Category: News

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author:  Caron Beesley.

If your agency is making the move to cloud services, it can expect cost-savings, improved service delivery, and all the great things that the cloud brings. But for procurement and purchasing officials whose practices and contracting vehicles were designed to help managers provision hardware and software, not on-demand services like the cloud, it can all cause a bit of a frenzy.

But cloud procurement isn’t as problematic as it might first appear. Here are a few quick tips and insights that can help guide you through the solicitation, award and termination phases:…

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Grazed from TheVarGuy.  Author: Michael Cusanelli.
 

Avaya is partnering withVMware (VMW) on a new enterprise hybrid cloud service that leverages the vCloud Air platform. Avaya’s Hybrid Engagement as a Service platform is designed to enable users to bridge private and public clouds to deliver a flexible approach to implementing enterprise communications.

“This new set of cloud services from Avaya provides additional flexibility and cost efficiency to enterprise customers who want to take advantage of a public cloud model for our customer and team engagement solutions,” said Joe Manuele, vice president, SI/SP, Alliances and Cloud at Avaya, in a statement…

Grazed from BloombergNews.  Author: Josh Petri.

Amazon Web Services is introducing Amazon WorkMail, a secure cloud-based enterprise e-mail and calendar program to compete with Google’s Gmail and Mirosoft’s Exchange products.

AWS already dominates cloud computing market, but until recently hasn’t had many consumer-facing products. WorkMail is the third product aimed at a general consumer. It follows Zocalo (Amazon’s cloud-based file sharing product) and Workspaces (virtual desktop).

Read more from the source @ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-28/amazon-launches-enterprise-e-mail-service

Grazed from Marketwire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Bitcasa, the company that makes storage simple and secure, was recognized at the 2014-2015 Cloud Awards last night, winning the "Best Infrastructure" category for Bitcasa CloudFS.

With CloudFS, developers, OEMs, and other service providers can leverage Bitcasa’s global cloud infrastructure to rapidly integrate cloud storage into applications and services. Offering a full set of APIs, including pre‐built files and folders along with upload, download, sync, and other media services, CloudFS accelerates application development on public cloud storage…

Grazed from CloudComputingInfo.  Author: Kenneth Van Surksam.

Platform9, which exited stealthmode in August last year last weekreleased it’s Software as a Service (SaaS) solution based on OpenStack. This platform aims to reduce operational complexity offering non-disruptive setup and upgrades, a single pane of glass (unified management) for KVM and VMware vSphere, a native support for teams collaboration and a solid OpenStack base.

All you need to do is sign up for a Platform9 account, and pair your servers with it. The Platform9 dashboard starts offering visibility into your infrastructure across compute, storage, network and existing workloads…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

IBM has announced the launch of Identity Mixer, a cloud-based technology which aims to protect personal data by only revealing the bare minimum for transactions, on its BlueMix developer platform.

The release, which has not coincidentally been pegged for Data Privacy Day, uses a cryptographic algorithm to only reveal selected pieces of a user’s information, such as date of birth, home address, and credit card number, to third parties…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Bernard Golden.

In 2014, Gartner introduced a prescriptive organization model for enterprise IT called “Bimodal IT.” It posits that IT organizations of the future will have two separate flavors, if you will: Type 1 is traditional IT, focused on stability and efficiency, while Type 2 is an experimental, agile organization focused on time-to-market, rapid application evolution, and, in particular, tight alignment with business units.

Here is one description of bimodal IT from a Gartner conference attendee — unfortunately, Gartner has not yet chosen to publish a full description of the concept that can be accessed by non-subscribers, although a good overview of it can be gleaned from the firm’s report outline…

Grazed from SysCon Media.  Author: Elizabeth White.

OneCloud Software has launched the OneCloud Partner Program. Responding to demand from prospective partners, the Program offers managed service providers (MSPs) and resellers the resources they need to grow their business with the OneCloud Recovery solution. OneCloud Recovery is an automated solution for disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC), which leverages Amazon Web Services as the disaster recovery site.

"This is a tremendous opportunity with an innovative hybrid cloud-based DRproduct and a partner committed to providing the tools and support that will enable a competitive advantage," said Marc Crespi, CEO at OneCloud Software…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Dan Sullivan.

With multiple models and all that fine print, cloud licensing gets complicated quickly. Risks arise when IT isn’t clear on what’s allowed and what’s not. And when you’re not sure whom to contact for support, the complications only grow.

Prior to cloud computing, perpetual licenses were common. With these licenses, users purchase software and can use it as needed — subject to other license restrictions. But to ensure you have access to updated software, users may need to pay for ongoing maintenance…