Category: News

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.

After Google’s drastic price cuts for its cloud computing services, Amazon quickly matched them. Given that Microsoft always promised to match prices, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the company today announced its own round of massive price cuts. Prices for compute on Microsoft Azure (previously known as Windows Azure) dropped by up to 35 percent and Microsoft cut storage prices by up to 65 percent. With these changes, Microsoft matches all of Amazon’s prices and sometimes undercuts them by 1 to 6 percent.

“We recognize that economics are a primary driver for some customers adopting cloud, and stand by our commitment to match prices and be best-in-class on price performance,” the company writes in its announcement today. Today’s announcement comes just a few days ahead of Microsoft’s big BUILD developer conference, but as Microsoft general manager for Azure Steven Martin writes today, “I’ve yet to meet a developer who travels just to hear about pricing updates, so you won’t see us take the stage at BUILD and use the opening moment to announce a price cut.”…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

Ingram Micro (IM) is pushing its cloud wares to a wider global channel, with the news of its plans to transform itself into a worldwide cloud services provider. Nimesh Dave, Ingram Micro’s executive vice president of Global Cloud Computing, will lead the company’s bid for worldwide cloud dominance with the new expansion of its program. According to the distributor, Dave will be essential in coordinating the company’s cloud services business in approximately 170 countries and driving continued expansion for Ingram’s global operations.

"Ingram Micro’s proven expertise, experience and ability to execute as a master cloud services aggregator has accelerated our success and positioned us as one of the Top 100 cloud providers," said Dave in a prepared statement. "Ingram Micro’s recent acquisition of SoftCom and adoption of a best-in-class automation platform also serve as significant growth catalysts that will further enable us to scale our cloud services success globally."…

Grazed from SeekingAlpha. Author: Michael Blair.

Salesforce.com (CRM) is one of a pile of Cloud computing companies sharing space in a market deeply into "bubble" territory where dark Clouds are forming and we are heading for a storm. The silliness is evident in Cloud storage firm Box Inc. filing for an initial public offering despite massive losses since it started up with its deficit reaching $361 million by January 31, 2014.

Almost half that cumulative deficit came from Box Inc.’s $169 million loss in the fiscal year ended on that date, according to its SEC filings. Profits are not expected any time soon. The lack of profits in current operations is seen as a positive by investors in Cloud companies as I see it – no pesky analysis of price earnings multiples and no easy way to tell when a stock is undervalued, richly valued or overvalued…

Grazed from DataBagg. Author: Neeti Patial.

A lot has been said and heard about latest in technology and business-critical data storage; everyone is just talking about none other than cloud computing as it has become the talk of the town these days. Understandably, cloud computing symbolizes a momentous step ahead in how businesses share and store files and data. Even though it does have its own downsides, it seems foreseeable that cloud services in coming future will persist to evolve till the time it will become a norm for businesses. Consequently, the main pros and cons of cloud computing for business that are looking forward to embrace this new technology are as follows:

Pros:

-Cloud computing enables the end-users to easily access their most significant files round the clock and from anywhere. For businesses with a large number of employees either working from home or on the move, cloud services can without doubt resolve many of the access related concerns that they might have been facing so far…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Maribel Lopez.

CEO Satya Nadella’s first major press conference last week was a return to basics for Microsoft. It focused the vision and the technology, not the glitz and glamour. The pacing and rally cries were replaced with literary quotes. Gates once spoke of a PC on every desk. Nadella talks about the cloud fueling every device and Microsoft cloud software becoming a crucial part of this ecosystem.

In the excitement surrounding Office for the iPad, many people I’ve spoken with have overlooked the key message that Nadella discussed on Thursday. First, Nadella proclaimed that it is a mobile cloud world. “The cloud is how a device becomes your device. And the cloud is how your device becomes part of your life, by connecting to all the people, information and experiences that matter to you…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: William Jackson.

The government has established an online collaboration called Project Interoperability to help develop tools and technologies for sharing threat information among organizations inside and outside of government. The project, recently launched by the Information Sharing Environment (ISE), a partnership between the defense and intelligence communities, addresses the need to make intelligence useable by many parties to counter increasingly sophisticated threats to national and cyber-security.

The need for better information sharing was one of the primary lessons learned from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Increased dependence on the Internet and the recent emergence — and convergence — of cloud and mobile computing to make systems and data accessible anytime from anywhere have stepped up the need for automated collaboration against attacks…

Grazed from KMWorld. Author: Stephen E. Arnold.

Cloud computing and big data appear to be a new technology marriage made in heaven. For many organizations, the cloud and big data could crack the knowledge management problem. In 2011, the National Institute for Science & Technology (NIST) published a draft definition of cloud computing. The definition articulated several "essential characteristics," service models and deployment models.

The main idea is that most enterprise applications can run in a time-sharing setup with such bells and whistles as collaboration, reports and guaranteed uptime. On-premises systems—despite their security advantages—require specialized staff. To control costs and shift from the hard-to-control expense of on-premise systems, cloud computing offers a managed solution. If the costs are about the same or higher, the efficiencies of outsourcing appear to make sense to many organizations…

Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications. Author: Scott M. Fulton III.

On first reading, it sounds like a stretch. For many legal scholars, it continues sounding like a stretch after the twelfth reading. But given the historically unique confluence of circumstances leading up to next month’s round of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of ABC v. Aereo, it’s impossible to rule it out entirely: Aereo’s argument is that, if the distribution of programming from its cloud-based servers to its subscribers’ devices counts as a "performance"–and thus a potential copyright violation–then any distribution of media from a cloud server to those same devices should also count as "performances."

Aereo is the innovative service, backed by former TV network chief Barry Diller, that uses arrays of patented micro-antennas to capture over-the-air TV signals, and then delivers those signals through cloud servers to Internet-based clients. It’s a subscription service that can deliver (almost) live television to viewers in locales where VHF antennas and coaxial cables can’t reach…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

Server virtualization is a given for most midsize businesses. Any company running on a shared public cloud stack understands that while their data lives alongside information from other customers, there is no communication and no diffusion of data across hypervisor partitions. The result is a single server taking the place of multiple servers and portioning out resources as needed. While it is easy to argue for cloud computing as the final step in the virtual chain, the emergence of viable network virtualization technologies may be changing this landscape again.

Not So Smart?

Virtualized networks are not new. As a recent Forbes article notes, they are needed to operate multiple guest operating systems (OSs) on most physical servers; but this first-gen network virtualization technology is not particularly bright. Author Kurt Marko describes the infrastructure as "rather dumb devices, really more bridges than switches, and completely isolated from and ignorant of the underlying physical network topology they operate on." New technologies aim to bolster virtual network intelligence using overlay software, tunneling protocols such as VXLAN or NVGRE and software plug-ins that permit hypervisor oversight. In short, network virtualization is getting schooled…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Andrew Froelich.

If you look at the most popular roles in enterprise IT today compared to a decade ago, you’ll notice that key IT roles have changed dramatically. Today’s hot IT jobs — including security engineers, server virtualization administrators, and mobile developers — were nonexistent or played a far less significant role in the past. We can expect the same to happen in the future. One role starting to develop prominence is what’s known as an "IT service broker."

And if you don’t think your department needs one now, you probably will see the need in the not too distant future. Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014 called out the IT service broker as a position that would be gaining importance in cloud-leveraged organizations. The broker’s responsibilities are to work with public, private, and hybrid cloud service providers to assist in the design, implementation, and support of cloud services…