Category: News

Today’s users increasingly demand mobile access to apps, and modernizing the front-ends of existing apps to add mobile capabilities using web technologies is more efficient than investing time and money in building native apps for each of the mobile platforms such as Android, IOS, and Windows. Those platforms and devices change rapidly, requiring constant updating of native apps, which is a maintenance headache. Plus, building new front-end apps is easier than modifying existing web apps because mobile apps have newer interaction paradigms, including different navigation controls, multiple screen resolutions, and platform-specific usability guidelines. Most mobile app building requires complex API development to access enterprises’ backend systems and server-side databases.

Every organization shares five primary cloud cybersecurity concerns, regardless of what industry it is in: Account Compromise, Cloud Malware, Excessive Data Exposure, Over-Exposed Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data, and Collaboration. On average, only 5 percent of organizations take active steps towards protecting credentials, which include attempts to identify instances of exposed credentials in public cloud environments.

As Gartner Analyst, Douglas Toombs, notes in his July 2015 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Enabled Managed Hosting North America Report "Cloud-enabled managed hosting brings cloudlike consumption and provisioning attributes to the traditional managed hosting market. It represents an evolution of a mature market in which the wide variety of offerings and capabilities means vendors must be chosen carefully."

DH2i Company, recently named a Cool Vendor by Gartner in the "Cool Vendors in Servers and Virtualization, 2015" report, recently announced the general availability of its new Sandbox Lab. Designed to provide simple access to evaluateDxEnterprise container management software for Windows applications and workloads, the new lab streamlines proof of concept (POC) testing. It gives IT teams unfettered access to a live customizable testing environment, eliminating the need to build and/or maintain their own on-premises POC infrastructure.

"The DH2i Sandbox Lab is an ideal way to accurately evaluate the value of container management technology for Windows Server environments, such as SQL Server workloads," said Edwin Sarmiento, Microsoft SQL Server MVP and MCM. "Using the lab, enterprises can quickly determine how container management software will meet their requirements in areas such as minimizing datacenter complexity, Windows Server OS sprawl, and licensing costs."

ByteGrid has expanded the availability of highly compliant Life and Health Science hosting platform to ByteGrid’s Seattle, Chicago and Washington DC Metro data centers. These ByteGrid locations have been formally qualified to offer the highest levels of technology, security and compliance of any national IT infrastructure services provider.

Acceleratio Ltd., an innovative software development company, released an ultimate system admin toolkit – SysKit 2016. It’s one of the biggest ever Acceleratio releases, because the company decided to bring all of its great server monitoring products and their features together into one tool – SysKit.

SysKit allows monitoring of Windows-based infrastructure, including Windows Servers, Remote Desktop Services, Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop servers, RD Gateway, workstations, etc. It enables administrators track users’ logon activities, monitor actions done on files, get information about blocked IPs and network traffic, track important hardware and software assets, and much, much more.

Grazed from IT KnowledgExchange.  Author:  Joel Shore.

Not even two years. HP’s Helion public cloud service, launched on May 6, 2014. It’s being euthanized on Jan. 31, 2016. If your organization has workload and data assets in the HP cloud, they must be moved elsewhere by that cutoff date.

Grazed from WinBeta. Author: Kareem Anderson.

In a recent interview, Microsoft’s group engineer Fil Alleva opened up about Skype Translator’s connection to the popular Star Wars characters, C-3P0 as well the long path it took them to grasp universal translation. While many may argue that Star Trek explored universal translation in a much more thought-out implementation, Alleva admits that it was C-3PO’s ability to understand and speak (presumably) millions of languages that he held in the back of his mind as the inspiration.

What we all had in the back of our minds, whether we say it or not, was C-3PO. Like the upcoming seventh Star Wars film, the Skype Translator team is leaning heavily on 30 plus years of ground work. Microsoft’s specific involvements can be traced back to the company’s executive vice president of technology and research Xuedong Huang’s early speech initiatives in 1993…

Grazed from HotHardware. Author: Brandon Hill.

It’s been nearly two years since Satya Nadella swooped into replace longtime Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Ballmer later resigned from Microsoft’s Board of Directors in August 2014 and has kept a relatively low [tech] profile since then. His most recent commentary about his former company was rather flattering, with Ballmer commenting in October, "Nobody else is really trying to compete with [Apple] anymore, really, seriously, in hardware. If there’s going to be any competition for Apple, it’ll come from Microsoft – and I believe that."

This week, Ballmer once again had some words to say about Microsoft, and this time he wasn’t so kind. At Microsoft’s annual shareholder meeting held yesterday, Ballmer, Microsoft’s largest shareholder, took issue with Microsoft’s failure to disclose its profit margins and sales figures for its cloud services and hardware business…