Category: News

Grazed from Virtual Bridges. Author: Editorial Staff.

New research from Virtual Bridges, Inc. reveals that the number of devices in the workplace is skyrocketing, changing the way people work and creating significant management and security challenges for IT professionals. Today, 80 percent of companies permit BYOD, with a majority employing VDI to manage the devices, including laptops, thin clients, iPads, tablets and more.

Conducted by Virtual Bridges, the study examines the growing use of personal devices in the workplace, including how they are used and what challenges IT professionals face in providing access to key applications while keeping the corporate perimeter secure. Findings from respondents point to a number of issues including:…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Cloud marketing has hit mainstream publications like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Open up your morning New York Times or Wall Street Journal and you may see the latest ad from a cloud computing company praising the virtues of their services. It’s the latest push by some vendors, including VMware, IBM and Pivotal, and it’s coming with some snarky fallout too.

Technology companies have long taken to traditional media outlets to pitch their products, but in recent weeks the back and forth between competitors seems to have ramped up. On the day that VMware and EMC launched Cloud Foundry, an open source platform as a service product, the company took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal announcing the move, which you can see here:..

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Almost half of all cloud computing projects are rated as being at least partially unsuccessful by internal or external auditors after launch. In two-thirds of all cases, benefits promised by the cloud migration were deemed real but not realized by the cloud project. To secure your own cloud benefits, establish explicit target benefits and link each target benefit to a specific step in the process, then audit benefit realization status at each project milestone and take prompt steps to record what you’ve promised. There will, however, be hurdles along the way.

Establishing target benefits

The biggest problem with benefit loss is lack of any organized benefit set. You can’t chase benefits you never really had under control, and control starts in the cloud project planning phase. A cloud computing project audit showed that projects that expended less than about 20% of their time in the planning phase were twice as likely to have benefit problems as those that spent 25% to 30% planning. Even though extensive planning and review seems to waste project time and opportunity, it pays off in accurate identification of costs and the creation of sound project controls to monitor critical assumptions…

Grazed from CivSource. Author: Editorial Staff.

Earlier this year, CivSource reported on a new Big Data research project at the University of Virgina. Now, the University of Texas San Antonio is getting into the mix with their own Big Data and Cloud lab. The lab will support the Open Compute Project (OCP) through cloud computing and big data research and development.

The laboratory will help the international business community improve their computing platforms through open-source hardware and cloud and big data technologies. The university laboratory will also train a pipeline of students for the workforce. The OCP is focused on making hardware cheaper and developing standards…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

ScaleXtreme is combining server management with enterprise cloud management in its new Advanced Cloud Management product, which is now in general availability but has been tested over the last few months in Fortune 500 companies. The new product was designed to be fully integrated with ScaleXtreme’s existing server management capabilities, which include server and application monitoring, patch management and job automation. It also includes a new workflow and orchestration system, autoscaling, multi-cloud management capabilities and cloud access control features.

Early customers have used the new product to deploy complex cloud-based applications and secure central IT control over public cloud deployments on the likes of Amazon (AMZN) Web Services (AWS), Terremark Enterprise Cloud and Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Azure…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

HP came out on top because of its breadth and depth of services for private clouds, while Cisco and Microsoft were also named leaders. Enterprises are expected to significantly ramp up their pursuit of internal private clouds within the next year and HP, Cisco and Microsoft have the strongest product offerings for those deployments, according to a new Wave report by research firm Forrester. According to a Forrester survey of more than 2,300 IT hardware buyers, about 55% of them said they plan to build an internal private cloud within the next 12 months; another 33% have already started.

The momentum represents the "next step along (the) virtualization journey," says Lauren Nelson, author of the report. "Over the past two years private cloud has shifted from concept to reality," she says. As organizations realize the benefits of private clouds, the market for products serving these deployments has intensified. Forrester evaluated almost 30 providers offering private cloud platforms, but took a deep dive into 10 of them. HP came out on top because of its breadth and depth of services for private clouds, while Cisco and Microsoft were also named leaders.

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence. Author: Marcus Austin.

SAS Visual Analytics on-premise data exploration tools are now available in the cloud with five different versions for public, private, and hybrid clouds SAS has launched a new cloud version of their Visual Analytics data exploration product, allowing anyone in a business to get access to SAS data visualisation on any device, with the ability to analyse over a billion rows of data in seconds.

The tool which combines data exploration and visualisation with advanced analytics was first unveiled in March 2012 and is designed to address big data challenges and use the scalability of industry-standard blade computing systems, as well as database appliances from EMC Greenplum and Teradata. SAS Visual Analytics now comes in five operational environments: an internal cloud, SAS-hosted systems, public cloud, single server on-premise, and powerful on-premise grid architectures…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Former SoftLayer and Terremark Chief Marketing Officer Simon West is now an advisor to independenceIT, the desktop as a service (DaaS) upstart, Talkin’ Cloud has confirmed. West and former Terremark CFO Jose Segrera are helping independenceIT to accelerate its DaaS strategy — which leans on MSPs and other channel partners serving the SMB market.

Segrera invested in independenceIT and joined the company’s board last week. He and West are working closely with the core independenceIT team — CEO Jim Lippie, President Seth Bostock and CTO Charles Buck — to make sure the company continues to innovate amid growing DaaS and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) chatter from Amazon Workspaces, VMware Horizon and Desktone, Citrix Xen Desktop, dinCloud and upstarts like Toshiba hosted Virutal Desktop Service, among others…

Grazed from DataMation. Author: Jeff Vance.

With any new hot trend comes a truckload of missteps, bad ideas and outright failures. I should probably create a template for this sort of article, one in which I could pull out a term like “cloud” or “BYOD” and simply plug in “social media” or “Big Data.” When the trend in question either falls by the wayside or passes into the mainstream, it seems like we all forget the lessons faster than PR firms create new buzzwords.

Of course, vendors within trendy news spaces also tend to think they’re in uncharted waters. But in fact there’s actually plenty of history available to learn from. Cloud concepts have been around at least since the 1960s (check out Douglas Parkhill’s 1966 book, The Challenge of the Computer Utility, if you don’t believe me), but plenty of cloud startups ignored history in favor of buzz. And it’s not like gaining insights from piles of data is some new thing that was previously as rare as detecting neutrinos from deep space. Here are five history lessons we should have already learned, but seem to be doomed to keep repeating:…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Cloud broker Cloud Sherpas took a shot at Microsoft (MSFT) recently for its Scroogled marketing campaign that targeted Google (GOOG) by claiming in a blog post that "Microsoft customers are the real victims." Cloud Sherpas Solutions Engineer Derik VanVleet led his company’s attack, writing a blog post around the idea of Microsoft scanning personal files.

"Even so, Microsoft still touts that Google scans your email, but what if Microsoft was scanning the files on your PC?" he said in the blog post. "And what if it was using your personal files on your computer to serve you ads? A little too personal and lacking in privacy? Well, that is exactly what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8.1, Smart Search and Hero Ads."…