Category: News

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

The use of cloud resources is basic — so basic, in fact, that it’s difficult for me to see why others find it difficult. Despite their experience and smarts, many need help, which is why I can make a living as a cloud consultant. We all win. Unfortunately, other people also hear the cloud music and want to crash the party. As the use of the cloud broadens, these party-crashers are showing up in droves, claiming they can help you implement the cloud. Watch out for these three types of self-described but woefully unqualified cloud experts.

1. The "I’ve been doing cloud for 30 years" guy

I understand that you used time-share systems back in the day, but trying to link that experience with modern cloud-based systems is flat-out ridiculous. I’m old, too. I’ve used time-share systems. They aren’t clouds. Cloud computing is about the use of granular services that are formed and reformed into solutions…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

SoftNAS, the #1 NAS in the Cloud, today launched the SoftNAS 2.1 upgrade for SoftNAS Cloud™ for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The upgrade delivers several unique features, including the only cross-zone high availability (HA) with the first patent-pending Elastic HA™ technology on AWS Marketplace of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS Cross-Zone HA provides failover across Amazon EC2 availability zones for NFS and CIFS to provide non-stop storage operation for mission-critical applications. Elastic HA utilizes an enhanced elastic IP address to deliver up to 99.999 percent reliability and seamless automatic failover within approximately 20 seconds…

Grazed from Voicendata. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), which works on bringing advancement in enterprise cloud solutions and services, has unveiled its third annual membership survey that highlighted continued growth in adoption of cloud computing by Alliance members, and also the broad market trends, including the usage of ODCA models to guide cloud purchases.

The 2013 annual ODCA membership survey, which took into account information from 124 members, found that 31% of respondents are running at least 40% of their IT operations in an internal cloud. This number is expected to grow up to 70% of respondents by 2016. Moreover, the findings also showed that 74% of respondents who are already using or plan to use ODCA’s usage model requirements in requests for proposals (RFPs) in the next six months, an inclination from 63% in 2012…

Grazed from Mobile Enterprise. Author: Editorial Staff.

Armor5 has extended its Zero Touch Cloud Security service to Google Apps for Business, including Google Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive and Google Sheets. The Cloud Security app gives enterprises protection against data leakage, compliance exposures and privacy breaches at the last mile between the cloud and the device.

“By 2018, 25% of corporate data traffic will bypass traditional perimeter security defenses (up from 4% today) by flowing directly from mobile devices to the cloud,” according to the Gartner report: “Gartner, Predicts 2014: CSPs’ Opportunities and Challenges Will Arise from Cloud Computing and Mobility Trends.” The report advises, “As the adoption of cloud computing and mobility accelerates, new revenue opportunities will emerge, together with the need for better service reliability and security. CSP strategists should move quickly on the opportunities and address associated challenges…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Jane Irene Kelly.

In the cloud, there’s room for everybody. But many small and medium business (SMB) owners have hesitated to use the Internet-based operating system because of concerns about the cost and potential security risks. That’s changing fast. As cloud computing matures, more flexible and cheaper options have emerged and the productivity gains have become hard to ignore.

A 2013 survey by the National Small Business Association found that 43 percent of small firms were utilizing cloud computing — a huge jump from just five percent in 2010. International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that SMB spending on cloud solutions will grow 20 percent in the next five years…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Anyone attending the latest industry conferences, reading the trade press, or viewing analyst reports can be forgiven for thinking that the entire world has suddenly become digitized. But we’re not quite there yet — most organizations are still in the midst of an often painful evolution to shed manual processes and stovepiped systems to bring themselves closer to the digital realm. And the benefits aren’t so clear cut yet.

Going “digital” is today’s call to arms across the business landscape, and the changes being wrought are potentially far-reaching. Becoming a digital business means employing information technology to manage operations, as well as develop and deliver new products and services. As a recent thought leadership piece released by Accenture puts it: “industrial companies are becoming customer service companies. Consumer products companies are becoming Internet companies. Energy companies are becoming information companies. And media and entertainment companies are becoming logistics companies.”…

Grazed from TheNewsReports. Author: Editorial Staff.

Despite the lacklustre response to wearable tech by consumers so far most of the companies in the smartphone and tablet industry are pressing ahead with releasing devices that are worn as well as used in 2014. In the last week Google have revealed further hints at to what these devices will be like after releasing the app developer software for an Android powered smartwatch.

Google’s smartwatch app development focuses on their own device for the market, the Motorola smartwatch that has been called the ‘Moto 360’. The specs all indicate that it will be an always-online device, with most of the computing and programmes running it doing so via cloud computing. This is inline with the direction other companies, in particular Microsoft, are taking – cloud storage and cloud computing are considered essential in the face of the low storage space available on mobile and wearable devices. The device being offered by LG, the G watch, will take a similar approach…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Sean Rhody and Kevin L. Jackson.

Cloud computing has introduced a new model of acquiring hardware and software. In reality, you aren’t acquiring anything physical, and much of the value of moving to the cloud is driven by the transition from using physical resources (hardware, software, and labor hours) to the consumption of online services (infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and software-as-a-service) that deliver similar functions.

While the technical aspect of this change seems to capture all the headlines, the financial and governance aspects are just as important — but end up on the back burner. Unfortunately, the necessary changes in management policy, acquisition processes, and organizational behavior rarely get the planning they deserve or get executed properly in advance. This disconnect can quickly derail any cloud transition…

Grazed from Health24. Author: Editorial Staff.

IBM is teaming up with the New York Genome Centre to help fight brain cancer. The company said that its Watson cloud computing system will be used in partnership with a New York-based genetic research centre mainly to help sequence DNA for the treatment of glioblastoma, the most common type of brain cancer in US adults.

New York Genome Centre, a consortium of academic, medical and industry officials, will use Watson to sequence the DNA of cancer tumours at much faster rate than would be possible if done by a human being. The DNA information would then be combined with clinical information and fed to Watson to help determine the best way to treat a particular patient…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

A survey of the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) membership found that the most popular usage model for members is infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which was noted by 86 percent of the respondents. It far outweighs any other category, including service orchestration (49 percent), virtual machine interoperability (48 percent), service catalog (39 percent) and scale-out storage (39 percent).

According to the ODCA, the survey highlights the continued growth in cloud computing adoption by the organization’s members—not a far stretch considering part of the purpose of the ODCA is to push adoption of cloud computing models. But the ODCA goes even further, noting its members are ahead of broad market trends…