Category: News

Grazed from Gartner. Author: Editorial Staff.

More than $1 trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to cloud during the next five years, said Gartner, Inc. This will make cloud computing one of the most disruptive forces of IT spending since the early days of the digital age.

"Cloud-first strategies are the foundation for staying relevant in a fast-paced world," said Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner. "The market for cloud services has grown to such an extent that it is now a notable percentage of total IT spending (see Table 1), helping to create a new generation of start-ups and "born in the cloud" providers."…

To the majority of the world, today is just another day; perhaps a little extra exciting because it’s a Friday. But, in the world of IT, today is THE day, System Administrator Appreciation Day! The role of a SysAdmin is perhaps one of the most behind the scenes, yet tremendously important jobs out there, and today is the one day SysAdmins are brought into the spotlight and recognized for being "heroic men and women who, come rain or shine, prevent disasters, keep IT secure and put out tech fires left and right," as stated on SysAdminDay.com.  

Recognizing the important role SysAdmins play in their own businesses, industry leaders and vendors across the board are weighing in on the 17^th Annual "holiday."

Grazed from Nasdaq. Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle Corp. agreed to pay $9.3 billion for a cloud-computing pioneer that counts Larry Ellison as a major investor, using its second-largest acquisition to try to catch up in a key area where it has lagged.

Oracle said it is paying $109 a share in cash for NetSuite Inc., a 19% premium to the company’s closing price Wednesday of $91.57. The deal is raising questions about the role of Mr. Ellison, Oracle’s chairman, who is the biggest shareholder in both companies…

LogMeIn and Citrix Systems announced that the companies have entered into a definitive merger agreement for LogMeIn to combine with Citrix’s GoTo business in a deal valued at approximately $1.8 billion.  The deal will enable Citrix to focus on its other products, including XenDesktop and XenApps.

Back in November, Citrix announced that it would spin off its GoTo family of products as a separate company.  By combining the spinoff with a merger, the transfer will be tax free for Citrix in a move known as a "Reverse Morris Trust."

The transaction has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies.  According to officials with both companies, the deal, expected to close in the first quarter of 2017, will create a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business with a diverse product portfolio and greater resources to drive innovation. 

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Michael Segal.

Cloud computing is transforming modern business. Through the cloud, new digital-centric businesses are emerging that are more agile and innovative than anything seen before. Whether a new, ‘upstart’ business like Uber, with its compelling approach to city transport; or an established company breaking into new markets, like General Motors with its investment into Lyft, businesses are pioneering new customer services and business models that are disrupting entire industries and changing the way we work and play.

This digital transformation (DX) will affect all businesses. According to IDC, one third of the top 20 companies in every industry will have been disrupted by such digitally transformed companies by 2018. The message to businesses is clear: disrupt or be disrupted…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Adam Shah.

If you want to play with an ARM-based server, you can now apply to gain access to one online through the Linaro Developer Cloud. The cloud service was announced in March but has finally gone live. It’s mainly targeted at developers who want to evaluate ARM servers.

The free service is one way to access ARM servers, which aren’t widely available. Applications go through an approval process, and only those serious about programming for ARM servers will likely be approved…

Grazed from CCI. Author: Editorial Staff.

In the face of cyber-attacks, infrastructure failures, human error and other threats, companies are now prioritising Business Continuity initiatives that have traditionally been an afterthought. As part of these efforts, teams increasingly focus on the security and compliance of cloud-based disaster recovery and backup. iland, an award-winning cloud provider, today announced this strategic shift towards ensuring secure, fast and compliant IT resilience has fueled its growth across the United States, EMEA and Singapore markets.

iland’s industry-recognised Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) and Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) offerings have achieved a 248 percent revenue growth rate in the first half of 2016. The company also more than doubled its number of new DRaaS and BaaS customers across diverse industries ranging from healthcare to financial services to oil and gas…

Article Written by David Marshall

Managed cloud services provider HOSTING has reinforced the HIPAA and PCI capabilities of its DRaaS solution with business continuity and disaster recovery software from Zerto. The Zerto Virtual Replication software is expected to help protect HOSTING’s mission critical workloads and applications with multi-cloud, single-team support on VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V and Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

HOSTING CTO Darrell Hyde said the Zerto software will help HOSTING build, migrate, and manage compliance-mandated environments for their managed services customers.

“The new HOSTING DRaaS solution offers customers the flexibility, control and support they need to protect their important applications and data from the ordinary such as human error, to the catastrophic such as natural disasters and even ransomware attacks,” he said “Recognized as one of the largest VMware partners in North America, we replaced Site Recovery Manager with Zerto to increase our customers’ confidence knowing their workloads – no matter the type, size or scope – will be protected and quickly recovered with minimal impact on operations.” 

The HOSTING DRaaS solution provides replication between multiple hypervisor types, self-service capabilities through a secure portal, detailed reporting, non-disruptive testing and point-in-time recovery. The DRaaS solution is powered by Zerto to support migration integration between HOSTING’s own cloud service and third-party cloud providers such as Amazon and Azure, to reduce engineering development cycles. 

HOSTING hopes the improved compliance and service level agreement capabilities will help differentiate it from large telecommunications providers that do not provide high-end support service.

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About the Author

David Marshall is an industry recognized virtualization and cloud computing expert, a seven time recipient of the VMware vExpert distinction, and has been heavily involved in the industry for the past 16 years.  To help solve industry challenges, he co-founded and helped start several successful virtualization software companies such as ProTier, Surgient and Hyper9 and also spent a few years transforming desktop virtualization while at Virtual Bridges.

David is also a co-author of two very popular server virtualization books: "Advanced Server Virtualization: VMware and Microsoft Platforms in the Virtual Data Center" and "VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center."  He was also the Technical Editor on Wiley’s "Virtualization for Dummies" and "VMware VI3 for Dummies" books.  David also authored countless articles for a number of well known technical magazines, including: InfoWorld, Virtual-Strategy and TechTarget.  And in 2004, he founded the oldest independent virtualization and cloud computing news site, VMblog.com, which he still operates today.

Follow David Marshall

Twitter: @vmblog
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmarshall
Blog: http://vmblog.com
 

CloudLock, the leading Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) and Cloud Cybersecurity Platform, today announced the company has achieved Advanced Technology Partner status in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN). By reaching this status, CloudLock demonstrates its commitment to enabling organizations to secure their AWS environments, including codeless security and cloud DLP for apps purchased on the AWS marketplace and custom apps built on top of AWS.

While IaaS vendors such as Amazon are responsible for securing the infrastructure, security is inherently a shared responsibility. Organizations now focus on user behavior and data exposures instead of the infrastructure itself. In addition, organizations are building their own apps faster than ever, where many of these apps are the most business-critical and store or process highly-sensitive data. With homegrown, custom apps, organizations need to be able to defend against compromised accounts, prevent data breaches, achieve compliance, and enable security operations and forensics.