Category: News

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Global software giant Oracle Corp. is slated to report its fiscal 2015 third quarter results on Tuesday, March 17th (the company follows June-May fiscal year). Having posted strong results in the second quarter thanks to the rapid expansion of its cloud computing business, expectations are ripe for the continuation of the cloud success story.

Further, this will be the first earnings report since Oracle initiated an aggressive pricing strategy for its engineered systems (Read: Oracle Triggers Price War in the Servers Market). Therefore, Oracle’s hardware business will also be watched closely to determine if the strategy has paid off…

Grazed from EdTech. Author: Frank Smith.

New technology is making it easier for school IT leaders to manage vast amounts of data. While cloud solutions have helped in this regard, some K–12 districts are reluctant to fully embrace the advantages offered by cloud services. In Cloud 401, a new report from CDW, more than 1,200 IT leaders from sectors such as business, healthcare, federal and state governments and K–12 were surveyed about their approaches to cloud services.

K–12 district IT experts surveyed said that 42 percent of their services are delivered either totally or partially through the cloud. “Cloud services have such great appeal that departments outside IT are often sourcing them independently," says Stephen Braat, vice president of cloud and managed solutions at CDW…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: David Roe.

The public cloud is more than 30 percent riskier than on-premises applications — and security concerns remain a strong barrier to cloud adoption. Those are just two of the findings from a new Cloud Security Spotlight Survey (registration required) by Campbell, Calif.-based Bitglass. The data security company surveyed more than 1,000 IT and IT security practitioners to assess the state of cloud in the enterprise.

It found a third of respondents have experienced more security breaches with the public cloud than with on-premises applications. In addition, 90 percent still express concern about public cloud security. The report also exposed other interesting facts, including that there are greater fears about employee misuse and access control than malware and hacking…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Cisco and Microsoft have jointly created a software and hardware package designed to help cloud providers spin up new services more quickly. The Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform was designed to streamline the process of setting up a cloud service by integrating Cisco hardware and software with Microsoft’s cloud and system software.

The package could be used to set up infrastructure, platform and software services. It has been designed to support enterprise applications in particular. Cloud systems can be difficult and expensive to set up properly because they involve coordinating operations among all the different elements, including servers, networking equipment and operating systems. A set of integrated offerings could cut deployment and maintenance times significantly…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Matt Weinberger.

What the heck is "the cloud"? Like "non-GMO," "part of a complete breakfast,"and "Intel Inside" before it, marketers have convinced us that "the cloud" is something we should want without ever really truly knowing why. When Microsoft airs TV commercials touting its range of cloud services and how it helps research teams work on cures for cancer, it hopes we’re nodding knowingly.

So, where does the phrase come from? Let’s back up. Rewind to the early nineties: Computer scientists and engineers needed some way in their diagrams and slideshows to refer to "the network," that big grouping of computers and storage devices out there somewhere. In other words, they needed some way to refer to something that was, essentially, somebody else’s problem…

Grazed from Cloud Computing Today. Author: Arnal Dayaratna.

On Wednesday, Google announced the Beta release of Google Cloud Storage Nearline, a cloud-based storage product that transforms the economics of hot and cold storage. Whereas enterprises currently wrestle with the problem of managing frequently accessed data versus “cold” data, Google Cloud Storage Nearline renders cold data accessible within three seconds.

The ability of Google Cloud Storage Nearline to access cold data means that organizations need not have separate infrastructures for managing cold and hot data but can instead leverage Google’s high performance, low cost storage solution to render historical data available within a few seconds…

Grazed from TechRepublic.  Author: Matt Asay.

There are lots of ways to explain the explosion of public cloud computing and the comparatively conservative growth of private cloud. We can talk about elasticity, shadow IT, and a number of other contributing factors.

But every once in a while, someone manages to sum up an argument in just one tweet, as Owen Rogers, a senior analyst with 451 Research, did this week. In fewer than 140 characters, Rogers said everything you need to know about why public cloud is the future of enterprise computing…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Jef Cozza.

With the announcement that it has just raised $28.5 million in venture capital funding, the cloud Relevant Products/Services-based monitoring company SignalFuse has emerged from stealth mode to announce the launch of a new monitoring platform to go along with the company’s new name, SignalFx. The San Mateo-based startup offers a software Relevant Products/Services-as-a-service application monitoring platform for infrastructure systems. SignalFx said it raised its financing from Andreessen Horowitz and Charles River Ventures.

Analytics-Based Insights

"An analytics-based approach to monitoring is essential for modern applications," said Phillip Liu, founder and CTO of SignalFx. "With SignalFx and SignalFlow technology, our customers can focus their efforts on interpreting operational metrics, discovering key patterns, and communicating insights with one another rather than building and supporting an undifferentiated metrics infrastructure…

Read more from the source @ http://www.toptechnews.com/article/index.php?story_id=030000HWQ866

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) has published an update to the widely cited Security for Cloud Computing: 10 Steps to Ensure Success whitepaper. Version 2.0 of the whitepaper can be downloaded here. When considering a move to cloud computing, customers must have a clear understanding of potential security benefits and risks associated with cloud computing and set realistic expectations with their cloud provider.

The Security for Cloud Computing: 10 Steps to Ensure Success V2.0 whitepaper provides guidance and strategies designed to help decision makers evaluate and compare security offerings from different cloud providers in key areas. The Cloud Standards Customer Council will host a webinar on Tuesday, March 17 from 11am – 12pm ET to introduce the paper…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

New Synergy Research Group data showed that Cisco Systems (CSCO) and HP (HPQ) maintained their status as cloud infrastructure market leaders during the fourth quarter of 2014. Together, Cisco and HP controlled 27 percent of the cloud infrastructure market. Synergy found that Cisco had a clear lead in public cloud infrastructure, while HP was the leader in private cloud.

However, the market intelligence firm also noted that both vendors saw their share of the total cloud market fall between the third and fourth quarters. Microsoft (MSFT) ranked third among cloud infrastructure providers, followed by Dell (DELL). IBM (IBM), meanwhile, fell from third to fifth; Synergy attributed the drop to Big Blue’s sale of its x86 server product line to Lenovo on Oct. 1…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-research/03122015/cisco-hp-lead-cloud-infrastructure-market