Category: News

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…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Koblalka.

Data center services provider QTS Realty Trust (QTS) has added hybrid connectivity features to its Enterprise Cloud service. QTS Hybrid Network Connectivity provides high-performance networking options that allow customers to integrate seamlessly with a variety of IT architectures, according to the company.

"Connectivity continues to be a key component in our customers’ business strategy, and by utilizing QTS Hybrid Network Connectivity, enterprises can easily manage their public and private cloud as a single environment, creating higher performance at a lower cost," Jim Reinhart, chief operating officer for QTS’s development and operations, said in a prepared statement…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/hybrid-cloud-computing/qts-now-offers-hybrid-connectivity-enterprise-cloud-solution

Grazed from EUKHost. Author: Asher Ross.

Cloud computing and IT demands are directly proportional to each other. To deliver consistency with security in cloud many service providers have started a different experiment with connected network servers to improve demand and deployment model in Cloud computing. Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) are the platforms on which businesses with cloud models needs improvement in storage capacity and service waterfall model.

In Cloud computing connected network of servers is grouped together to manage and maintain resources of a website in any critical traffic situation. The storage needs of IT industry have increased from 39% to 64% from last year, but a need for more advanced technology for storing large databases was required. Before block storage in the cloud invented businesses with large database capacity used additional servers to store data online and paid for huge server instances…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Mike Kavis.

Last week I wrote about Rackspace’s pivot from a pure play IaaS vendor to a managed service provider. In the article I questioned how the smaller, niche IaaS providers could compete with the “big three” IaaS companies and whether playing the price war game was a losing choice. I spent this week researching the answer to that question and here is what I found out.

Thoughts on Rackspace

I interviewed top executives from CloudSigma, DigitalOcean, and ProfitBricks and asked them about their thoughts on Rackspace’s announcement. Not one of the three companies was surprised with Rackspace’s move to managed services. In fact, Rackspace started out as an MSP before going head to head with the large IaaS providers and this area has always been their strength…

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Federal Trade Commission wants to upgrade its computer networks and software, and the key focus is the cloud — something the Securities and Exchange Commission has used for years, according to Federal News Radio. Federal Trade Commission CIO Bajinder Paul said the agency is interested in how cloud computing can swiftly bring operational capabilities to employees, create a path for innovation and aggregate acquisition initiatives across the agency, according to the report.

Paul said the agency wants better cloud-based data analytics tools to take advantage of enterprise applications that bring in more data. SEC CIO Thomas Bayer said his agency already uses 50 cloud-based applications.