Category: News

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Jungah Lee & Cornelius Rahn.

SAP AG (SAP), the biggest maker of business-management software, plans to step up cooperation with Samsung Group to overcome a slump in Asia and speed its transition to cloud computing. “Cloud is one of the future trends that we are trying to bring into Korea,” co-Chief Executive Officer Jim Hagemann Snabe said in an interview in Seoul today. “Samsung plays an important role in making sure that their handsets are optimized for SAP software.”

The Walldorf, Germany-based software giant is also in talks with local Samsung rival LG Electronics Inc. (066570) and mobile operators including SK Telecom Co. and KT Corp. to speed the adoption of its next-generation Hana database technology and cloud service in South Korea…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud hosting platform provider DigitalOcean has unveiled a new Amsterdam data center to expand its footprint in Europe and offer its shared private networking technology to the region. With DigitalOcean’s shared private networking feature, previously only available in the company’s NYC2 datacenter, customers gain "the ability to create a virtual server containing both a public and private address, where any communication that happens over the private address happens over a private network," DigitalOcean CEO Ben Uretsky told Talkin’ Cloud.

The company’s expansion throughout Europe remains a top priority for Digital Ocean, Uretsky said. "We’ll continue to invest heavily in our infrastructure as more datacenters are added throughout the world," he said. "We are looking to add capacity throughout Europe…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

IBM is looking to jumpstart cloud adoption by launching a catalog of applications aimed at specific vertical industry segments as part of its larger effort to deeply embed IBM services inside business processes. The expansion of the IBM Cloud Consulting portfolio announced today represents a concerted effort to help organizations make the shift to the cloud using turnkey application solutions that can be quickly deployed on top of the SoftLayer cloud platform that IBM acquired earlier this year.

According to Sanjay Rishi, global leader for IBM cloud consulting services, organizations of all sizes are looking for help in moving to the cloud because they lack the internal expertise required to build, deploy and manage cloud applications. IBM plans to address that need via a series of applications developed by its consulting group that customers can then customize as needed. In particular, Rishi says IBM has developed a massive amount of analytics expertise that will increasingly be delivered as a service within social networking and mobile computing applications. Rishi says the convergence of social networking, mobile computing, analytics and cloud computing, which IBM collectively refers to as SMAC, is requiring organizations to look for external help to capture the millions of dollars in value that those applications can represent to the enterprise…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steve Ranger.

These behemoths of computing might not be as exciting to young developers as cloud and mobile projects, but mainframes are still the power behind many business applications. According to a survey of CIOs more than half (55 percent) of enterprise applications call upon the mainframe to complete transactions. And that shows little sign of decline – nine out of ten of the CIOs surveyed said their mainframe workloads are increasing, and distributed applications have caused a 44 percent increase in workload over the past five years.

Nine out of ten said new customer-facing applications are accessing the mainframe; however this combination of old and new technologies is adding to the CIOs’ headaches – three quarters of CIOs said the complexity of applications working across distributed and mainframe environments is making problem resolution take longer…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CSA Congress 2013 – The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization which promotes the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, today announced the release of the Software Defined Perimeter Report, a new white paper report that explains the Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) security framework and how it can be deployed to protect application infrastructures from network-based attacks. Bob Flores, former CTO of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), will unveil further details of the SDP initiative at a fireside chat keynote this afternoon, at 4:00 pm ET, hosted by CSA Executive Director Jim Reavis.

The Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) Initiative is a new CSA project aimed at developing an architecture for securing the "Internet of Things" by using the cloud to create highly secure and trusted end-to-end networks between any IP addressable entities, allowing for systems that are highly resilient to network attacks…

Grazed from AwesomeCloud. Author: Dan Farrell.

If you’re considering offering cloud services to your clients, or you already are, you’ve likely heard of the benefits (reduced CAPEX, on-demand access, metered service, etc.) that go along with cloud computing. Those benefits can be a huge win for your clients and also create a recurring revenue stream for your business. What about the perceived risks of cloud computing?

In this blog post, we’ll review some of the most common cloud computing security risks expressed to our channel partners and cloud resellers by their clients(end-users) when they are considering a move to the cloud. After reading this blog, you’ll be more prepared to answer common questions posed from your existing clients and potential clients…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

The latest server sales tally indicates that higher end systems are increasingly looking like glorified PCs that will experience the same slowing growth picture in the future. And the cloud is increasingly getting the blame. Cloud computing is to server sales what tablets are to the PC market.

IDC said that server sales fell 3.7 percent in the third quarter to $12.1 billion. Gartner pegged server sales at $12.34 billion, down 2.1 percent from a year ago. Both research firms indicated that HP was the market share leader. HP and Cisco were the only server vendors to show growth in the third quarter…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Eugene Rudenko.

For the last couple of years there have hardly been any new concepts in cloud computing. But hardly doesn’t mean never. Since the summer of 2013 you might have noticed the appearance of a new trend that has been called Fog Computing. The main purpose of fog computing is to gather services, applications, large data volumes in one place and unite them with the networks of a new generation. The aim is to offer data, computing power, memory and services at a really distributed level.

The thing is that today’s data is extremely dispersed and delivered continuously, in large volumes and to a large number of users with different devices. In order to make an effective cloud model, businesses need to learn how to deliver the content to their users via geographically distributed platforms and not via the cloud which is placed in one place. Thus, the idea of fog computing is to distribute all data and place it closer to a user, remove network delays and other possible obstacles connected with data transfer. Users need all their data and apps at any time in any place – this is the essence of cloud services. And fog computing may take this service to the next level…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

API management and cloud-based data solutions vendor StrikeIron has launched a fully-hosted API management platform in the cloud. Dubbed IronCloud, the cloud-based platform was previously only available to StrikeIron’s partners and early adopters, but now the cloud service is available more generally.

With the launch of the GA version of IronCloud, StrikeIron has added a new front-end user interface, as well as new management console support. The purpose of the software is to enable partners and customers to monetize their data and digital assets through APIs. That, according to the company, is done through enabling clients to host digital assets and software, and then access them across any system, including web, mobile apps, customer relationship management software, SaaS apps and on-premise solutions…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Cloud Ventures.

At a pre-conference Meetup recently, one of the organizers waxed poetic about how the cloud is changing how companies do business. His big example was ZipCar, the car sharing company. His example was how Zipcar uses cloud to deal with data.  But, I think he missed the bigger analogy there: how cloud is changing IT the way Zip car forever changed car ownership.

Before Zipcar, a few large firms dominated the car buying market. If you wanted a car you went to a dealership and negotiated a long term contract. You took on the responsibility for owning, maintaining, and paying down the costs for the life of your vehicle. Your car selection was also limited by what the local dealership had on the lot that day. The cost to buy, own, and maintain a car kept many people from having the mobility of a car…