Category: News

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Hyoun Park.

The best way to look at the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a Software as a Service application is to consider the costs of the software, hardware, labor, consulting and training associated with the existing process compared to the SaaS application.

However, although SaaS applications typically have a lower TCO than on-premises applications due to the lack of hardware, maintenance and upgrade costs and to improved alignment between the application and the use case in question, chief financial officers (CFOs) should not use the TCO of a SaaS application as the key metric…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

As cloud computing continues to evolve, it’s becoming pretty clear that IT organizations need to start acting a lot more like service providers. Of course, what any service provider will tell you is that the quality of the service being provided is only as good as the network that supports it. Within the enterprise today, there is already a mix of wide area networking technologies in place that provide various levels of network bandwidth. Most of those networking transport options are being steadily replaced by Ethernet. But for the time being, IT organizations are still going to have to contend with multiple types of WANs to deliver services that in the era of the cloud are more distributed than ever.

At the recent ITEXPO West conference, Adtran announced the Total Access 900e Gen 3 series of Ethernet and Multi-T1 IP Business Gateways that, in addition to being able to support voice services, provide 100 Mbps along with a Gigabit Ethernet interface. In addition, Adtran followed up this week with a new NetVanta 6250 IP Business Gateway that makes it easier to transition from a T1 network to Ethernet…

CloudCow Contributed Article.  Author: Sergio Galindo, head of Global Product Management at GFI Software.

Stress is a feeling that IT administrators, especially at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), know all too well. In fact, an independent survey conducted by Opinion Matters on behalf of GFI Software earlier this year, which polled 207 IT administrators in U.S. organizations with more than 10 employees, found that 57 percent of respondents admit they’ve considered leaving their job due to workplace stress.

The reality is that IT admins are often challenged with supporting their company’s IT efforts with limited resources and budget. And they are forced to wear many different hats each day. They are tasked with keeping network infrastructure operational and secure, battling unauthorized access and intruders, and defining and enforcing corporate policies, among a laundry list of other critical tasks. On top of that, they shoulder the responsibility of supporting the needs of end users who sometimes seem to go out of their way to create the most bizarre IT issues imaginable…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

When it comes to cloud computing, the ultimate goal is to essentially erase the barriers between data centers in a way that allows workloads to dynamically run wherever they are best suited. We’re a long way from making that happen across heterogeneous environments. But Skytap is showing how cloud computing will evolve in a world where platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings provide a layer of abstraction that helps mask the underlying complexity of cloud computing.

At the recent VMworld 2013 conference, Skytap showed an instance of version 2 of the Cloud Foundry PaaS environment that provided a template that IT organizations could use to deploy an instance of Cloud Foundry in less than 30 seconds…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Lynn Haber.

While cloud computing has become a well-established option for IT operations, confusion persists and is hampering channel partners from fully transforming their business model, according to CompTIA’s fourth annual Trends in Cloud Computing study, which was published last month.

The CompTIA study — which polled IT and business professionals as well as IT channel companies, for about a total of 900 respondents — noted several cloud adoption trends. For starters, IT systems are increasingly cloud-based, with businesses showing a greater reliance on all three cloud models: Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

The cloud computing model of service-based IT delivery has been over-hyped, over-sold and (in many respects) over-talked. This space’s next big thing is the high-performance bare metal cloud solution. But what is bare metal cloud? Who uses it? What does it do? — and how should developers code for this environment?

Organisations’ collective demands for flexibility, scalability and efficiency have driven them flocking to public cloud infrastructure services, representing (as they do) an opportunity for cutting IT costs while capitalising on technology innovations. But, just a few short years into the cloud revolution, new options have appeared in response to the stress that high-performance workloads can put on traditional public clouds…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Cloudscaling has released its 2.5 version of its Open Cloud System, giving enterprise implementers of the private cloud an opportunity to test its network virtualization concepts, first announced last April. With Release 2.5, Cloudscaling has joined the competition between VMware and Cisco Systems to supply virtualized networking to the future software-defined data center and private-enterprise cloud. Cloudscaling is inside the OpenStack cloud software camp, but its alliance with Juniper Networks on software-defined networking puts it ahead of other participants on the SDN front.

Asked if that meant Cloudscaling was forking the OpenStack networking component, dubbed Neutron (formerly Quantum), CTO Randy Bias said no, Cloudscaling’s approach capitalized on Juniper Networks’ ability to plug SDN into the Neutron platform, using OpenStack APIs. "Neutron is an API interface to networking as a service…

Grazed from BICS. Author: PR Announcement.

BICS introduces first real crowd-sourcing model for anti-fraud processes developed through strategic partnership with cVidya. BICS, the strategic international wholesale partner to over 400 mobile operators worldwide, today announced the launch of FraudGuard, a fraud detection and prevention solution based on a crowdsourcing model, which drives shared experience and insights across the extensive BICS wholesale network. This approach creates an active community of telecoms companies which as a whole gains insights on suspicious activities reported by BICS or any of its members. The platform is delivered as a SaaS service to carriers and operators.

FraudGuard gives operators and carriers a robust means of combatting fraudulent practices in the telecoms world which can increase in effectiveness from the participatory nature of the crowd sourcing arrangement. FraudGuard is equipped with revenue analytics provided by cVidya to deliver a fully integrated solution to help carriers combat telecoms fraud. FraudGuard’s end-to-end surveillance capabilities across the network offer real-time detection and optimum coverage of a wide range of fraud types…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Elizabeth White.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Telx, leading provider of global interconnectivity, cloud enablement services and 100% Uptime SLA data center facilities, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4-7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

Telx is a leading provider of interconnection and data center services in strategic, high-demand North American markets. With 20 datacenters supported by 100% Uptime SLAs and 24 Hour Cross Connect guarantees, Telx increases speed to market and reduces connectivity costs by providing direct connections to a community of the industry’s highest performance networks and access to 1,100+ customers, including leading telecommunications carriers, ISPs, cloud providers, content providers and enterprises…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

The University of Bristol’s Centre for Quantum Photonics has made quantum computing available to the general public through the cloud for the first time. The university’s QCloud initiative consists of two parts. The first is a software simulation, hosted on Google’s App Engine cloud platform, that allows anyone to perform experiments on a model of the real quantum processor housed at the Centre.

The experiments vary in their degree of complexity, from a simple two-path model with a beam splitter in the middle where users can chose to send a virtual photon down one path or the other, or indeed one down each, to much more complex models involving multiple beam splitters and rotation devices, as well as multiple paths…