Category: News

Grazed from InTheBlack. Author: Christopher Niesche.

Changes brought about by cloud computing, the oversight of tax financial advisers, and streamlining its services are some of the challenges the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) is facing over the next 12 months. Just like the broader tax and accounting profession, the TPB is responding to the challenges thrown up by increasing IT capability and cloud storage of information.

Chair of the TPB, Ian Taylor FCPA, says it is providing guidance on these trends. “We’re seeing a very marked change in the way people do business digitally,” he says. “We’re getting an increasingly electronic interchange of information and interaction with the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). That means changes for agents, because a number of agents previously used to lodge only by paper.”…

Infrastructure is increasingly complex, and change is constant — whether immediate, or slower, more insidious configuration drift. A recent CloudPhysics survey indicated that 68% of application disruptions are due to configuration issues, rather than software or hardware failures. Prior to Exploration Mode, when a change-driven problem surfaced in the infrastructure, IT admins were unable to "replay" the environment across time to correlate events or changes that may have caused the problem.

Lenovo and Nutanix today announced a strategic partnership to develop, market and sell a new family of Lenovo hyperconverged appliances powered by Nutanix software. Converging storage, server and virtualization services into an integrated scale-out appliance helps simplify datacenter management and can drive substantial IT cost savings. Both companies are committed to delivering hyperconvergence infrastructure that enables IT organizations to focus on the applications and services that power, and bring greater agility to, their businesses by offering a compelling alternative to public cloud services.

Hyperconvergence combines highly reliable server platforms with state-of-the-art software to build private cloud datacenters that match the agility, scalability and fractional consumption of public clouds. This partnership allows Lenovo to continue its legacy of innovation, commitment to world-class engineering, and vision of how IT will evolve in the coming decade. Lenovo’s global reach including in fast-growing markets such as China provides the partnership with an accelerated route to market in critical segments of the industry.

Today, CoreOS, the leader in container infrastructure, is launching the general availability of Tectonic to provide a software solution to enterprise companies looking to deploy, manage and secure containers anywhere. Tectonic is available today to enterprises looking to move applications seamlessly between cloud and data center, as well as ensure a consistent environment to deploy applications from dev to cloud to data center.

Colm Keegan, cloud analyst from ESG states: "Many organizations are interested in leveraging container technology to enable continuous application innovation, faster time to market and improved operational efficiencies across hybrid cloud environments. But the lack of manageability, security and isolation often serves as an obstacle towards container adoption. CoreOS’ Tectonic offering addresses these concerns by providing a consistent and simplified operational framework that can be utilized to securely and more easily manage containers across hybrid cloud infrastructure. This can potentially enable businesses to reduce costs, enhance their Dev/Ops capabilities and gain a competitive edge through more rapid application development and deployment."

Having to continually invest in and provide support for an older business PC network can often become unsustainable for organizations. Combined with the existing investment of a large PC infrastructure, VXL’s CloudDesktop represents an easy-to-deploy and low cost alternative featuring VXL Software’s latest Gio 6 Linux based operating system.

By extending the life of legacy PC’s as re-configured and fully-optimized thin client devices, VXL’s CloudDesktop offers a seamless PC-to-thin client transition strategy without the cost of acquiring new hardware and maximizing the existing investment.

SmartBear Software, a leader in software quality tools for the connected world, released a new plugin for Ready! API that integrates with Amazon API Gateway. The new plugin allows API consumers and testers to read an API from Amazon API Gateway and quickly generate a test framework based on the API service description. Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor and secure APIs at any scale, offers all the power of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) stack with an affordable pay-as-you-go model. Ready! API is one of the most popular platforms for ensuring API quality.

“The Amazon API Gateway is the perfect fit for Ready! API, offering powerful capabilities within an affordable framework and an ecosystem of open source tooling like the Swagger Importer,” said John Purcell, Vice President of Products, API Readiness at SmartBear. “We’re excited to extend that power to our customers, allowing them to import an API for testing and virtualization as well as easily deploy new APIs to Amazon API Gateway.”

IBM Spectrum Storage is designed to help clients securely embrace the explosive growth of data and support both traditional and next generation applications. New features to improve security and cost-effective management of large amounts of data and storage, include:

Steadfast, a leading provider of private and public cloud hosting, colocation, disaster recovery and managed services, now offers offsite backup for Veeam Availability Suite using Veeam Cloud Connect. The company is a Silver Veeam Cloud Provider (VCP), offering Veeam-powered backup and DR (disaster recovery) services for customers utilizing Hyper-V and VMware hypervisors, both inside and outside Steadfast’s data center facilities.

OFFSITE BACKUP WITH VEEAM CLOUD CONNECT

Steadfast is proud to add support for Veeam Cloud Connect to its already expansive array of Veeam-powered offerings. Cloud Connect allows customers already utilizing Veeam onsite to push backups, backup copies and file copies to a secure cloud repository hosted in Steadfast’s data centers, allowing you peace of mind knowing that your backups are safe in a secure, offsite location. Cloud Connect allows full VM restores, VM disk restores and Windows guest OS file restores to be performed directly from the cloud repository, giving you a wide array of restoration options in the event of a disaster.

North Carolina-based Cloud Pharmaceuticals designs new drugs and drug candidates, accelerating the developmental process using cloud computing technology in place of traditional, expensive and slow on-premises infrastructure. In 2014, Cloud Pharmaceuticals migrated to ProfitBricks, the leading provider of painless cloud infrastructure, in pursuit of the perfect balance of power and efficiency for its pharmaceutical design teams, and has since seen a reduction in cloud computing costs of 45 per cent.