Category: News

December 14, 2016 Off

Cloud Computing: Microsoft’s new service turns FAQs into bots

By David

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

Finding customer service help online can be a pain. Filtering through a knowledge base to find the right answer to your question can be an exercise in fighting with nested frequently asked questions documents. Microsoft is aiming to help by making it easier for companies to create intelligent bots that can answer common questions.

The QnA Maker, launched in beta on Tuesday, will let users train an automated conversation partner on existing frequently-asked-questions content. After that information is fed in, the service will create a bot that will respond to customer questions with the content from the knowledge base…

December 14, 2016 Off

Why culture and teamwork are as important as tech in GoDaddy’s cloud strategy

By David

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: R.Danes.

With the dizzying array of technology products available to enterprises today, managers and CTOs may wonder where to start. Do they really need five clouds, a plethora of Software as a Service applications and an integration platform to do business in the Digital Age? We spoke to one engineer about how to get the most out of technology at the ready with culture, rigor and teamwork.

Shaheeda Nizar, senior director of engineering at GoDaddy Operating Company LLC, spoke at the CloudNOW 5th Annual “Top 10 Women in Cloud” Innovation Awards about her team-leading experience at GoDaddy. CloudNOW is a non-profit consortium of leading women in cloud computing and converging technologies…

December 14, 2016 Off

Amazon Web Services Now Available to Customers from Data Centers in the UK

By David
Grazed from Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced the launch of the AWS Europe (London) Region. With this launch, AWS now provides 42 Availability Zones across 16 technology infrastructure regions globally with another five Availability Zones and two regions in France and China expected to come online in the coming months. The AWS Europe (London) Region is AWS’s third European Region, joining existing regions in Ireland and Germany. Over one hundred thousand UK-based customers already use existing AWS Regions and starting today, developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations, can leverage the AWS Cloud to run their applications and store their data on infrastructure in the UK. Developers can sign-up and get started today at: https://aws.amazon.com.

December 14, 2016 Off

Why Understanding Technology is Essential for Business Professionals

By David

You used to be able to learn how to operate a PC on your own and be ready to run a company. Now, you have to be able to use the web, troubleshoot, install and activate software and save files to various locations. A lot of time is wasted by businesses that refuse to accept the fact that technology really is their friends. Companies will never go back to sending time sensitive correspondences in the mail when they have computers they can use to send emails. You might be willing to turn on your PC every day, but if you don’t understand what technologies are important to your business, you can pretty easily get stuck going in circles. 

Business Technology Improves Speed

How often are you surprised when you anticipate that it will take days to do something and it is instead completed in hours, thanks to technology? Technology can increase the speed of certain tasks phenomenally. Think of all the companies that are using internal messaging to communicate within small buildings just because it is faster to type than it is to walk down the hall. Things done with technology happen faster and more effectively.

December 13, 2016 Off

ZTE makes case for link between fog computing and cloud to bolster 5G, IoT

By David

Grazed from RCRWireless. Author: Dan Meyer.

In a move to combine what it sees as similar technology attributes, ZTE offered up a support for combining work being conducted in cloud and fog computing. Participating in the International Telecommunications Union’s Eighth CTO meeting in Thailand, the vendor said it analyzed online video, augmented reality, virtual reality, large-scale “internet of things” and other application scenarios in pointing out similar concepts behind fog computing and multi-access edge computing.

Those efforts were said to be placed under a “cloud-fog collaboration” system architecture. ZTE explained that while a solid cloud platform is required to deal with the generation, transmission and processing of massive data, performance and latency requirements for AR and VR in particular will require edge-based platforms…

December 13, 2016 Off

How to handle the politics of cloud resistance

By David

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Why do cloud projects fail? Why does cloud technology not meet expectations? Why are security models are not transferable to the cloud? How did you end up with performance issues that can’t be fixed? The answer is usually this: resistance from your colleagues. The overwhelming issues that I run into when helping clients move to cloud computing are never the technology — those issues are easily fixed. It’s the people issues.

But don’t despair because there are some actions you can take. Most cloud computing projects threaten someone in the organization. No matter if they admit it or not, or if their lives will actually change or not, the core idea of public cloud computing is to remove some of the control that your colleagues may currently have. At the heart of cloud resistance is insecurity…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3149521/cloud-computing/how-to-handle-the-politics-of-cloud-resistance.html

December 13, 2016 Off

Is the Future of Education in Online Learning?

By David

The online education industry was worth $166.5 billion dollars last year and it is estimated that its financial value will grow year on year.  A survey by Global Shapers of 25,000 young people from across the world reported that 77 per cent of respondents have embarked on an online course at some point.

There appear to be many benefits to studying an online course from lower overall costs to the convenience and flexibility it provides.  So, does this mean that online learning is going to dominate the future of education?

What’s on Offer?

December 13, 2016 Off

KeyBank Goes Cloud-Native, Builds a DevOps Practice and Chooses Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

By David
Grazed from Red Hat and KeyBank

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that KeyBank, one of the United States’ largest bank-based financial services companies, used the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to expand the bank’s digital banking capabilities.

As with many large companies, KeyBank found that application delivery resulted in complexity growth over time, with slow manual testing, quarterly release cycles and outages resulting in poor Mean-to-time-Resolution (MTTR).

December 13, 2016 Off

Charles River Expands Its ISO-Certified Hosting Capabilities in Canada with CenturyLink

By David
Grazed from Charles River and CenturyLink

Charles River Development is expanding its private cloud through an agreement with CenturyLink. The arrangement opens up Charles River’s Software-as-a-Service offerings to Buy-Side clients in Canada which requires local residency for data and hosting providers.

“We’ve been broadening our hosted services since 2005, and the addition of CenturyLink’s on-the-ground facilities and support assures even more clients that we can process and protect their sensitive data,” said Tom Driscoll, Global Managing Director, Charles River. “Our newest functionality in the Charles River Investment Management Solution is SaaS-based. Our agreement with CenturyLink lets clients take full advantage of hosted capabilities regardless of their location.”

December 13, 2016 Off

Top Five Cloud Trends for 2017

By David
Grazed from Nuvias Group

Karl Roe, VP Services and Cloud Solutions Nuvias Group, gives his top predictions for cloud developments in 2017.

1. Un-Clouding
We have all witnessed the ‘cloud rush’ of recent years where organisations have been encouraged to move their workloads to the cloud. However, there is a growing recognition among organisations that cloud services are not the be-all and end-all – and certainly not always the most cost effective way to deliver all their IT workloads.

In several cases, the promised cost savings that customers thought they would receive haven’t materialised – in fact it can be quite the opposite when they first see their bill, after failing to be properly advised on their long-term costs. Many IT service providers have been caught up in the vendor hype surrounding cloud services, and encouraged cloud migration despite the end user often not fully understanding the long-term cost implications.