Category: News

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Richi Jennings.

Smart CIOs are evolving their existing in-house IT—to include “the cloud.” But beware of hidden pitfalls in moving to cloud computing.  So here are a few top, actionable tips. They’ll help you successfully transition to a modern computing model, stay sane in the face of fast-growing data, and avoid IT management chaos…

The Challenges We All Face 
Whatever your industry, CIOs are continually being asked to do more with less—and faster. Cynthia Stoddard, NetApp’s CIO, concludes that this type of innovation requires a business-focused approach:…

Grazed from GCN.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology released the final version of its Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap Volumes I and II, the culmination of a three-year old effort to assess and set objectives for the accelerated adoption of cloud computing in government.

“Cloud computing is still in an early deployment stage, and standards are crucial to increased adoption,” the report adds. “The urgency is driven by rapid deployment of cloud computing in response to financial incentives.”…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Google has struck a partnership with PwC in which the global provider of consulting services will recommend to its customers the Apps suite, Android devices and the Google cloud computing platform.

The deal comes at a time when Google is embroiled in tough fights in the enterprise markets for cloud email and collaboration suites, cloud computing services and mobile against rivals like Microsoft, IBM, Amazon and Apple…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Steve Ranger.

In the early days of the cloud computing it was routine for tech executives to admit that they had little idea of, or control over, the use of the technology within their organisations; developers would cheerfully pay for cloud storage or processing power using their credit cards, forcing CIOs to turn detective to work out what was being used, when, and by who.

But it seems that the IT department has now caught up and is reasserting its control over cloud spending, with either excellent or disastrous timing.  Over 80 percent of cloud spend is now managed by the IT department, and 62 percent of that has the direct involvement of the CIO, according to research by Verizon…

Grazed from Virtual Instruments.  Author: PR Announcement.

Infrastructure Performance Management provider Virtual Instruments has updated its VirtualWisdom solution, offering customers new analytics tools.  Now dubbed VirtualWisdom4.1, the update was announced at Powering the Cloud in Frankfurt. It features an applied analytics module which the firm claims to offer ‘enhanced user-interface, reporting, and analytics tools’.

Skip Bacon, CTO at Virtual Instruments, said: "The advanced applied analytics tools are able to execute tasks in just a few seconds, tasks which prior to VirtualWisdom4, would have taken hours or even days…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: Kimberly Gress.

As technology vendors respond to a changing marketplace by creating Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, their relationship to their customers must change. Satisfying customers by creating a great product that garners positive reviews, and soliciting customer feedback for future upgrades simply isn’t enough.

When a company hands over control of its mission-critical software environment to a SaaS provider, the SaaS customer support organization essentially functions as an extension of the customer’s IT department. To take this step, a customer must trust that they will receive the constant, professional and hands-on support they need. Generating this trust requires that the Customer Support team be transparent and always available. The following best practices will ensure that the support organization does both:…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

The HP Helion portfolio is expanding with the launch of commercially available infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings based on OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, respectively. The official launch of the cloud services follows up on several announcements Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has been making since it debuted the Helion portfolio in the spring.

Stephen Spector, social strategist for the HP Cloud portfolio, noted in a blog post that the IaaS and PaaS offerings were designed to seamessly work together and provide cloud computing offerings that are both highly available and developer-friendly. "Customers can deploy HP Helion OpenStack to gain the advantages of an open source distributed computing platform that provides predictable scalability, high availability, durability and significantly reduced operational costs…

Grazed from CIO. Author: J.D. Sartain.

For much of its 25-year history, catastrophe modeling and risk management firm RMS delivered its software using an on-premises model. The company’s modeling software is designed to help customers mitigate financial risk in advance of events such as earthquakes, hurricanes and even terrorist attacks.

Four years ago, RMS "started down a journey of taking our solution to the cloud," says Paris Georgallis, senior vice president of cloud platform operations. RMS started with Amazon Web Services, “which provided us with the runway we needed to get our development off the ground and to rewrite our product for a cloud platform."…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Simon Mitchell.

Before you start considering business Cloud storage, be clear on what you understand by “Cloud”. It’s used in various ways by different people to mean different things. When IT consultants talk about Cloud, they mean multi-server systems that are highly adaptable and often automated.

There is more to the business Cloud than storage. Data is not the only workload and it is not necessarily the thing you should move to a Cloud environmnet first. Think in terms of memory and CPU usage – both are expensive to provide in-house.
Cloud flexibility is ideal for variable workloads:…

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/moving-cloud-workloads-move-cloud-environment-01043268#d44qZl2gayBrqkcb.99

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.

Bracket Computing is a startup with a lofty mission: It’s daring to show enterprises how to virtualize the cloud—which, as we all know, is already quite virtualized. The 3-year-old Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company came out of stealth mode Oct. 22 to unveil something called the Bracket Computing Cell, what it describes as the world’s first cloud virtualization system.

We certainly know about virtualized servers, storage, networks and even I/O. Now, we’ve got virtualized clouds. Stay with us here. Companies that use this, Bracket claims, will obtain the reliable, high-performing enterprise-grade security and control that they require to run significant workloads on the public cloud…