Category: News

Grazed from Akamai. Author: Wentao Li.

Enterprise public cloud adoption is becoming a norm around the world. Gartner expects public services cloud to hit $240 billion by 2017. They also suggest that the worldwide software as a service (SaaS) market will grow at 18.1% annually and the market will hit $46.35 billion by 2017 [1]. In addition to traditional dev-ops applications, business critical functions, such as CRM and ERP, are moving onto public cloud infrastructure. The goal is to take advantage of the on-demand scalability, flexibility and cost savings associated with cloud computing.

However, to realize the full benefits of adopting cloud computing, organizations need to look beyond access to simple compute and storage. Performance and security must also be considered when making the public Internet a critical piece of your application delivery environment…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

The Wall Street Journal today takes a critical eye toward IaaS cloud providers like Amazon and Google who admit they are hosting some of their companies most sensitive workloads in private servers and not in their much-touted public cloud platforms. Executives with cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services have for years been attempting to make the case that their cloud platforms are ready for any and all workloads. They trot out customers at their conferences who have closed their last data centers. But that’s not the norm. While many organizations have warmed to the idea of using the public cloud, there’s still a hesitancy to lift and shift all workloads into the cloud.

Even the teams that run the Amazon.com ecommerce site and some of Google’s most valuable applications feel the same way. The WSJ spoke with a former Amazon executive who said that back-end databases with confidential data on them do not run in AWS’s cloud. An AWS spokesperson told the WSJ that “the vast majority of Amazon.com runs in AWS.”…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Most cloud computing users evolve into their cloud strategy rather than build one from scratch. In many cases, the cloud is the result of shadow IT within line departments — individual business units spinning up cloud VMs without the IT department’s knowledge or consent. And even when IT professionals formally plan for cloud, it’s usually done on a per-application basis without full consideration of costs and risks.

Fortunately, there are many ways an organization can optimize cloud, in terms of performance and cost. To start the optimization process, follow these four steps: Strike a balance between cost and performance; shed any unnecessary applications; know where your users are; and negotiate rather than accept published cloud prices…

Read more from the source @ http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/Cut-costs-with-these-four-cloud-optimization-tricks

Grazed from OpenStack. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Board of Directors of the OpenStack Foundation has voted unanimously to approve Fujitsu as the newest Gold Member of the OpenStack Foundation. The decision was made during the Foundation Board’s meeting in Austin last week. The move underscores rising momentum for the open source cloud computing project throughout the APAC region, as the worldwide community of OpenStack developers and users prepare for their global Summit in Tokyo this October.

Fujitsu is Japan’s largest IT services provider, with 159,000 employees globally and US$40 billion in revenue. The company operates more than 100 data centers worldwide and holds the No. 1 spot in Japan’s IT services market by revenue. "Fujitsu has been an active and engaged member of the OpenStack community for several years,” said Kenji Kaneshige, director of development department, Linux Development Division at Fujitsu. "The Board’s vote of confidence in our elevated level of commitment to the project is exciting for our entire team, and we look forward to new ways we can help OpenStack users with our experiences running the software at scale in public and private clouds as a unified cloud system.”…

Grazed from MSPMentor.  Author: Pedro Pereira.

Businesses have no shortage of reasons to embrace cloud services, but price shouldn’t be one of them. So says MJ Shoer, president of Jenaly Technology Group, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based provider of managed services and cloud solutions.

“If price is the primary driver, we are coming at the conversation from the wrong place,” Shoer says. An overemphasis on cost, he argues, forces you to either reduce capability to meet price requirements or deploy a solution that falls short of meeting business needs…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Government CIOs in states and local districts increasingly are looking to push applications to the cloud, but security and a reliable user experience remain principal challenges, a new survey reports.

Akamai, which provides a leading online content delivery network, tapped the Center for Digital Government to canvas state and local government IT workers to gauge their technology priorities and concerns, finding that poor user experience is a major obstacle for the spread of e-government services.  Government CIOs are struggling to meet rising expectations among consumers for what level of service a website should deliver, and 70 percent of the respondents in Akamai’s survey said that a consistent user experience is an "unmet need."…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Frederic Lardinois.

Security platform Zscaler today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round led by late stage investor TPG. The company, which offers a wide range of web, mobile and cloud security services for enterprises, has now raised a total of $138 million and says that its valuation in this last round was over $1 billion. Other investors include EMC and previous investor Lightspeed Venture Partners.

“Our mission is to make the Internet safe for business by delivering an amazing security platform that protects our clients and enables the strategic adoption of cloud computing, mobile devices and the Internet of Things,” said Jay Chaudhry, CEO of Zscaler, in today’s announcement…

Grazed from NetworksAsia. Author: Editorial Staff.

With the increasing utilization of data centers and cloud services across the Asia Pacific region, companies have gradually updated or upgraded their existing IT systems, giving rise to the Hybrid IT environment which is fast becoming the new normal.

Besides helping enterprises to drive digital disruption, the latest Hybrid IT environment is also enhancing the customer experience and encouraging business model innovation.  As a result, there is greater acceleration in the adoption of a multi-vendor multi-cloud environment or Hybrid IT…

Grazed from IBT.  Author: Jessica Menton.

Microsoft Corporation’s Windows 10 launch kicked off to a strong start last week, with its usage share jumping by four times in just three days, Computerworld.com reported, citing Irish metrics company StatCounter. Microsoft released Windows 10 Wednesday as a free upgrade for users who are currently using Windows 7 or Windows 8.

The increase was much larger than Microsoft’s last free upgrade of Windows 8.1 in October 2013.  The global Windows 10 usage share, a measure of how active users of the OS were on the Internet, doubled from 0.3 percent to 0.6 percent on the official launch day Wednesday, Irish metrics company StatCounter said…

Grazed from ChannelBiz.  Author: Antony Savvas.

Acronis has announced a partnership with ProfitBricks to deliver Acronis Backup Cloud as its backup solution option for the ProfitBrick’s cloud computing platform.  Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) firm ProfitBricks says that with Acronis Backup Cloud, its managed service provider (MSP) partners and end user customers will have access to “best-in-class” backup through its cloud computing platform.