Category: News

Grazed from Examiner.  Author: Victoria Ross.

Ericsson, the Swedish telecom provider, has purchased a majority stake of a platform in service provider Apcera. It has done this because, “Cloud technology is disrupting the global ICT infrastructure market, and service providers must modernize to provide more value to their customers,” according to its press release to CloudTech on Friday.

Closer to home, LA based ConnectX, the space-based supercomputing company, unveiled in a press release on Friday its bold mission to unlock the value and insight of all Big Data by creating the first space-based supercomputing platform…

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud.  Author: Ahmed Banafa.

The cloud isn’t just for techies anymore. Understanding what’s next for cloud computing is crucial for businesses at all levels. Managers are responding to the real opportunities that the cloud offers to develop new business models, forge closer ties with customers and tap into the expertise of employees and partners. From a technology that was initially adopted for efficiency and cost savings, the cloud has emerged into an innovation powerhouse.

The next generation of cloud computing will deliver value to the business faster by automating everything from request to deployment and configuration—and it will do so up and down the stack and across the entire infrastructure. In order for the next generation of computing to achieve these goals, there are five platform requirements:…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Mark Gibbs.

It’s Friday morning and marketing tells you they need a Wordpress blog up and running by Monday and they want a theme like this and features like that and, and, and …  you’ve not got much time if you plan to have a weekend off so the last thing you’re going to want to do is work with a remote server. If you did you’d be loading themes one after another, testing them with various plugins, and generally beating the application into submission while dealing with the delays inherent in using a machine that’s somewhere out on the Internet. That would mean you’d be waiting just that little bit longer (or quite possibly, a lot longer) to do everything than you’d prefer.

The answer is, of course, to run the application locally but that will often involve a huge amount of preparation and messing around. I have a fantastic shortcut: Bitnami Stacks.  Bitnami Stacks are server-based open source applications packaged to a consistent standard with all of the app’s required libraries and dependencies, optimized for performance, and kept updated to the latest stable version…

Grazed from RealBusiness.  Author: Editorial Staff.

We’ve sure heard a lot about cloud computing this decade. Yes, the potential for storing information in virtual data centers is great, especially when it comes to complementing that other much-hyped innovation: Big Data. But the cloud can also serve as an IT solution on a day-to-day level — that is, if businesses can figure out the best strategy to implement it. Until recently, that has been a struggle.

“Things are a little slow because cloud was more of a buzzword in the past,” says Raman Padmanabhan, chief information officer for the Commercial Healthcare Sector at Xerox. “People didn’t fully comprehend the full potential of a cloud infrastructure, outside of companies that were delivering ITO [Information Technology Outsourcing] as a service.”…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Daniel Green.

Apple’s launch of the iPhone 6 Plus reflects a wider trend of mobile devices slowly replacing PCs as the central device for the consumer’s every day use. The rise of cloud computing has enabled mobile devices to fulfil most computing tasks so that “any trade-offs are outweighed by the convenience and flexibility provided by the mobile devices.” Companies like Apple and Samsung have capitalised on the growing consumer demand for PC-like devices, with the introduction of ‘phablets’ beginning to change the very concept of a ‘personal computer.’ While tablets have certainly found a niche market, they remain an awkward size for basic mobile uses such as receiving mobile calls and texting.

The increased size of mobile screens, with the iPhone 6 Plus screen measuring 6.22 x 3.06 x 0.28 inches in size, will also help to close the gap between mobile phones and the traditional desktop experience. Video conferencing via user-friendly mobile apps such as Skype are predicted to be even more commonplace in the work place, with corporations investing more in remote working and flexible working practices by relying more on cloud technology and online productivity tools…

Grazed from TechPageOne.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Business agility. It’s the true driver of cloud computing adoption — and it trumps efficiency, cost and the other things people talk about.  For example, when marketers sign up for Typepad online, they do so because the technology enables them to solve problems on their own timetables — not those of a centralized IT organization.

Likewise, when developers start virtual machines in the Amazon cloud because it takes six weeks to get similar resources from central IT, they do so because they need the virtual machines now — not because of how much less expensive the public cloud might appear…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Brandon Kelly.

We live in an era of constant, accelerating change, and the only organizations that are equipped to keep pace are those that are capable of competing at cloud speed. Does trading out packaged software installed on your own servers for the cloud based versions offered by your vendor accelerate your organization to cloud speed?

Sorry, no.   So what the heck is cloud speed anyways?  Competing at cloud speed is a goal that every organization should have, and it requires learning fast not failing fast, it involves creating the flexibility to adapt to trends that spread globally faster than ever before, to respond to competition from unexpected sources, and provides a potential antidote to decreasing corporate lifespans.   Accelerating to cloud speed requires your organization to operate under a series of principles that make it both FAST and agile…

Grazed from FederalTimes.  Author: Anthony Robbins.

Access to data is driving how today’s world operates, now more than ever before. Rarely is anyone disconnected from a device that acts as a data source — be it a computer, smartphone or even an object like a car. On top of the data individuals are generating, satellites are collecting information and geodata in exponential quantities. In many cases, organizations struggle to put all these data to meaningful use.

The federal government is actively paving the way to creating best practices and programs that activate the value of data. On May 9 President Obama signed the Digital Accountability and Transparency (DATA) Act, which requires agencies to uniformly code their spending data to improve transparency and visibility into how taxpayer dollars are being spent…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Dan Sullivan.

Deploying and configuring AWS resources can be time consuming and error-prone. If you ever had to configure an application stack using someone else’s janky documentation, you will appreciate AWS CloudFormation.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudFormation allows developers to capture the state of existing platforms, tailor them to additional requirements and redeploy them as needed, in an automated way. It is designed to streamline the process of managing resources, such as storage, servers and security controls…

Grazed from GCN.  Author: Editorial Staff.

IBM and AT&T are teaming up to stay competitive in the cloud market, announcing a deal that would let customers link their IT services to IBM SoftLayer cloud using AT&T NetBond secure virtual private network (VPN).

The dual service offering would give customers a method for securely connecting their data and IT systems to a set of SoftLayer managed hosting and hybrid cloud services…