Category: News

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

Cloud and hybrid backup and recovery solutions provider Carbonite (CARB) today announced plans to acquire MailStore for approximately $19.8 million. Carbonite CEO Mohamad Ali said he believes acquiring MailStore, a German email archiving solutions provider for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), will help his company expand globally and improve its SMB continuity solutions portfolio.

"MailStore is a great fit for Carbonite, as both companies are committed to providing SMBs with powerful yet simple data protection solutions," he said in a prepared statement. "In addition to offering email archiving to businesses worldwide with MailStore’s existing solutions, Carbonite will integrate MailStore’s robust full-text search and indexing capabilities into our product portfolio to help our business customers better manage, understand and leverage their data."…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-mergers-and-acquisitions/12152014/carbonite-acquire-mailstore-approx-198m

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Riverbed Technology (RVBD) has been bought by private equity investment firm Thoma Bravo and Teachers’ Private Capital, the private investor department of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. The buyout is being valued at approximately $3.6 billion. The San Francisco-based company provides solutions designed to tackle issue with IT performance across wide area networks (WANs).

Riverbed’s solutions focus on CAD applications, data protection software, collboration, unified communications and more. Riverbed CEO Jerry Kennelly, who will remain with the company in the same capacity, said his company believes this acquisition "will be a winning proposition for all our stakeholders."…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-mergers-and-acquisitions/12152014/riverbed-be-acquired-thoma-bravo-36b

Grazed from AmericanBanker. Author: Penny Crossman.

As bank executives continue to debate, hesitate and worry over the security issues related to using applications that connect to the cloud, their employees are using cloud-based apps by the hundreds — often without banks’ knowledge. The average bank had 844 cloud services in use throughout its network in the third quarter of this year, according to an analysis conducted by Skyhigh Networks, far higher than bank IT departments estimated.

"If you did a survey where you asked the financial services companies themselves [how many cloud services they use], the answer would be somewhere between 32 and 34, because you approved those," said Rajiv Gupta, CEO of Skyhigh, which provides cloud security software…

Grazed from WindowsITPro. Author: Sameer B.

As more cloud-based technologies become available and their security and functionality improves, more companies are moving to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for all of their enterprise applications. The use of online software for customer service has lagged slightly behind its use in other areas, but it is catching up.

According to a Forrester Research survey, at the end of last year, only 15% of companies had moved most or all of their customer service and support to the cloud. However, an additional 14% planned to add some cloud-based tools over the next two years. Customer service itself has traditionally been an area where development has been slow, but new cloud technologies are speeding innovation…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Paul Burns.

Although public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds have been widely adopted to drive IT agility and deliver new business value, confusion still exists about their defining characteristics. Many in the IT industry believe that virtualized infrastructure is a requirement for cloud computing. In truth, however, both virtualized and bare-metal infrastructures are well suited for building clouds. And both types of infrastructure enable the defining characteristics of cloud computing, including resource pooling, metered consumption, self-service, and elasticity.

The real question is how virtualized and bare-metal clouds are different, and in which cases the bare-metal option provides an advantage. CIOs and CTOs want to know which type of cloud will help them meet their strategic IT objectives. Infrastructure architects want to understand where applications will run best…

Grazed from EnterpriseInnovation. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is no longer an issue of “if” for enterprises anymore, clearly all businesses will adopt or are adopting cloud in some shape or form as the basis for transforming their IT infrastructures into more agile and flexible organizations. Whether from government, telecoms, retail or even the highly regulated financial sectors, companies across the board are jumping on the cloud bandwagon in efforts to create a new model for IT.

According to an IDC survey conducted at the end of 2013, approximately half of the survey respondents indicated that they are planning on a private cloud strategy while the other half plan on rolling out a hybrid public and public cloud approach. "It’s going to be a very diverse and complex environment out there for a number of years," IDC Research VP Mary Johnston Turner. She added that diversity includes the use of different virtualization tools as well as underlying operating systems…

Read more from the source @ http://enterpriseinnovation.net/article/cios-discuss-transformation-around-cloud-and-open-source-1197932306

Grazed from HostReview. Author: Editorial Staff.

One of the most basic ways to explain cloud computing is that it allows computing from anywhere where there is an available internet connection. Some of the benefits of cloud computing includes enabling remote employees access the same applications they would use on their desktop computers, lower costs on IT infrastructure upgrades, and improve overall collaboration and productivity within your company.

It is estimated that billions of dollars will be invested in cloud computing technology so the trend is clear that cloud computing will only grow in popularity for the foreseeable future. But is it worth the investment for your business? Let’s take a look at he below reasons why your company definitely needs to take a look at this powerful technology…

Read more from the source @ http://www.hostreview.com/blog/141215-cloud-technology-is-it-really-worth-the-investment#ixzz3Lz2imn4w

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing, says Gartner, “is uniquely susceptible to the perils of myths due to the nature, confusion and hype surrounding it.” This is not good. “These myths slow things down, impede innovation and induce fear, thus distracting from real progress, innovation and outcomes.”

True enough, myths tend to do that, but I’d suggest there is nothing unique about cloud’s ability to attract myths. Any new technology development creates confusion and hype, and hence myth. Gartner has listed 10 of what it says are “some of the most dangerous and misleading cloud myths.” Some of these I would agree are well established, thus damaging the image and impeding the uptake of cloud and inhibiting organisations from enjoying the full benefits of cloud…

Grazed from InvestCorrectly.  Author: James Vrionis.

Inventors at International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) have put together a patented technique that takes advantage of analytics to increase the performance of cloud computing services and reduces their associated costs. This is done by moving workloads around, in the same cloud center or a distant one, based on an automated analysis which optimizes use of cloud resources. The automated analysis allows workloads to run in the cloud in the most efficient way possible.

IBM’s newest invention is able to automatically take cloud computing resources from different cloud centers, which allows clients to optimize their service performance and lower costs by reducing the amount of manual intervention needed in order to properly allocate software, hardware, and services on the cloud. The automated technique used by IBM is also beneficial for the end-user, as it gives them more control over where their cloud workloads will run…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

The “market” for system- and network-level technologies has become (or at least needs to become) more comprehensible to many business managers in a world where we understand that cloud and managed and/or virtualized computing services are increasingly driving our IT functions. CEOs who might have never heard the term Application Delivery Controller, load balancer or log file now have a chance to grasp the new back-end jive-talk and develop an appreciation for the provenance and health of the technology inside their firms’ operational guts.

Piggy in the middleware

Network engineers at Cisco know that the holiday season is approaching, but haven’t let the forthcoming revelry stop them from releasing the “alpha” of Snort 3.0 this late into December. Snort (yes, they do use a piggy for the logo) is an open source Intrusion Prevention/Detection System (IPS or IDS, depending on which way you swing) capable of real-time traffic analysis and packet logging…