Category: News

Grazed from Huffinton Post.  Author: Vala Afshar.

In a recently Harvard Business Review blog, a two-year research study with the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, Corporate Executive Board, Intel and others suggested that CIOs are not in sync with what the CEO and the other line-of-business executives need from IT. One out of two CEOs said that IT should be commodity service purchased as needed and only a quarter of executives felt that the CIO is performing above their peers. The research clearly pointed to the failure of IT to deliver value to the business in terms of accelerating growth, reducing customer acquisition costs and improving customer retention.

I also recently spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review about the emergence of the chief digital officer in the enterprise. I noted that digital technologies — cloud, mobile, social, applications, big data — in the enterprise is shifting some of the technology procurement, development and implementation responsibilities away from the CIO, and to new positions within the enterprise including: the chief digital officer, chief data officer, or into marketing with oversight from the chief marketing officer. Gartner is predicting that by 2015, 25% of the enterprise will appoint a chief digital officer…

Grazed from IT News.  Author: Juha Saarinen.

Amazon Web Services customers will now have further options of connecting directly to the cloud computing provider’s data centres via its Direct Connect service, instead of going over the public internet.  Direct Connect is now available at the Seattle Equinix data centre, and also to the AWS GovCloud in the US, which is a region designed for specific regulatory and compliance requirements of controlled, unclassified information.

The main benefit of using a private network connection to the AWS is lower cost, Amazon claims, as well as improved bandwidth and more consistent experience and performance. Direct Connection doesn’t however provide onward connectivity to the public internet…

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Netflix is arguably one of the world’s biggest users of cloud computing, renting all its computing power from Amazon Web Services, the cloud division of Amazon.com, which runs its own video-streaming service that competes with Netflix. Ashlee Vance from Bloomberg reports:

"Netflix has more than 36 million subscribers. They watch about 4 billion hours of programs every quarter on more than 1,000 different devices. To meet this demand, the company uses specialized video servers scattered around the world. When a subscriber clicks on a movie to stream, Netflix determines within a split second which server containing that movie is closest to the user, then picks from dozens of versions of the video file, depending on the device the viewer is using. At company headquarters in Los Gatos, Calif., teams of mathematicians and designers study what people watch and build algorithms and interfaces to present them with the collection of videos that will keep them watching…

Grazed from QRCodePress.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The landscape of the web is endless, which is one of the amazing things about the new age we live in. New technologies are regularly being introduced and just as people begin using them in their everyday lives, something else is invented that trumps them. One of the newest trends to sweep the web and the business that’s done on it is cloud computing.

This technology allows companies to transfer and save large files in a cloud, or a third-party server that they rent for a set amount of time per month or year. They can also transfer data through this cloud from one company to another, which previously was much more difficult and required a hard drive or a special connection between the two businesses. However, BitTorrent, developer of a popular online file-sharing tool, has just come up with a new way to transfer these massive files directly from computer to computer without having to rely on these third-party cloud systems…

Grazed from PeakColo.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Enterprise-class cloud computing offers many benefits to its adopters, and its overall value rests in its ability to offer innovative solutions to myriad business issues. One of a company’s primary concerns is its security, but there are many ways in which enterprise clouds provide overarching solutions to potential security vulnerabilities. Inherent in the design of enterprise IaaS clouds is a prominent focus on maintaining a protected infrastructure. This is an especially salient concern of many IT professionals and CIOs, who still debate the merits and hindrances of security in the cloud, wrote Computerworld’s Steve Pate. In addressing cloud security, Pate considered the perspectives of businesses and cloud service providers.

Pate wrote that the security concerns of smaller organizations in particular  frequently stem from their lack of an in-house security team, and so they often have the most to gain by investing in the services of an IaaS cloud provider…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Robert Smith.

In 2012, cloud computing became a much bigger trend in the business and networking world. IDC have predicted a 130% increase in cloud computing by 2016, meaning an increase to $43 billion. Here are some of the five trends to look out for that are coming in 2013 which are going to help boost cloud computing in the long term;

Subscription

With more and more companies beginning to look into cloud computing, the hype is growing every day and more businesses are using it. Colleges are using it more and more to help store lecture data for easy access to the class. Businesses are using it to work from home, pick up easy access to documents and for sharing important company information. One of the big changes expected to appear in 2013 is the subscription model for Cloud computing. The idea is that you will only pay for how much data you need, rather than buying bulk for space that may never be used. It gives you a powerful security measure as well, knowing that your paid-up data is protected and accessible at any given time…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Todd Weiss.

Google’s Compute Engine is moving to Debian as its default operating system after a round of recent enhancements to Debian, including improved 32/64-bit compatibility. "Today we’re adding Debian images for Google Compute Engine," wrote Jimmy Kaplowitz, site reliability engineer and Debian developer for the project in a May 8 post on the Google App Engine Blog. "Debian, in collaboration with us, is providing images for both Debian 7.0 ‘wheezy’ and the previous stable release, Debian 6.0 ‘squeeze.’ This support will make it easy for anyone using Debian today to migrate their workloads onto Compute Engine."

The Debian community just released Debian 7.0 "wheezy," which "brings big improvements, including hardened security, improved 32/64-bit compatibility and addresses a lot of community feedback," wrote Kaplowitz. "For fast performance and to reduce bandwidth costs, Google is hosting a Debian package mirror for use by Google Compute Engine Debian instances. We’ve updated our docs and will support Debian via our usual support options, or you can also check out what Debian offers."…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author: Archana Venkatraman.

Public cloud rivals Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have collaborated to help users manage Windows workloads on AWS cloud more easily, with Microsoft launching the System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) management pack for AWS.

The tool allows organisations running their Microsoft-based workloads at AWS to monitor their AWS resources directly in the Operations Manager console, eliminating the need for complex management consoles.  It can monitor AWS EC2 instances (Windows and Linux), Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFormation stacks, Auto Scaling groups and Elastic Beanstalk applications…

Grazed from MSPMentor.  Author: CJ Arlotta.

Moving to the cloud may seem simple on the front end, but it’s a lot more complicated if you are re-architecting your software to become an as-a-service offering.  Corent Technology has announced a software platform to assist with transforming software applications to software as a service (SaaS). What does this platform offer? We’ll reveal the details.

SurPaaS transforms applications to SaaS and can be deployed on any data center or cloud platform, the company said in its announcement. The solution’s capabilities include: self-service on-boarding capabilities and management of tenants, subscription management, SaaS lifecycle management, monitoring, metering, billing integration, business reporting, key performance metrics and dashboards…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Louis Columbus.

Evangelizing development on any cloud computing or enterprise platform is challenging, costly and takes a unique skill set that can educate, persuade, sell and serve developers at the same time.

The companies who excel at this exude technical prowess and as a result earn and keep trust. For Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform providers, getting developers, both at partner companies and at enterprise customers to build applications, is a critical catalyst for future growth…