it can be defined in enough detail, it can be done. To help, Logicalis has put together a four-point checklist that will help CIOs and IT managers set off with confidence on the road to cloud computing…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Editorial Staff.

When large enterprises move to a public infrastructure cloud (such as Amazon Web Services or others), it is a gradual, and often times, carefully measured process. Large enterprises strive for 100 percent certainty that the migration process will not impact the business; therefore, they’ll usually start slowly, by migrating one application or process to the cloud.

This is where hybrid clouds kick in. Hybrid clouds offer (just as their name insinuates) a hybrid between on-premise and cloud infrastructure. But once even part of the business is in the cloud, the need arises for cloud security. As data is migrated away from the local “safe” data center, access to the information is no longer controlled by the enterprise, and different, cloud-oriented, security measures must be considered…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Madeline Bennett.

The global software market grew by five percent last year, highlighting businesses’ willingness to invest in newer technologies such as big data and the cloud while making savings on hardware investments. Overall, $407.3bn was spent on software last year, compared with $388.5bn in 2012. The top earner was Microsoft, which raked in a massive $65.7bn in software sales, compared with $62bn the previous year.

Despite the Redmond firm’s recent struggles to cement its place in the world of mobile and cloud, Microsoft’s results show just how strong a hold it still has on the software market, with its revenues more than double that of its closest competitor. The firm will no doubt be hoping the death of Windows XP will help raise this number further, as businesses finally start to migrate to newer Windows 7 or 8.1 systems…

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud. Author: Allan Tate.

Many of my clients are in the healthcare field, so a common question is if data can be managed on IBM cloud computing solutions in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The relevant part of this law, enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996, establishes rules for the storage and transmission of electronic health information. In summary, these rules are:

• Privacy Rule: regulates the use and disclosure of protected health information

• Security Rule: sets national standards for the security of electronic protected health information

• Breach Notification Rule: requires that entities and business associates notify affected individuals (and others) following a breach of unsecured protected health information…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

A new report by Tariff Consultancy Ltd (TCL) finds that public cloud computing pricing is becoming increasingly competitive, with price reductions averaging 10 per cent per annum, with private (dedicated) cloud services also seeing a decline in pricing – as new virtualized services with a high degree of automation are being made available even for the SME enterprise.

Cloud computing services are typically being offered on a per hour or a per GB basis for virtualized computing power, storage and bandwidth. Providers are offering services based on a simple hourly rate based on a per GB or per unit of computing power or per defined Computing Instance…