Category: News

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have to track the needs of the workers they support, but they don’t always do that successfully. According to enterprises, mobile SaaS applications change for one of the following reasons, in increasing order of likelihood: changes to regulations governing the application, changes in mobile device policy, changes in worker activities and changes in mobile OS features. There is no perfect strategy for making mobile SaaS apps Agile with so many drivers of change, but picking the right SaaS provider, customizing the SaaS service for mobile use or even creating your own SaaS can help.

Evaluating SaaS agility

Whatever forces drive mobile application users and their SaaS providers in different directions, the ability of a SaaS provider to respond to regulatory changes that impact an application is a key indicator of their determination to track the market. One of the questions every SaaS evaluator needs to ask is how rapidly the application has accommodated changes driven by regulations. A response measured in months will almost certainly create issues with regulators, and it also suggests that the provider isn’t able to change the application quickly. That same inertia will likely impact the SaaS provider’s response to other demands for change, so it may be wise to pick a different provider…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Steve Pate.

It’s 10:00 PM. Do you know where your data is? Is it nestled securely within the firewalls of your data center, or is it more adventurous, spanning the boundaries of various public clouds? Cloud adoption continues to grow at unprecedented rates, raising concerns about data privacy and also about data residency, especially for organizations considering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in a public cloud.

I recently attended a presentation by a large cloud service provider (CSP), who proudly explained that they immediately make three copies of customer data, placing them in disparate data centers to ensure availability and disaster recovery. Because he was speaking to a room full of security people, it’s safe to say the audience quickly became more concerned than comforted…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

Translating time into dollars matters far more to many CEOs I’ve spoken with versus what platform their applications are running on. What matters most is getting all they can out of every hour their business is operating. They are all focused on getting beyond the constraints that held their growth back in the past – everyone wants a growth accelerator today.

For manufacturers especially, this includes applications with depth of functionality that can be quickly deployed regionally, and in more cases than ever, globally as well. Line-of-business leaders want applications that make an immediate impact on their entire value chain…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Eucalyptus Systems, the leading provider of AWS-compatible private and hybrid cloud computing software, today appointed Dr. James Gosling, known as the father of Java, and former Sun Microsystems VP and Fellow, as a strategic advisor. Gosling’s deep programming and software architecture experience will be essential in furthering Eucalyptus’ industry leadership, and driving product design, performance and scalability.

James Gosling is recognized as the original designer of the Java programming language. He was awarded the Economist Innovation Award in 2002 for driving leadership and innovation in computing, and is currently the Chief Software Architect at Liquid Robotics and writing software for the Waveglider, an autonomous ocean-going robot. Gosling was with Sun Microsystems for 26 years before it was acquired by Oracle…

Grazed from The Huffington Post. Author: Drew Hendricks.

Cloud computing has experienced serious growth in recent years–even the Department of Defense is jumping on board. However, some people are a little concerned about giving up hard copies and going completely virtual. Big change is always difficult to deal with. However, getting on this bandwagon is a great idea that can save money and time (assuming the cloud server chosen has a solid reputation). Here are 5 of the biggest reasons cloud computing is gaining in popularity.

1. It Saves Money (and the Environment)

Keeping paper copies, updating them, making more copies to distribute, shredding them, ordering more paper and ink–it’s a vicious cycle. Many companies waste serious cash on this process, not to mention the leg work of employees whose sole responsibility is to keep up with the filing. Switching to cloud computing can save a lot of money and trees, which is why many companies are going green and upping the bottom line at the same time…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lynnette Nolan.

Most of the companies benefiting from public cloud services today are small businesses with few IT assets, according to a recent blog post on the Forbes Magazine website. The post cites a study of 260 Amazon Web Services customers. It revealed that 53 percent of companies using the service have 50 or fewer employees, while large organizations (10,000 or more employees) represent only four percent.

It’s great that so many small businesses are benefiting from cloud computing. Few small businesses, however, understand the differences between public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds. Let’s take a step back and clarify the differences between them…

Grazed from The Guardian. Author: Jim Reavis.

We all know about the massive presence of computing and the internet in our everyday lives. It therefore boggles the mind to consider how rudimentary our use of technology will seem in just a few short years as many projections point to 100bn internet-connected devices in 2020, compared with just 8bn today. This post-PC world of pervasive computing, from appliances to automobiles to the electrical grid will centre around cloud computing.

The massive cloud data centres of today will grow at a phenomenal pace to manage these devices and store their data – a utility on a global scale. Like a utility, the cloud is always on and available. Individual countries and federations of nations, such as the European Union, are scrambling to understand how to regulate the cloud and promote its growth, while protecting the rights of its citizens…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Ariel Shuper.

The immense growth of IaaS cloud computing has given rise to a need for highly scalable and secure virtual networks, without requiring significant investment in replacing or adding to the existing infrastructure. One virtual overlay technology that has emerged to address this is VXLAN, which uses MAC-in-UDP tunneling to capitalize on the best aspects of existing layer 2 infrastructure and the advantages of layer 3 transport. However, while VXLAN seems an ideal solution, this article points out performance challenges that arise with its usage, which must be addressed for its benefits to be fully realized.

Background: The Need for Virtualized Overlay Networks

Over the past few years, cloud computing has grown at a tremendous rate, with worldwide spending on IT cloud services tripling since 2008 and expected to reach over $100 billion in 2014.1 More specifically, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud services market, having grown over 45% in 2012 alone…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

CumuLogic is launching its Cloud Services Platform software suite on Nebula and Cloudscaling IaaS clouds. The vendor announced at OpenStack Summit last week that its platform was now available those two OpenStack-based clouds, which brings Amazon Web Services (AWS)-style cloud services to OpenStack customers.

Previously, CumuLogic launched its PaaS on HP Cloud Services with the intention of speeding adoption of Java-based applications on the cloud. The company is also no stranger to the OpenStack world. More than a year ago, CumuLogic extended its Java PaaS to OpenStack clouds after scoring initial successful as a Java platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider on Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) EC2…