Category: News

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

PaaS is a multi-faceted phenomenon that has been evolving very rapidly in the past five years, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Enterprises should get ready to anticipate and take advantage of new PaaS developments. To do so, they should ask vendors some hard questions about strategy plans and product roadmaps. For more information, see the Ovum report PaaS: Two More Years of Confusion Ahead.

PaaS has quickly evolved in the past few years

Today’s PaaS is quite different from that of yesterday, and this can cause confusion. Its rapid evolution has so far partly reflected the evolution of the overall cloud computing market. PaaS has, for example, evolved from a focus on public clouds to private and hybrid clouds, from green-field to legacy applications, and from being packaged with its own infrastructure services to supporting third-party (mostly IaaS) services…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Don Clark.

Many businesses no longer buy servers–they just turn to Amazon’s cloud computing service to run their operations. Some now may apply the same tactic to personal computers. The Seattle-based company’s Web services unit on Wednesday announced what it calls Amazon WorkSpaces, which amounts to deploying virtual Windows PCs on Amazon servers. Such a service opens up several different possibilities.

In theory, for example, a user could access Windows-based applications from many kinds of devices, including Apple Macs or iPads, Android or Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, Google Chromebooks or conventional laptops. Assuming a decent Internet connection, they also should be able to get pretty much the same experience in using those applications when they are on the move as when they are in the office…

Grazed from EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Chinese IT giant Huawei is embracing the open source OpenStack cloud platform. During the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong last week, Huawei officially became a Gold Member of the OpenStack Foundation. In an exclusive video interview with Enterprise Networking Planet, Haiying Wan, VP and CTO of Cloud Computing at Huawei, explained why his company plans to play a key role in pushing OpenStack forward in China and around the world.

Becoming a Gold Member of the OpenStack Foundation isn’t just a matter of paying a membership fee. The OpenStack Foundation only votes in Gold corporate members that have demonstrated that they will contribute code and technical expertise into the OpenStack development process. Wan is keen to help OpenStack improve and mature…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Doug Henschen.

IBM on Wednesday announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Fiberlink Communications, a provider of cloud-based mobile-device management and mobile security services. IBM said the acquisition will advance its ability to support organizations adopting bring-your-own-device (BYOD) mobile programs.

Fiberlink’s MaaS360 cloud services are used by financial services firms, healthcare organizations, and manufacturers worldwide, reportedly offering fast, self-service enrollment of BYOD in less than five minutes. IBM said the technologies will enable it to offer cloud-based or on-premise mobile device management, mobile content management, and mobile application management capabilities. The software can also separate personal from enterprise data and content on mobile devices…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: John Rath.

At the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week Red Hat (RHT) announced an expansion of its OpenShift Online public Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering and services for its partner ecosystem. Red Hat is now expanding OpenShift Online’s global availability, and introducing new pricing and memory options.

Red Hat is expanding Silver tier commercial availability of OpenShift Online to 14 new Eurozone countries, including Greece, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Cyprus and Malta. With this expansion, Red Hat’s technical support and additional platform resources is available for developers and application providers in more than 30 countries…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

At Amazon Web Services re:Invent, Riverbed Technology (RVBD) introduced Stingray 9.5 on AWS GovCloud, bringing the traffic manager software to the government sector on the popular cloud platform. Riverbed has made a lot of inroads into the public sector space and currently serves hundreds of government organizations around the world. The introduction of Stingray on GovCloud will open up additional opportunities and provide AWS channel partners serving government departments and agencies with the ability to optimize, scale, secure and improve the performance of mission-critical apps in the AWS cloud.

Designed as a virtual, software-based Layer 7 application delivery controller with integrated web content optimization, Stingray was optimized for cloud environments and is meant to be easily integrated into an application stack. For GovCloud, what it provides is a way for U.S. federal, state and local government agencies and departments to gain agility and cost savings while also improving their performance and scale of application workloads and services…

Grazed from Investors Business Daily. Author: Brian Deagon.

Founded in 1992, NetApp (NTAP) is the second-largest provider of external data storage systems and software, behind EMC. Besides its data storage hardware, NetApp’s core software offering is Data OnTap, an operating system that helps users manage companywide data operations, including cloud-computing environments. Software now plays a larger role in data management, a trend called software defined storage.

NetApp says Data OnTap is the leading storage operating system worldwide. The emergence of cloud computing — where data is stored and apps reside in the Internet cloud — presents both challenges and opportunities for NetApp. It created a boom in new storage startups that might challenge the company. But it’s also advanced the rapid expansion in data creation in an increasingly digital world. The emergence of flash storage also altered the playing field. Flash is chip-based storage, instead of disk drives…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Eric Basu.

This is the third posting in my cyber awareness series for small to medium-sized business owners. One of the biggest buzzwords being used right now is “the cloud.” So, what is the cloud? There are many different definitions you can find, but for the small business owner it means essentially outsourcing your IT infrastructure (possibly including applications, servers, data storage, etc) remotely. Why would you move to the cloud? The most commonly cited reasons are focused upon the core business and cost savings, but in reality every company should consider carefully any move to the cloud to ensure it is the correct move for them.

For small to mid-size business owners migrating some or all of their systems to the cloud environments presents the usual IT issues, but the problems are compounded by having data stored and managed remotely, by external organizations and often in multiple locations. Among these issues are special considerations for privacy, interoperability, data and application portability, data integrity, business continuity, and security…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Kevin Benedict.

The middle-class jobs of the past, the jobs you and I could start with and retire from, are mostly gone today. It is much harder to find jobs that require simply hard-work, responsibility and dedication. In today’s world, in order to live a traditional middle-class lifestyle that supports home ownership, cars, a college education and a family, it takes a different mindset and inventory of skills. A set of skills our education system has yet to fully understand and embrace. These are the skills of a digital nomad.

Being a digital nomad means we depend less on company issued laptops, smartphones and tablets, as we desire our own personal tools (BYOD) that can travel with us from job to job and employer to employer. We depend less on companies for our software applications and seek cloud-based applications and services that are tied to us personally, not just our current employer. We seek recognition for our work beyond the four walls of our employer…

Grazed from CIO. Author: David Geer.

As everyone knows, cloud provider Nirvanix recently fell apart, declaring bankruptcy and leaving its customers in the lurch. Nirvanix gave enterprises less than a month to move their data to a new home. To avoid the fate of those customers, follow these best practices for safely moving data in and out of the cloud.

Due diligence: financials first

The Cloud Security Alliance’s February 2013 report, "The Notorious Nine: Cloud Computing Top Threats in 2013" has identified a lack of due diligence as a continuing threat to cloud computing. When enterprises do look into cloud providers, their view of things is a bit lopsided. "Cloud consumers place too much emphasis on information assurance and privacy, or focus on cost reduction and savings at the expense of investigating the financial health of candidate providers," says John Howie, COO, the Cloud Security Alliance…