Category: News

December 2, 2016 Off

Why Do Most American Companies Outsource Their IT Services?

By David

Author: Stephanie Rowan.

As your company grows, so does its responsibilities and capabilities. However, your time to manage these responsibilities shrinks in a comparable fashion to the speed of your company’s growth, and you are left with few options. You can scramble to manage everything in-house, but the quality of your work and your level of customer service will most likely suffer. A second option would be to never sleep and suffer through a terrible work/life balance. The third option is to outsource. There is a better way to balance the demands of quality and value.

 

Play to Your Strengths

November 30, 2016 Off

Cloud Foundry Welcomes SUSE as Platinum Member

By David
Grazed from Cloud Foundry Foundation

Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of the industry-standard platform for cloud applications, today announced that SUSE has increased its engagement and support of Cloud Foundry by becoming a Platinum member. The move comes as SUSE is readying itself to enter the PaaS market with a Cloud Foundry certified product. SUSE CTO Thomas Di Giacomo will also be serving on the Foundation’s Board of Directors. SUSE was previously a Silver-level member of the Foundation since 2015, joining Google, EMC, HPE, IBM, Pivotal, SAP, VW, VMware and more than 60 other technology innovators.

"Having been involved with Cloud Foundry for a while now, we recognize the value of contributing to and working with this very important community," said Thomas Di Giacomo, CTO, SUSE. "Cloud Foundry is a key element of SUSE’s software-defined infrastructure and application platforms strategy, and our intent is to bring an enterprise-grade, fully certified Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service product to market. We believe our customers and partners will welcome such a solution, and we are pleased to help the Foundation and its members develop innovative, open source solutions that deliver real business benefits."

November 30, 2016 Off

2nd Watch Achieves AWS Service Delivery Partner Status for Four AWS Service Offerings

By David
Grazed from 2nd Watch

2nd Watch, a managed public cloud provider for enterprises, announced today that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Service Delivery Partner status for four AWS service offerings including Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, AWS CloudFront and AWS Database Migration Service. 2nd Watch also holds AWS competencies for Migration, DevOps, Big Data, Life Sciences, and Marketing and Commerce, and is an audited, approved and accredited AWS Managed Service Partner.

The AWS Service Delivery Program recently launched and is designed to highlight APNPartners who have a track record of delivering verified customer success for specific AWS products, so . customers can easily find qualified APN Partners that provide expertise in a specific service or skill area. To qualify, APN Partners must pass service-specific verification of customer references and a technical review, meaning customers can be confident they are working with partners that provide recent and relevant experience.

November 30, 2016 Off

CloudPassage Launches New Release of Halo Agile Security Platform

By David
Grazed from CloudPassage

CloudPassage announced today a new release of CloudPassage Halo, the company’s award-winning agile security platform. The update includes several enhancements including a new filtering feature in the portal user interface, visual and functional improvements to the Traffic Discovery feature (offering improved insight into firewall connections and traffic) and improved server lifecycle management.

"CloudPassage continues to focus on developing and delivering innovative automated security and compliance solutions to help companies embrace the power of agile computing," said Ram Krishnan, Chief Product Officer, CloudPassage. "In fact, our SaaS-based platform was purpose-built to handle the dynamic nature of the modern IT infrastructure, and operates seamlessly across any environment to provide a broad range of controls — at speed and scale — to enable secure innovation and deployment. This newest release delivers numerous capabilities that enhance the security team’s visibility and eases management."

November 30, 2016 Off

Juniper Networks Simplifies Cloud Transition for Enterprises with Carrier-Grade Routing and Unified Security for AWS Marketplace

By David
Grazed from Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks, an industry leader in automated, scalable and secure networks, today announced that the latest versions of its industry leading virtual routing and security platforms, Juniper Networks vMX and vSRX Virtual Firewall, are now available in the AWS Marketplace. Operating similar to their physical counterparts, the vMX and vSRX platforms will enable enterprises to flexibly deploy carrier-grade routing and firewall functions at the click of a button. Customers will have the option to purchase services on-demand via an annual or hourly subscription directly from the AWS Marketplace, or from Juniper Networks through a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model.

The benefits of running workloads in the cloud are well documented, yet the actual migration and implementation of a cloud strategy still pose challenges for enterprises with an established IT infrastructure. According to research conducted in 2016 by IHS Markit, a world leader in supplying critical information, analytics and solutions for major industries and markets, 53 percent of enterprise respondents in North America cite data security as the top barrier to adopting off-premises cloud security technologies, indicating the need for faster, more scalable virtual software solutions for securely routing or migrating workloads between private and public clouds.

November 30, 2016 Off

AWS Launches Amazon Athena

By David
Grazed from Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced Amazon Athena, a serverless query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using standard SQL. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can point Amazon Athena at their data stored in Amazon S3 and begin using standard SQL to run queries and get results in seconds. With Amazon Athena there are no clusters to manage and tune, no infrastructure to setup or manage, and customers pay only for the queries they run. Amazon Athena scales automatically – executing queries in parallel – so results are fast, even with large datasets and complex queries. To get started with Amazon Athena, visit https://aws.amazon.com/athena.

November 30, 2016 Off

Survey Shows More than 50 Percent of Businesses Not Leveraging Public Cloud

By David
Grazed from TriCore Solutions

While more than 50 percent of respondents are not currently leveraging public cloud, 80 percent plan on migrating more within the next year, according to a new study conducted by TriCore Solutions, the application management experts. As new streams of data are continuing to appear, from mobile apps to artificial intelligence, companies in the future will rely heavily on cloud and digital transformation to minimize complexity.

The study is based on survey results from more than 200 industry professionals. The research outlines businesses state of operations, biggest changes expected and greatest needs for the digital age. Today’s CIO understands the delicate balance between managing for today’s demands and preparing for the technology solutions of tomorrow.

Here are some key results from the survey:

November 30, 2016 Off

Esri Offers Customers On-Demand Deployment and Managed Services in the Cloud

By David
Grazed from Esri

At this year’s AWS re:Invent, global smart-mapping leader Esri announced that customers can now deploy select ArcGIS licenses from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace instantly, using a pay-per-use pricing model available through hourly or annual subscriptions. Automated software provisioning allows users to launch new projects, respond to emergency requirements, address spikes in usage, and respond seamlessly to business needs without being tied to restrictive enterprise licensing models.

November 30, 2016 Off

The Best Ways to Prepare Yourself for a Career in Cloud Computing

By David
Are you thinking about working in cloud computing? This is a technology sector that has seen massive growth in recent years and this trend looks set to continue for many years to come. It’s also good news for anyone who wants to work in this area. Below are some of the best ways you can prepare yourself for a career in cloud computing.

Research Cloud Computing

If you know very little about cloud computing, you need to start off by carrying out some extensive research. This should include finding out more about the latest cloud technologies and the platforms used by businesses today, the course or courses you need to complete to qualify in this area and any other research you believe is necessary. Once you have collected this information you can make better decisions about how to proceed.

November 29, 2016 Off

IDERA Free Tools Now Available on AWS Marketplace

By David
Grazed from IDERA

IDERA, a leading provider of database lifecycle management solutions (DLM), today announced four free tools available on AWS Marketplace, providing customers a range of options for third-party management solutions for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database across Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

“We build our portfolio of free tools to solve critical issues for users, and their success is clear with hundreds of thousands of downloads worldwide,” said Heidi Farris, chief marketing officer at IDERA. “Making them available on AWS Marketplace for cloud database customers reinforces IDERA’s commitment to data professionals who must consistently accomplish more for less. We’re looking forward to expanding our free tools in cooperation with AWS.”