Category: News

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

In the business world over the past couple of decades, no two words have carried more negative baggage and resulted in such trepidation than downsizing and outsourcing. Downsizing is still the nasty term it has always been, but lately, there’s been a sea change in attitudes toward outsourcing.

That’s because cloud is shattering the practice of outsourcing as we’ve known it. It’s transforming outsourcing from an invasive, Borg-like assimilation of jobs and departments to everyone’s toolset. In a way, cloud has ripped open the very fabric of the outsourcing universe. Outsourcing — that is, the use of services outside one’s organization — has become a part of our day-to-day lives, and we embrace this model with gusto…

Grazed from CMO. Author: Editorial Staff.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today announced the creation of a new cloud partner ecosystem with Avnet Technology Solutions, the global IT solutions distribution leader and an operating group of Avnet, Inc.(NYSE: AVT). Avnet was named national value-add distributor of the Hitachi Cloud Services Connection program (HCSC) in Australia.

Under the brand Avnet Cloud Connect, Hitachi Data Systems and Avnet, together with independent software vendors (ISVs) and alliance partners, help a growing number of resellers and systems integrators (SIs) to capitalise on the opportunity of cloud computing without the need for capital investment…

Grazed from MSDynamicsWorld.  Author: Rob Curls.

 "No one understands the cloud! It’s a mystery!"  Those words of anguish, from Jason Segel to his co-star Cameron Diaz in a new comedy, sum up the confusion that still surrounds cloud technology for most people. In this case, the pair discovers that their computer has uploaded undesirable personal data to a cloud-based file sharing service, making it visible to everyone they know. Can they get the offending content back, saving some shred of their dignity in the process?

While this is a fictional story wrapped around a comedic personal mishap, it identifies some key challenges we face with cloud computing today, from the lack of controls for safeguarding data to a general lack of knowledge in the general public…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Growing industry trends like mobile and cloud computing, video and bring-your-own-device are putting increasing pressure on Internet service providers to provide more bandwidth to handle the workloads. Many ISPs are responding by trying replicate what Google is doing via its Google Fiber initiative.

However, startup Mimosa Networks is looking to enable ISPs to embrace wireless network technology by bringing fiber-level capabilities to WiFi. The company has raised $38 million in funding since its founding in 2012, and this month is releasing the first products in what Chief Product Officer Jaime Fink told eWEEK will be a rapidly growing portfolio…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Nearly 80 percent of U.S. small businesses will be fully adapted to cloud computing by 2020, more than doubling the current 37 percent rate, according to “Small Business Success in the Cloud,” a new report from Emergent Research and Intuit Inc.

“This report paints a detailed picture of how small businesses will increasingly use cloud technology not only for efficiency gains, but also in more transformative ways that redefine the rules for achieving long-term success,” said Terry Hicks, vice president and general manager, QuickBooks Online Ecosystem at Intuit…

Grazed from eCommerceTimes.  Author:  Jeffrey Kaplan.

A rising tide of interest has sparked a series of competitive moves among the widening array of software and technology providers vying for a share of the rapidly expanding IoT market.  As with previous major IT industry trends, the enormous promise has driven a growing number of large and small players to rebrand and reposition their product and service offerings to appeal to the curiosity of potential corporate and consumer customers.

In the same way some of these players "cloudwashed" their legacy products and services to make them relevant with the advent of the cloud, many companies now are suggesting that their remote devices, networking solutions, analytic engines and software applications are perfectly suited to address the new requirements of the IoT…

Grazed from Investors Daily.  Author:  Patrick Seitz.

Enterprise spending on cloud computing is expected to pick up materially, now that the technology and ecosystem have matured, a new survey indicates.  The buildout of private clouds could spark the next investment wave in 2015, with VMware (NYSE:VMW) a big beneficiary, Pacific Crest Securities says.

Pacific Crest surveyed 152 enterprise information technology departments with 1,000 or more employees for its second annual study of cloud spending trends, released Thursday. The investment bank said corporate and government IT departments had frozen spending on hardware over the past couple of years as they evaluated public and private cloud options. This year’s survey shows "the potential for enterprise IT spending to unthaw as enterprises build out internal private clouds," Pacific Crest said…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Chris Carroll.

The proportion of cloud services purchased through cloud brokers is growing, and Gartner predicts it will soon make up a substantial portion of cloud purchases. The appeal of a cloud broker is obvious: It allows the enterprise to leverage specialized expertise to provision expensive and complicated services. But what is a cloud services broker (CSB), and why do so many companies need one? What’s the impact of CSBs on IT, and should brokering the cloud be done externally or can it be as an internal IT function?

The Role of a Cloud Services Broker

As organizations continue to turn to cloud computing, the demand for specialized expertise to provision the optimal cloud offerings for enterprise business and technical requirements is rapidly increasing. This has led to the swift emergence of CSBs, who help the enterprise with all things cloud: from evaluating cloud service providers to negotiating contracts and documenting cloud vendor deliverables…

Grazed from Gigaom. Author: Derrick Harris.

It’s no secret that the cloud has the potential to be a hacker’s paradise, chock-full of all the password-cracking computing power a trove of stolen credit cards can buy. Surely, though, this type of bad behavior can’t be carried out without any direct financial investment. After all, the free tiers on most cloud computing services are pretty minimal — a single core (probably fairly weak) and maybe a few gigabytes of storage. What can anyone do with that? A whole lot, if they’re clever.

At the Black Hat security conference this week, a pair of professional penetration testers, Rob Ragan and Oscar Salazar of Bishop Fox, showed how they built a functional 1,000-node botnet by stringing together resources from a variety of services. They used it to mine some Litecoin and could have done a whole lot more if they weren’t trying to minimize harm to other cloud users (by being noisy neighbors) or cloud providers (by driving up power bills)…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Jason Hannula.

Even if a business and its leadership embrace cloud computing, and its IT resources no longer spend all of their time maintaining operational systems and fielding business-user password reset requests, it does not mean that IT’s duties in a cloud services relationship have ended. According to Barb Darrow’s article on Gigaom, treating cloud services as an option that can be purchased and promptly forgotten about creates the potential for the next generation of wasteful shelfware.

Instead of a storeroom of unused, shrink-wrapped license software, cloud resources are prone to over-provisioning, wasteful idle capacity or orphaned resources from past projects. Without active usage monitoring, resource rationalization and cleanup of idle instances, long-term savings or cost reductions are at risk…