Category: News

Grazed from CNBC. Author: Ari Levy.

The winners in the cloud-computing revolution so far have been vendors catering to big business. Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Workday and ServiceNow built multibillion-dollar companies by shifting massive enterprise applications to the Web, uprooting traditional software suppliers in the process.

A new crop of emerging cloud players is creating software for the millions of mom-and-pop shops, pulling some into the digital world for the first time. Goodbye paper spreadsheets and time punch machines. Tough Pups in Corning, New York, is the quintessential new buyer. Founded a decade ago by Leo Sanders, Tough Pups is a pet day care and training facility with six employees and less than $1 million in revenue…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

August is over, but consolidation in the backup and disaster recovery (BDR) is spilling over into September. Acronis this week said it has acquired BackupAgent, a cloud-based backup platform provider headquartered in Holland. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As a result of the acquisition, Acronis will acquire all of BackupAgent’s employees and customers.

Once everything is settled, BackupAgent’s solution will be powered by Acronis AnyData Engine, data protection technologies provided via cloud backup solutions. The acquisition follows the Woborn, Massachusetts-based storage management company’s announcement of Acronis True Image for Mac, an image-based backup product that provides Mac users with several ways to back up data…

Grazed from BriggsLawGroup. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing and legal ethics are an important piece of knowledge every business owner should possess. For businesses and individuals, storing and accessing information on Internet-based systems, also known as the “cloud,” is a powerful tool that boosts productivity and convenience. However, ethics rules require lawyers to keep client information confidential, which can be problematic when using the cloud to store client information and work product. State bar associations nationwide are struggling to weigh the benefits and risks of cloud computing.

On the plus side, cloud-based systems free up attorneys from their desks, allowing them to access information from anywhere they can get an internet connection. I know several lawyers who use iPads and mobile phones for most of their client work. For solo and small firm practitioners who do not have the resources to acquire and maintain robust in-house computing systems, the cloud has been a game changer…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

OpenStack has been finding its way into a variety of verticals for cloud deployments, but most of the deployments are focused, either solely or mostly, on devops. But in the growing cloud telecommunications market, OpenStack has found a new function—specifically, network functions virtualization (NFV), according to Mirantis.

The OpenStack-focused vendor claims to be experiencing very strong growth in the telecommunications sector this year; and Mirantis is boasting a leadership position as the largest OpenStack provider to the sector. The telco sector is growing for Mirantis and other OpenStack vendors, but as important as the $1.6 trillion sector is, it’s also interesting to see new or expanded use cases emerging…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Rob Wright.

When you’re building a multi-national cloud computing platform that involves some of the leading scientific research organizations in Europe, more than a dozen commercial partners and numerous data centers across the global, federated identity management becomes a crucial pillar.

That’s one of the key lessons learned from the Helix Nebula project, also known as the "Science Cloud." The ambitious cloud computing project was first announced in March 2012 by the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), the European Space Agency, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory…

Grazed from Google. Author: PR Announcement.

Google has renamed its Enterprise division as ‘Google for Work’. The name change reflects both the search giant’s increasing ambitions to win corporate accounts, as well as the changes gripping workplaces. In a blog post, Eric Schmidt wrote: "Work today is very different from 10 years ago. Cloud computing, once a new idea, is abundantly available, and collaboration is possible across offices, cities, countries and continents.

"Ideas can go from prototype to development to launch in a matter of days. Working from a computer, tablet and phone is no longer just a trend – it’s a reality. And millions of companies, large and small, have turned to Google’s products to help them launch, build and transform their businesses, and help their employees work the way they live. In other words, work is already better than it used to be."…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Avnet Technology Solutions, the global IT solutions distribution leader and an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), today announced that it has significantly expanded its cloud offerings in Latin America. As a part of this, Avnet will now provide business partners in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela with products and services from SoftLayer, a cloud infrastructure provider and an IBM company. The addition of SoftLayer to Avnet’s cloud portfolio will help Latin American business partners accelerate the development of their cloud offerings with a scalable, secure base for the delivery of cloud services, spanning IBM’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) solutions.

“We are committed to helping our business partners evolve their cloud capabilities to meet the rapidly changing needs of their customers,” said Sergio Farache, senior vice president and general manager of Avnet Technology Solutions, Latin America and the Caribbean. “Today, Avnet became the first distributor in Latin America to provide our partners with access to SoftLayer’s cloud services, which will position them for success as major global companies look to incorporate cloud computing into their IT strategies. Business partners can rely on the knowledge and expertise of the Avnet team to develop and expand their cloud services skills and capitalize on the significant market opportunities related to the cloud.”…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Jason Hannula.

Software-defined technologies are an up-and-coming option for virtualization across networks, servers and data storage. Bill Kleyman’s Data Center Knowledge article points to how this can benefit small and midsize businesses (SMBs) through the creation of commodity data centers.

Software-defined technologies accelerated virtualization in the data center by removing a dependency on specific hardware platforms and providing assistance with task automation. The physical design of data centers is also changing to incorporate modular and custom alternatives. The resulting shift in the data center landscape presents commodity-level options for SMBs to economically consider private data center development…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Sue Poremba.

Employees who bypass company-approved technologies to use shadow cloud services are putting the overall company and network at risk for more data breaches, compliance failures and a loss of integrity during business transactions, according to a new warning from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Increasing Risks

Shadow IT situations, in which employees use any technology that has not been approved by the company, have been creating problems for a long time. By instituting policies surrounding the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement, IT departments have been able to rein in some shadow IT problems. However, as cloud computing continues to gain popularity and more employees use the cloud on their personal devices, shadow cloud has added a new level of risk…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Sue Poremba.

The next generation of cloud computing could actually be found in a cloud format that has already been around for a while. The bare-metal cloud brings all of the advantages that have become synonymous with the cloud but minus one element — there is no virtualization.

The Need for Better Cloud Architecture

With the growth of technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) taking up bandwidth and storage space, there is a need for better cloud architecture, Joe McKendrick writes on ZDNet. Cloud experts and researchers think that this can be accomplished in part by using bare-metal access, or “an alternative to the virtualization technologies currently used to share cloud hardware, allowing for experimentation with new virtualization technologies that could improve reliability, security and performance.”…