Category: News

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), the organization where members work together to advance the deployment of enterprise cloud solutions and services that are interoperable, secure and free of vendor lock-in, today announced that representatives from global IT leaders Infosys and SAP are the newest members of the ODCA Steering Committee and have joined the ODCA Board of Directors. Senior executives from Infosys and SAP join ODCA board members from BMW, Capgemini, China Unicom, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, Inc., NAB, NTT Data, T-Systems, UBS, Verizon Terremark and The Walt Disney Company in driving the strategic direction and output of ODCA on a global basis.

"The expansion of the leadership team marks the significant momentum ODCA is experiencing in global markets and comes as enterprises worldwide increasingly rely on ODCA usage models and requirements for easing and speeding the migration of data center IT operations to the cloud," said Mario Mueller, ODCA chair and VP of IT Infrastructure at BMW…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Carl Brooks.

Nearly two years after enterprise customers were given sanctioned Windows Server virtual machines to run in Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud and other services, Microsoft has adjusted its enterprise volume licensing to allow for "license mobility."

Microsoft applications bought through volume licensing agreements — such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Microsoft Lync Server, System Center and Dynamics CRM — can now move to dynamic virtual environments like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud if enterprises purchase Software Assurance (SA) for those licenses…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: JP Blaho.

In October 2012, we had the chance to attend SunGard’s IGNITE Conference for CIOs in San Francisco, and in May 2013, we were lucky enough to go again. The topic of both sessions was enterprise cloud computing, but there was one striking difference: between October and May, CIOs (and IT in general) seem to have lost their seat at the table when it comes to making decisions about cloud computing in the enterprise.

In October 2012, the conversation in the room was about how IT can maintain the driver’s seat of infrastructure management, and steer corporate policy on cloud adoption and procurement of cloud services. CIOs discussed their challenges with departments within their organization going outside of IT and buying cloud services. One CIO pounded the table and said, “We have got to make people understand that they can’t just agree to public cloud services willy-nilly when there are a whole host of other considerations to think about, from legal to regulatory to technical.”…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM announced that its researchers have developed a new technique for protecting sensitive data prior to transmitting it to the cloud. Big Blue’s patented invention will overcome barriers to client adoption of cloud computing solutions by ensuring that private or proprietary information is secured before transferring it for processing by cloud computing services.

The new IBM security invention addresses cloud computing apprehensions by helping users protect confidential and private information in the cloud. This can help businesses meet regulatory requirements regarding the handling of sensitive client data. IBM received U.S. Patent #8,539,597: "Securing sensitive data for cloud computing" for the invention…

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Shawn Drew.

Despite years of success and a certain ubiquitousness in the lives of consumers, the cloud still has a long way to go to completely transform the enterprise data center. As time progresses, it would appear that complete public cloud adoption may never happen. Midsize businesses that think their only options are the openness of the public cloud and the closed confines of their data center are overlooking another option that might provide the best of both worlds: The hybrid cloud.

The Truth about Private and Hybrid Clouds

There is a gap in understanding that is preventing many IT professionals from fully understanding just what the cloud can do for their company. Virtualization, in which large-scale hardware segments itself into numerous instances, is a powerful tool and an integrated part of the cloud but is not itself a cloud solution. Virtualization is indeed a starting point for the cloud, but an IT department that believes it is harnessing the cloud optimally through the exclusive use of virtualization is missing the bigger picture…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Cloud computing is necessary in the eyes of more CIOs and IT professionals today. A new survey found that more firms are integrating the cloud into their information infrastructure to help them gain a competitive edge. Cost and security ranked as the top concerns when IT decides on a cloud platform and vendor.

High Adoption

NTT Com Security recently commissioned a report from Vanson Bourne that solicited the opinions of IT professionals at firms around the globe. The research, featured in CloudTimes, found that North American companies were the biggest implementers of cloud computing. Almost 100 percent of North American respondents said that that they have had the cloud working for them for the past six months or more. Cost or security ranked as the most important factors when deploying new applications…

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Robert Lawson.

The cloud is becoming a popular and sometimes integral part of everyday business operations for many companies these days; but according to Forbes Technology contributor Joe Weinman, who focuses on the business value of technology, this trend is growing so fast that a customizable intercloud will be the most viable strategy for users going forward.

Flexibility of Service

Small and midsize businesses need to do more with less, and that is why this technology can greatly improve IT solutions. Getting a secure solution that is always available, requires little to no setup and that can be up and running with little to no initial expense are a few key factors to consider for the midsize market to consider. When considering an IT contract, making sure that the company providing services is flexible enough to work with the client to find optimal solutions is in the best interest of all parties…

Grazed from GlobalNewswire. Author: PR Announcement.

Radware, a leading provider of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers, today announced its participation in this year’s OpenStack Summit at Asia World Expo in Hong Kong, November 5-8.

Scheduled to present is Dr. Gilad Zlotkin, vice president of virtualization and management products for Radware. On Tuesday, November 5(th) , Dr. Zlotkin will discuss a presentation entitled: Bringing Mission and Performance Critical Applications to OpenStack. He will outline several use cases for load balancing as a service (LBaaS) and the benefits for using Radware’s Alteon load balancer in OpenStack for driving truly multi-tenant, efficient and agile "enterprise grade" LBaaS…

Grazed from OpenShift. Author: Krishnan Subramanian.

PaaS and DevOps are much discussed topics these days in meetups and conferences around the world. The ambiguity around the very definition of DevOps is pushing people to wonder if there is any connection between DevOps and PaaS. I want to briefly touch on this topic in the hopes of generating a conversation on the role of DevOps and PaaS.

Putting the discussion in context
From my vantage point (as someone who was an analyst up until four months ago, viewing the industry from 30,000 feet), I see two schools of thought inside the DevOps movement:

• Hosted "NoOps" PaaS – This school insists that operations ceases to exist on the side of enterprise IT and defines DevOps narrowly as developers using code to manipulate the underlying infrastructure. For example, analyzing application performance and performing on-the-fly optomizations to underlying components for delivering a more seamless end user experience. From this perspective of DevOps, operations in enterprise IT is unnecessary…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Michael C. Daconta.

Gartner predicts “By 2015, at least 20% of all cloud services will be consumed via internal or external cloud service brokerages, rather than directly, up from less than 5% today.” Thus, it is important to understand what a cloud broker is and what they do; however, before we can do that, we need to clear up some confusion between different definitions and implementations of cloud brokers.

The term “cloud broker” was defined by NIST in Special Publication 500-292, the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture, as “An entity that manages the use, performance and delivery of cloud services, and negotiates relationships between Cloud Providers and Cloud Consumers.” The use of the word “entity” makes it ambiguous as to whether a broker is a person or a software service; however, most interpreted this “actor” as a person or persons in a business. NIST divides the broker’s services into three categories service intermediation, service aggregation, and service arbitrage…