Category: News

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Holger Kisker.

Over the past few years, BI business intelligence (BI) was the overlooked stepchild of cloud solutions and market adoption. Sure, some BI software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors have been pretty successful in this space, but it was success in a niche compared with the four main SaaS applications: customer relationship management (CRM), collaboration, human capital management (HCM), and eProcurement. While those four applications each reached cloud adoption of 25% and more in North America and Western Europe, BI was leading the field of second-tier SaaS solutions used by 17% of all companies in our Forrester Software Survey, Q4 2011.

Considering that the main challenges of cloud computing are data security and integration efforts (yes, the story of simply swiping your credit card to get a full operational cloud solution in place is a fairy tale), 17% cloud adoption is actually not bad at all; BI is all about data integration, data analysis, and security. With BI there is of course the flexibility to choose which data a company considers to run in a cloud dyployment and what data sources to integrate — a choice that is very limited when implementing, e.g., a CRM or eProcurement cloud solution…

Grazed from MSPNews. Author: Erin Harrison.

Although organizations are implementing cloud computing for storage and other needs, only about one-third of them regularly test data recovery plans.

According to a survey conducted by Kroll Ontrack, 62 percent of organizations are leveraging the cloud and/or virtualization, but only 33 percent test data recovery plans regularly to ensure proper protocols are in place to protect this data.

Although 49 percent of organizations reported experiencing some type of data loss in the last year, they were not necessarily from the cloud. In addition, 55 percent said data was lost from a traditional storage device in contrast to 26 percent who reported a data loss from a virtual environment, 3 percent who reported a loss from the cloud and 16 percent who experienced data loss from both a virtual environment as well as the cloud…

Grazed from Smart Data Collective. Author: Paul Barsch.

Among CIOs and CFOs debate swirls regarding how to best budget for and acquire IT resources. The key questions are; should companies own, lease or essentially “rent” IT services via cloud computing? It’s actually a tougher choice than you may think.

An Economist article explains the "Big Data" conundrum facing global enterprises. Data volumes are increasing faster than many companies have the capacity to store much less mine them for insights. In this exploding “data revolution” many companies are also finding their internal processes—much less budgets—for acquiring technology are not keeping up with business user needs.

That’s why cloud computing is so attractive. With the public cloud model, compute, memory and storage can be acquired on a “pay per use” basis. In the public cloud there is typically no hardware/software to buy upfront, thus companies can use operating expense budgets (OPEX) to fund their needs, giving them plenty of budgeting flexibility. The alternative is to purchase needed hardware and software outright—thus capitalizing assets (CAPEX)…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Rachael King.

Companies are turning increasingly to IT outsourcing as a means of supplementing and, in some cases, replacing internal hires. That’s especially true of application hosting. About 35% of companies say they’ll outsource more in this area during the next year to 18 months, according to a new report from global consulting firm Bluewolf. Cloud computing is partially driving this growth, as more companies use applications from the likes of Salesforce, Google and Workday.

Companies spend nearly half of their outsourcing budgets on application services including development, hosting and maintenance. Bluewolf predicts that as more companies rely on cloud providers, the outsourcing of applications will grow, whether it’s to providers who offer niche services or larger companies like Google or Microsoft…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Most public cloud announcements focus on reduced rates for machine instances, new persistent storage options or the introduction of new services, while news about cloud development tools seems to get the short shrift. Still, Amazon and Microsoft offer many new tools that make it easier for developers to build, test and deploy instances in the cloud.

Developers looking for language-specific cloud tools to help streamline some of the more tedious cloud-instance and storage tasks have several options. Let’s take a look at what cloud development tools Microsoft and Amazon have to offer…

Grazed from Linux.com. Author: Jennifer Cloer.

Two weeks from today The Linux Foundation will debut CloudOpen. This is a really exciting time in cloud computing, a time when developers and open source projects are clearly leading the way in technology innovation. The building blocks are in place thanks to decades of open source software development, and everybody is looking for their edge.

CloudOpen will provide a vendor- and project-neutral venue for collaboration and advancing key technologies. CloudStack, Eucalyptus Systems, OpenStack, Gluster, oVirt, Chef, Puppet, Xen, KVM, OpenShift, Ceph and more will al be there, as will the vendors and users who want to understand how best to work with these projects…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Florence De Borja.

Because cloud computing is still in its early state, we can expect a few organizations taking advantage of being the first ones to take advantage of it. However, it is expected that by 2020 a lot of organizations are already in the clouds. Since is just around the corner, Forrester, an analyst group, says that the cloud computing industry will be worth around $150 billion by 2020, up by $115 billion from 2011. There will also be a great demand from business organizations as well as an increase in technology developments which will support cloud computing.

Processing power will also experience a rapid increase which will eventually reduce the price of cloud computing projects. It is also expected that supercomputing will experience a big boom by 2020. On the organization level, a new breed of Chief Information Officers will emerge as they will take charge of cloud computing directions on an enterprise scale…

Grazed from Equities.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

Wave Systems Corp. (NASDAQ: WAVX) today launched Wave Cloud, a cloud-based service for enterprise-wide management of self-encrypting drives (SEDs). The company’s new subscription-based service introduces a game-changing platform for enterprises that wish to rapidly deploy centrally-managed hardware-based data encryption on laptops — all without the complexity and cost associated with maintaining on-premise servers.

SEDs provide one of the best defenses against data breach. Based on the Opal specification published by the Trusted Computing Group, the drives are available from leading storage vendors at little to no incremental cost from a wide range of PC suppliers, including Dell, HP, Lenovo and others. Solid-state versions of SEDs are also available. Advantages over software encryption include better performance (because encryption happens on a chip, it doesn’t compete for processing cycles); faster deployment (unlike software, SEDs don’t require an initial encryption cycle); and enhanced security (encryption cannot be turned off or otherwise compromised by the end user)…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Karen Goulart.

For CIO George Reed, having the right enterprise cloud computing skills in his data center is a matter of life and death. No, really.

Reed is the CIO of Seven Corners Inc., a privately held global travel insurance provider in Carmel, Ind. Each day any number of the company’s 220,000 policy holders around the world could be calling on Seven Corners through its Web portals for help in a crisis.

That’s in addition to the 15,000 medical providers and eight insurance carriers who knock at the insurance provider’s portal doors. All of them have to be able to securely access what they need, anytime from anywhere…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Ilesfay Technology Group LLC (Ilesfay), a global leader in data replication solutions, announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued the company patent No 8,244,831 titled, "Method for the Preemptive Creation of Binary Delta Information within a Computer Network."

The technology, dubbed MatchMaking®, enables customers "to collaborate and share information in a way that was just not possible before," said Ilesfay CEO Chris McLennan. "Our unique approach allows Ilesfay to provide our customers with the highest-performing data-replication methods on the planet."…