Category: News

Grazed from CIO. Author: John Grady.

In today’s technological landscape, it’s not unusual to hear about putting your files “in the cloud.” Everyone seems to be doing it, from personal exchanges to business transactions. In simple terms, cloud computing takes the old system of running programs and saving files onto a computer’s hard drive, and makes it Internet-based instead.

For businesses of all sizes, running your operations and applications using the cloud is becoming increasingly popular for a number of reasons, especially because it saves money, it’s fast and easy, and it is available almost anywhere with an Internet connection. However, there are many other benefits for companies looking to make a change in the way they do business. Here are the top six reasons why you should consider using cloud computing for your enterprise:..

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Atul Shetiya and Pankaj Sabnis.

Over the past few years, cloud computing and mobility have emerged as mainstream technologies transforming enterprises’ ICT adoption and spending. Begun as a phenomenon of consumer technologies moving into the business world like social networking, cloud storage and mobile devices (smartphones and tablets), the above trends are now driving the enterprise-wide IT ecosystems.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the rapid advancements in above technologies is being driven by the economics of value created by change, for instance, shifting of investments from CAPEX to OPEX and rapid consumerization. If we learn about their play in current IT user landscape, in many ways, mobility and cloud computing play a congruent role from both consumer and enterprise user standpoint…

Grazed from ITNews. Author: Munir Kotadia.

Adoption of internal cloud technologies have increased by 50 percent in a year while public cloud usage seems to have stalled, according to the most recent survey of The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) members. The ODCA is a global organisation that was formed in 2010 to promote the adoption of interoperable, non-proprietary cloud technologies. This was its third annual survey investigating adoption of its members’ cloud computing and data analytics technologies.

The survey found that in the past 12 months, the number of respondents already running more than 40 percent of their workloads in internal clouds had increased from 20 percent to 31 percent. This figure is expected to grow as high as 70 percent by 2016. For the first time in its annual survey, the ODCA measured the adoption of virtual private and community cloud…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: Therese Poletti.

However, in after-hours trading, investors largely focused on the miss, with Oracle shares falling nearly 4% to $37.47, after the software giant reported adjusted earnings per share of 68 cents a share, versus analyst estimates of 70 cents a share. At one point in after-hours trading, Oracle’s shares were down 5.3%. Oracle ORCL -2.68% attributed the 2-cent miss to currency issues in Venezuela and their impact on its Venezuelean subsidiary..

“EPS [earnings per share] this year was reduced by two cents due to a currency re-measurement non-operating loss for Venezuela that obviously had not been included in my guidance,” Oracle Chief Financial Officer and Co-President Safra Catz told analysts in a conference call…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

Much has been made recently about "green" clouds. Along with server agility and data portability, many providers sell public clouds as environmentally friendly. On the surface, green cloud computing makes sense: If data moves from redundant local stacks to a single superserver, especially one shared with other midsize companies, one might expect the natural result to be lower energy consumption and a greener outlook. This is not always the case. Conservation is the current buzzword, but intelligent consumption may provide greater benefits over the long term.

Measure Twice, Scale Once

As discussed by a March 16 Forbes article, several large companies such as Facebook and eBay have provided the code they use to track power and water consumption in their data centers. eBay published its code last year whereas Facebook just went public as part of the Open Compute Project. The social giant split the code into pieces: A user interface component and a back-end data aggregator that can be made to work together or separately depending on business needs…

Grazed from Virtual Bridges. Author: Editorial Staff.

Employees are going to continue introducing new mobile devices and operating systems into the corporate network; IT pros must get ahead of this trend and decide how to protect their company’s sensitive data without actually owning the devices being used to access it. Is your organization prepared for this “bring your own device” challenge? Here are four things you need to know in order to succeed in the adventures of BYOD.

To view the infographic and read more from the source, visit http://vbridges.com/resource/infographic-byod-top-4-things-know/

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Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Google and Cisco are teaming up in the enterprise collaboration market, bundling WebEx with Chromebooks and integrating the Cisco Web conferencing and online meeting product with Google Apps. The companies announced on Tuesday that two of their high-ranking executives demonstrated a "proof of concept" of WebEx running on a Chromebook, something that hasn’t been possible to date.

Rajen Sheth, director of product management, Chrome for Business, and Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group, also demonstrated interoperability between Google Apps and WebEx, such as the ability to join a WebEx meeting from a Google Calendar item, the companies said…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

CradlePoint, the global leader in cloud-managed, 3G/4G networking solutions for distributed enterprises, today announced that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). CSA is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing. CradlePoint’s participation within the alliance provides an additional layer of confidence and aligns its cloud-based management solution, Enterprise Cloud Manager, with an industry-accepted framework.

CradlePoint’s Enterprise Cloud Manager will look to the Cloud Security Alliance Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) as a security framework for the solution. CCM provides fundamental security principles that are aligned to Cloud Security Alliance guidance in 13 distinct domains. The foundation of the Cloud Controls Matrix was built based on industry-accepted security standards, regulations, and control frameworks. The CCM provides the needed structure, detail and clarity relating to information security tailored to the evolving cloud industry…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Frank J. Ohlhorst.

As any networking professional knows, downtime costs money. However, few know exactly how much money downtime costs. Estimates, calculations, and incidentals are all open to interpretation. This creates a lot of uncertainty. Cloud computing is a good tool to use here. Many IT pros are turning to cloud-based technologies to mitigate the cost of downtime. However, is the viability of a cloud migration backed by facts or based on suppositions?

The assumption that cloud services can reduce downtime is founded on the belief that third-party providers deploy all sorts of continuity technology that all but guarantees uptime. That belief, coupled with service-level agreements (SLAs) that make promises about limiting unscheduled interruptions in service, can give you a sense of security. The real question becomes whether that sense of security is false or justified — and, more importantly, whether a value can be assigned to it…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

There’s a lot of discussion these days on the benefits of the cloud. It’s known for saving organizations – large and small – a great deal of time, money and headache. What may not come to mind immediately are the environmental benefits of cloud based computing. “Going Green” and reducing the corporate carbon footprint have also been fairly recent trends among companies.

Not only is it a way for businesses to make drastic changes in the preservation of our planet; it’s a good way for them to improve their public image. As an MSP, you may not have initially considered your services to be “environmentally friendly.” Well, according to this article from Sustainablebrands.com, you might want to reconsider that idea…