Category: News

Grazed from GovHealthIT. Author: Tom Sullivan.

A majority of government organizations are planning to institute technology uber-trends within the next three years. The only thing is: A hefty percentage of them lack the infrastructure to actually do so. That’s according to a survey conducted by MeriTalk and, while the self-described government IT network polled state and local officials spanning the array of departments, its findings are particularly applicable to healthcare. MeriTalk lists the Big Five of IT as big data, cloud computing, data center consolidation, mobility, and security.

"Public health departments have perhaps the most to gain from Big Five initiatives,” said Steve O’Keeffe, founder, MeriTalk. “Mobile health drives community engagement, big data delivers better understanding of population health drivers, security keeps private information private.” That said, will state and local health departments follow through on intentions to adopt those technologies?…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Daniel Price.

Everyone knows what the cloud is, but does everybody know where the cloud is? We try to answer that as we look at some of the most unusual data centre locations in the world.

Under the Eyes of a Deity

Deep beneath the famous Uspenski Cathedral in the heart of Helsinki lies a converted World War II bomb shelter, which sees an unlikely fusion of data storage and green technology. Estimates suggest that in a typical data centre only 40 percent of energy use is for computing, with the remainder being used for cooling down the servers. The problem is so serious that data centres account for as much as 30 percent of a corporation’s energy bills and 1 percent of energy usage worldwide…

Grazed from Alavara. Author: PR Announcement.

Avalara Inc., (http://www.Avalara.com), a leading provider of sales tax and compliance automation services in the cloud, today announced it has been named as one of the top 100 Coolest Cloud Vendors of 2014 by CRN. The annual list recognizes the most innovative cloud vendors and solutions tailored to address the channel industry’s unique needs. Avalara was honored for its SaaS-based end-to-end compliance platform, AvaTax.

Each year, CRN honors the 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors in an effort to help solution providers navigate the growing cloud marketplace and identify the best solutions to support the IT channel. Winners are named across five major cloud categories including platforms and tools, infrastructure, storage, security and software, based on data and information gathered from both solution provider nominations and the CRN editorial team. Within the 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors list, Avalara was named to the 20 Coolest Cloud Software Vendors category…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Vladimir Jirasek.

Companies are increasingly using clouds to reach for business agility, lowering costs and putting pressure on internal IT teams to improve. The question of whether a company should use public or private cloud service cannot be answered without some definitions first. Fortunately, the Cloud Security Alliance has done a tremendous amount of good work by publishing a comprehensive guidance on cloud computing.

In the guidance, a public cloud is defined as such where multiple customers, who are not related to each other, share the service. Consequently, a private cloud is the opposite of public, but with a twist. There are two types of private clouds defined: on-premise and off-premise. As the names suggest, the former is in the customers datacentre, most likely operated by the IT team, while the latter are services provided to customers with infrastructure, platform or software, while ensuring that the service is not shared with other customers…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.

Organizations fully utilizing cloud computing save on average more than 15 percent in IT spending, whether measured as a percentage of revenue or on a per-user basis, according to a report from Computer Economics. A more detailed analysis of respondents’ IT spending mix shows that the savings come not only from a reduction in data center spending but also in IT personnel costs.

The cloud user organizations that participated in the study include two manufacturing companies, a life sciences organization, a wholesale distributor, a systems integrator and an online content provider. The full study provides a description of the survey respondents, including their industries, sizes and cloud system portfolios…

Grazed from AFR. Author: Trevor Clarke.

For all intents and purposes the Australian cloud computing market appears to be thriving. But while the pundits continue to claim it’s the way of the future, tech infrastructure run on businesses’ premises is far from dead. Analyst firms like IDC say the domestic cloud-computing market has become a billion-dollar industry and is likely to break through the $2.5 billion mark in 2017.

Over 80 per cent of the firm’s survey respondents say they are using one form or another of cloud computing. These are promising numbers. Anecdotal evidence in the form of enterprise chief information officers publicly espousing their support for using the cloud, including public cloud services, abounds. And, egged on by true believers, there is a steady stream of “we now have a cloud-first policy” emanating from government policymakers across Australia…

Grazed from Gadget. Author: Editorial Staff.

A cloud-based IT delivery model can speed up application development and provide flexible environments to accommodate the dynamic and unpredictable needs of the organisation and its customers. As cloud services continue to evolve and become increasingly vital for success, it’s critical to understand the inhibitors that are leaving many unsure about how to jump into the cloud, including: managing complexity, creating or preserving IT agility, and maintaining control of valuable business data.

Complexity

Dealing with complexity is often a significant inhibitor for businesses that are considering incorporating public cloud into their IT environment. Companies often struggle with the idea of ‘How do I get started?’ Choosing from the variety of services offering different service levels, different virtualisation and compute platforms, and different data management frameworks can be a daunting task for any CIO’s team. In addition, many organisations are perplexed with how to manage elements of IT across a blend of private and public cloud resources, particularly the intricacies of managing data across disparate locations and platforms in a hybrid environment…

Grazed from AFR. Author: Paul Smith.

Adrian Di Marco, executive chairman of ASX-listed software company ­TechnologyOne, has hit out at a growing army of “false prophet” consultants and systems integrators who claim to be able to provide expert advice on cloud computing strategy, saying they waste customers’ money and are a blight on the industry.

Mr Di Marco was speaking to The Australian Financial Review to mark the signing of a new $15 million contract for TechnologyOne to provide a state-wide school administration software package to the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria. He said the deal was evidence that customers were beginning to ­recognise the value of signing on with vendors who built the software, ­implemented it and then took responsibility for managing the infrastructure…

Grazed from CIOL.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Interoute, owner operator of Europe’s largest cloud services platform, has completed ISO 20000 certification across its Prague Operations Centre and Amsterdam, Berlin and Geneva Data Centre operations.

The comprehensive scope of the ISO 20000 certification aligns to ITIL service management industry best practices applied to Interoute’s Unified Computing. The certification represents a significant milestone in Interoute’s continued efforts to provide quality and secure outsourced business technology solutions to the world’s leading organisations…

Grazed from Voxy.co.nz.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A unique-to-New Zealand version of the famous and popular Dropbox application has been created by an Upper Hutt-based company.  Layer3 has developed Filecloud, an application that does everything Dropbox does, but adds on some additional bells and whistles.  Chief executive, Hayden Kirk, says the application took six months to develop, but has been snapped up quickly by willing customers.

It’s designed to serve as a basic application with a smooth and familiar user interface for business which just want a simple file storage option, and as a sophisticated administration and document management tool for IT departments that need serious analysis and auditing of file management information…