Category: News

January 24, 2015 Off

Cerner, Athenahealth And Veeva Chase Cloud-Based EHR

By David

Grazed from Nasdaq.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A new wrinkle in federal rules this year aims to urge more hospitals and other medical providers into the 21st century.  Those expectations have helped lift a handful of companies in IBD’s Computer Software-Medical group, a group at the intersection of health care and Internet technology — and key suppliers to the health industry’s conversion from paper to digital electronic records.

Cerner, Athenahealth, and Veeva Systems are at the head of that list. All three have seen benefits from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus bill. All have also seen their share of recent ups and downs…

January 24, 2015 Off

Cloud Computing: Box Becomes First Tech IPO of 2015 and Wows Investors

By David

Grazed from CIOToday.  Author: Dan Heilman.

In its initial public offering, shares in online file storage company Box were trading at $24.24 on Friday afternoon, 73 percent higher than its IPO price of $14 a share. With that impressive opening morning, the start-up company caught up to the $2.4 billion valuation that it garnered in its most recent private financing round last summer, possibly allaying concerns among investors that the company had been overvalued.

In a video presentation to investors Friday, Box co-founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, said that his company was at the forefront of "a once-in-a-generation shift" in storage. Among the company’s clients are General Electric and the drug maker AstraZeneca…

January 23, 2015 Off

ODCA Usage Model: Cloud Infrastructure Rev. 1.0

By David

Grazed from ODCA. Author: Editorial Staff.

While the segregation of infrastructure resources into these three components is useful to a degree, they are more appropriately considered as a cohesive set of aggregate resources that can be purchased, provisioned, and managed as a whole. This is especially important as the lines between software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and IaaS blur.

SaaS offerings continue to add options and flexibility (thereby delving into PaaS); recently, the industry introduced the concept of IaaS+, which blurs the line between IaaS and PaaS by adding modular services on top of infrastructure services…

Read more from the source @ https://www.opendatacenteralliance.org/advanced-search-and-tools/advanced-search/infrastructure-workgroup/cloud-infrastructure

January 23, 2015 Off

VMware Launches vCloud Air Edge Program for Cloud Startups

By David

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

VMware (VMW) is giving small cloud startups a chance to grow their businesses with the launch of vCloud Air Edge, an incubation program designed to help small businesses develop their cloud-centric offerings as well as help launch companies currently developing “new, potentially disrupting enterprise solutions on vCloud Air,” according to the company.

The incubator program was spurred by the popularity of VMware’s cloud-based service programs for independent software vendors looking to leverage the virtualization company’s hybrid cloud solutions. Further interest from venture capitalists, cloud startups and on-premise ISVs convinced VMware to expand the program to startup companies, according to a company blog post…

January 23, 2015 Off

Federal IT Leaders Want Cloud Vendors to Provide Clarity

By David

Grazed from CIO. Author: Kenneth Corbin.

If you’re a cloud service provider, the federal government wants to hear from you. Federal agencies are actively shopping for new cloud computing technologies, but vendors will help their cause by packaging their services to be more readily implemented in a government environment that is highly security conscious and almost preternaturally cautious about rolling out new IT systems.

The feds have been developing a system for streamlining the security requirements for cloud service providers (CSPs). Under the FedRAMP program, vendors can submit their cloud service for a review by an inter-agency panel to gain clearance to operate across the government, or can seek approval of a single department or agency…

January 23, 2015 Off

Cloud Computing: Legal Issues on the Horizon

By David

Grazed from JDSupra. Author: Quinn Emanuel.

In the May 2014 issue of the Business Litigation Report, we discussed a hot topic in law and technology: cloud computing. That topic did not cool down over the summer. Businesses and courts—including the Supreme Court—have continued to grapple with issues presented by computing in the cloud, including who owns the rights to key cloud computing technologies. Given the increased competition and growth in the cloud computing market, such litigation is likely to continue in the future, and will need to take changing legal rules into account.

The Cloud Computing Market

Broadly defined, “cloud computing” refers to the shared use of computing resources over a distributed computer network. Those resources may include storage, processing, communication, or other computer tasks. The network over which such resources are accessed may be public like the Internet, private like many enterprise IT environments, or a hybrid network combining public and private elements. The business case for shifting computing resources to the cloud is based on the flexibility that cloud computing provides. Instead of needing to buy racks of expensive servers and other equipment as a necessary first step to launching a business, today’s startups can order “virtual” IT centers consisting of only the resources they actually need…

January 23, 2015 Off

The cloud warning label and avoiding the dark side

By David

Grazed from Vator.TV. Author: Graham Turney.

A startup founder faces a wealth of decisions every day that can profoundly affect the fate of his or her business. One such decision is choosing where to host a site or application. Until recently, that choice often appeared to be among several near identical infrastructure providers. As the cloud has matured, however, the industry has begun to recognize two broad categories in the cloud — managed and unmanaged vendors.

According to Gartner, Rackspace is the leader in the managed space. In a recent blog (included below), our CEO, Taylor Rhodes, outlined the differences between managed and unmanaged clouds and the ramifications of those differences for your business. Here’s what he outlined:…

January 22, 2015 Off

A Mixed Forecast: The New Norm For Cloud

By David

Grazed from MBTMag. Author: Ed Talerico.

After years of debate and numerous predictions as to when cloud computing would reach widespread adoption, it seems that 2014 was the year when it finally came of age. With 69 percent of enterprises running either applications or infrastructure in the cloud today, up 12 percent from 2012, it is difficult to dispute claims that the ‘fluffy stuff’ has hit the mainstream.

The drivers behind this acceleration are three-fold. First, a reduction in the cost of cloud computing has made it increasingly difficult for companies to ignore. Research shows that most organizations rapidly realize significant cost savings that actually increase over time as a result of the many indirect costs related to on premise software…

January 22, 2015 Off

Choose a cloud governance flavor for your IT taste buds

By David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Linthicum.

Cloud governance and security typically work together, so you can’t select the right security approaches and technology without first understanding your governance strategy. What’s more, cloud governance comes in many flavors, including service level, data level and platform level. It’s important to understand each type of governance before choosing the best option for your organization.

Service-level or API governance installs policies around access to services exposed by public or private clouds. Users who request access to cloud services have to go through a centralized mechanism that checks the requester’s authorization. This mechanism also forces compliance with predefined policies that dictate when and how to access the cloud services…

January 22, 2015 Off

Federal Agencies Cautious Of Cloud Commitment

By David

Grazed from HSToday. Author: Amanda Vicinanzo.

Although government agencies understand the benefits of migrating services to the cloud, nearly three quarters of federal cloud users remain wary of fully committing to cloud computing, according to MeriTalk, a public-private partnership focused on improving the outcomes of government IT. Meritalk’s new report, Cloud without Commitment, underwritten by Red Hat and Cisco, examined federal barriers to cloud adoption including migration, data portability, integration and future agility.

Surveying 150 public sector IT professionals, Meritalk found most federal cloud users want to migrate more services to the cloud, with nearly one in five saying they deliver some of their agency’s IT services fully or partially via the cloud. However, security and control concerns are preventing them from fully embracing the cloud…