Category: News

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

My friend, Thomas, recently asked me: “What kind of work do you do with cloud, and how does it make the world a better place?” Wow, what a question! Should it be part of my professional goal to make the world a better place? This was an interesting idea, especially since IBM aims to “build a Smarter Planet” and, in general, smarter is better.

By keeping my eyes open, I found a scenario that not only describes cloud’s societal benefits—and includes mobile, social and big data. Thomas is a German Catholic, and one of the most exciting events in his life was the nomination of the German Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. In the picture below, you can see a split between 2005 and 2013, when a new pope was elected. In the 2005 portion of the image, almost no mobile devices such as phones or tablets are visible. People seemed to be listening to the ceremony and were not as concerned with sharing this experience with the rest of the world…

Grazed from GovExec. Author: Kimberly McCabe.

Federal acquisition professionals feel they lack expertise in cloud computing services and they are having trouble structuring contracts to buy them, according to two recent polls of subscribers to ASI Government’s Virtual Acquisition Office—an online center of research, tools and on-call support.

Because cloud computing offers agencies opportunities to reduce costs, enhance efficiency and empower innovation, it’s important for program and procurement professionals to become better cloud consumers. It helps to think about buying cloud computing as similar to purchasing water for a building…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

OnRamp, a leading Data Center operations company headquartered in Austin, TX, announced today that it will open a 42,000-square-foot Data Center in Austin with an invitation-only grand opening celebration on March 20, 2014. The facility will be the company’s second Data Center in Austin and third Data Center in the US. Design of the Data Center began in the fall of 2012.

OnRamp built the facility to meet the growing demand for its services, which include high security hosting, cloud computing, high density colocation and disaster recovery services. “We are excited to open a second, enterprise-class Data Center in Austin,” said OnRamp CEO Lucas Braun. “We’re an Austin-based company, and a large percentage of our managed and cloud hosting and high security hosting services are delivered by our teams in Austin.”…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.

Disaster recovery used to be the province of the rich and famous: Only the most deep-pocketed organizations could afford the equipment, effort and expertise needed to put together a comprehensive DR plan. In the past decade, though, virtualization has lowered the bar to disaster recovery. By running a hypervisor at a remote site, organizations can eliminate the need for exact hardware replicas at the DR site, greatly reducing costs and overhead.

Now, the public cloud has pushed DR one step further, using cloud computing advantages to remove the need for a dedicated remote location and hardware altogether. Further, the cloud’s pay-for-use model reduces monthly charges, prompting organizations to pay for protection only when they need it. Soup-to-nuts cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings, meanwhile, can also reduce the amount of on-staff expertise needed to pull off a DR initiative…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Butler.

Cloud computing was an estimated $47.4 billion industry in 2013 and is expected to more than double to $107 billion by 2017, research firm IDC predicts. The cloud’s 23.5% compound annual growth rate is five times faster than that of the broader technology market, IDC Vice President of data center and cloud Rick Villars said during the IDC Directions conference on Wednesday in Boston.

Cloud’s adoption has been driven by three major factors: scale, complexity and speed, Villars said. The cloud offers scale that regular businesses do not have, which allows them to deliver more complex services faster. The explosion of mobile devices was one of the first megatrends that significantly ramped up the need for cloud computing services…

Grazed from BusinessCloudNews. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

Research commissioned by Microsoft and published Wednesday suggests nearly half of organisations using cloud services have moved beyond initial pilot phases, and 32 per cent of enterprises articulating and implementing clear cloud computing strategies within their organisations despite concerns around data protection and security. But the findings also suggest that pervasive concerns around security, while certainly a challenge for cloud service providers and enterprises, may also be a boon for other players.

The research, which includes interviews and survey responses of over 2,000 IT decision-makers working in business of all sizes in eleven countries reveals that over 45 per cent of those that participated claim to be well beyond the pilot phase of implementing cloud services within their organisations…

Grazed from CircleID. Author: Peter JH Van Eijk.

The number one concern cited for avoiding cloud computing is security. And there is a reason for that. Cloud providers have demonstrated some spectacular failures in the past, including Amazon’s near total shutdown of an entire region, Dropbox’s authentication snafu, and innumerous cloud providers that go belly-up.

However, in the long run, cloud computing is destined to become more secure than in-house IT. I will briefly describe two dynamics in the industry that point in that direction, with substantiating evidence. First, good cloud providers are getting better, as they have more staff available to do security, and bigger economies of scale, allowing them to sustain more security processes…

Grazed from Syncplicity. Author: PR Announcement.

Syncplicity announced a new release of its Syncplicity Business Edition that now offers full and seamless support for Google Docs™. With this latest release, Google Apps™ customers can now synchronize any desktop file such as Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Adobe Acrobat PDF, JPEG, ZIP, CAD and other files with Google Docs.

Syncplicity’s unique seamless synchronization means users can now have the choice to create and edit their files in their favorite application, such as grammar checking a file in Microsoft Word and then collaborating on that same file in Google Docs. In addition, through Syncplicity, users with files in Google Docs benefit from centralized management and backups, instantaneous synchronization across multiple computers, policy-controlled sharing and collaboration, and offline, anywhere access…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Gilad Parann-Nissany.

In 2008, the size of the cloud computing industry was $46 Billion. That is more than the GDP of Costa Rica! Think it’s a lot? Ready to jump on the cloud security bandwagon? That was 2008! In 2014, the size of the cloud computing industry has more than tripled to $150 Billion – almost the GDP of New Zealand. NOW are you ready?

Besides the fact that everyone else is doing it, migrating to the cloud just makes good business sense. Whether you select a private cloud, a public cloud, or some hybrid of the two, cloud computing is just more powerful than traditional datacenters. There are several reasons for this. First, the reduced capital costs of IT infrastructure – no need for hardware, software, and manpower (and training) to manage them. Also, there is the improved accessibility, effectiveness, flexibility and scalability of the cloud…

Grazed from Peak10. Author: Ken Donoghue.

There is strong evidence that cloud computing and cloud storage will experience big growth spurts this year. The cloud has more to offer than ever before, and competition among providers for mindshare is producing highly differentiated products with real appeal to businesses of all sizes and types, particularly in the mid-market.

Three contributors stand out. The cloud offerings have matured mightily over the past few years, particularly in the area of security and compliance, making the cloud more attractive all around. Maturity in the cloud storage arena has been accompanied by a massive expansion in data generation and data analytics; it all has to go somewhere…