Category: News

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Maria Deutscher.

The promise of cloud computing remains elusive for the traditional enterprise nearly a decade after the trend first reared its head. Organizations are caught in a trade-off between control and flexibility that makes it difficult to realize the full benefits of the model, but striking the right balance became a notch easier last week as the vendor community took a collective step forward toward seizing it.

AppDirect Inc. led the charge, revealing a $50 million funding round meant to fuel the development of its namesake platform, which provides a way for business workers to consume cloud services on their own terms while still upholding governance policies. It offers a selection of pre-screened applications that administrators can assemble into catalogs tailored to the requirements of their organizations and regulate usage accordingly…

Read more from the source @ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/02/16/what-you-missed-in-cloud-disrupting-consumption-models/

Grazed from BackupTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Complete automation is a myth. Absolute agility is a dream. But, the cloud makes it possible to automate those routine processes and activities that would otherwise consume considerable amount of time and deprive the organisation of the precious time that can be spent innovating, communicating, and building up their business.

The first step towards smarter computing is to spell out your rules and policies. These are triggers and frames for intelligent process definitions. For instance, if you want only certain section of your employees to have access to a specified set of data, it is important to have a user management policy. Each employee who can be authorised for access must be given a user id and password that allows access to the data set…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Is cloud computing finally opening up the doors to analytics? Everyone wants advanced data analytics, but the bar to achieving these capabilities has been high — requiring high-level skills, as well as highly scalable data management and storage. Cloud offers a way into the world of analytics, especially for small to midsize organizations that may may never have been able to afford it.

For large enterprises, it provides ways to quickly spin up or test new applications and data sets without crowding out existing infrastructure. A recent survey by O’Reilly Media and sponsored by Teradata finds that 40 percent of respondents who identify themselves as big data practitioners currently use cloud services for analytics…

Grazed from FutureGov.  Author: Editorial Staff.

As the mobile channel becomes an increasingly important access point for government services, HP has launched a new Software-as-a-Service solution to improve the way government agencies monitor their mobile apps.

HP AppPulse Active monitors the performance of both native apps and browser-based apps, allowing IT departments to see service levels in real time – rather than when it is too late and a fault has already occurred…

Grazed from SeekingAlpha.  Author: Zejia Yao.

When we talk about Alibaba, we always refer to its e-commerce business. In fact, Alibaba is more than just an online shopping operator. It also offers cloud computing services that are underappreciated by the market.

Aliyun ("yun" means cloud in Chinese) is Alibaba’s cloud computing division. Originally, it was founded to handle the traffic volume and serve the data management of its own e-commerce platforms and Alipay, the payment platform. Since 2010, it has shared its cloud computing resources to generate revenue…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Tom Tennant.

As an IT professional, what would you say are the top three concerns that keep you awake at night? According to the results of a recent survey, your peers listed security, downtime (disaster recovery), and talent management, in that order.

The survey was commissioned by Sungard Availability Services, a cloud computing, disaster recovery, and managed hosting services provider based in Wayne, Pa. I had the opportunity to discuss the findings with Ric Jones, CIO at LifeShare Blood Centers, a blood donation services provider in Shreveport, La., that’s a Sungard AS customer. Jones ranked disaster recovery ahead of security on his own list of concerns, but he indicated that the two are inextricably linked…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Linda Musthaler.

Does your organization have a shadow IT problem? Would you even know if you did? According to the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), 72% of respondents to the 2014 Cloud Adoption Practices and Priorities survey know the scope of shadow IT in their computing environments.

CSA defines shadow IT as “technology spending and implementation that occurs outside the IT department, including cloud apps adopted by individual employees, teams, and business units.” Nearly half of the survey respondents (49%) say their primary concern about shadow IT is the security of corporate data in the cloud…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Mark Greene.

Over the last 20 years, software has slowly eaten the world. Marc Andreessen pointed out this trend in 2011 and noted that increasingly industries are going to be disrupted by software. Here we sit four years later with an “app” for everything. “There’s an app for that” is leading to the acceleration of fragmented software.

The Rise of the App

The rise of the app has meant a shift away from large and complex applications that typically were bundled into a platform or suite (think ERP) to a world of small, consumable, and easy to use apps with specialized functionality. The movement from monolithic applications to individual apps is providing more personalization opportunities…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Dan Kusnetzky.

Fortscale’s Idan Tendler, CEO and co-founder, came by to discuss what his company has been doing since our last conversation at the Splunk user group conference roughly a year ago. Each time I have the opportunity to speak with him, I learn something more about how analysis of the organization’s operational and machine logs can help.

This time Tendler pointed out that many of today’s security breaches or thefts of customer data can be attributed either to malicious staff behavior, or staff not following the enterprise’s data governance or security policies. Staffers are typically given access to many of the organization’s data assets…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Danny Bradbury.

Vancouver-based firm CA Cloud is offering CIOs the chance to run their own private cloud implementations, using open sourced cloud platform OpenStack. The benefits of cloud computing are well understood: elasticity, cost-effectiveness, and the option for automation and self-provisioning of services.

For many companies, moving to a public cloud-based infrastructure (where lots of customers share a single server) is too risky. Heavy regulation and compliance issues, along with their own security concerns, may prevent them being part of a multi-tenanted environment. Many may not have the time or resource to build up a cloud infrastructure outside their own organisation…