Category: News

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Paul Barsch.

Look around at global economic conditions. More than skirmishes—near flat out war—in Ukraine, Gaza, Iraq and Syria. China pushing up GDP numbers by loading local provinces with more debt. European economies are on the mend, but not yet turning the corner. Fickle western consumers more pre-occupied with the latest smartphone app than the new product you’re selling. It’s in stressful economic conditions that you need to make sure your business has the ability to cycle capacity up or down when needed. You need cloud computing.

According to an article in the Financial Times, during the World Cup, Ghana’s authorities had to “import 50 megawatts of energy from neighboring Ivory Coast” just to keep televisions on during Ghana’s National Soccer team’s games. Fortunately, Ivory Coast had enough spare electricity to sell to Ghana, because there might have been riots in the streets had Ghanaian authorities not figured out a way to meet the demands of thousands of televisions…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Trevor Pott.

Public cloud computing has finally started to make sense to me now. A recent conversation with a fellow sysadmin had me rocking back and forth in a corner muttering "that’s illogical". When I emerged from my nervous breakdown I realised that capitalising on the irrationality of the decision-making process within most companies is what makes public cloud computing financially viable.

For certain niche applications, cloud computing makes perfect sense. "You can spin up your workloads and then spin them down when you don’t need them" is the traditional line of tripe trotted out by the faithful. The problem is that you can’t actually do this in the real world: the overwhelming majority of companies have quite a few workloads that aren’t particularly dynamic. We have these lovely legacy static workloads that sit there and make the meter tick by…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Matt Asay.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) may be the cloud leader, but Microsoft Azure is gaining fast and should surpass AWS revenues by the end of 2014 — at least, according to Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund. Still, as well as Microsoft may be doing, Sherlund’s $5.7 billion revenue target for Azure doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny.

Azure on fire

Let’s be clear: Microsoft Azure is doing well — really, really well. Though neither Microsoft nor Amazon break out their cloud services revenues, Microsoft noted in its last earnings call that cloud revenue grew 147 percent year-over-year. This led Nomura analyst Sherlund to predict Microsoft will hold the crown as top cloud by revenue by the end of 2014…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Sue Poremba.

For many small and midsize businesses (SMB), cloud-based services like software-as-a-service (SaaS) have been budget-friendly time-savers, meaning that IT staff can focus on computing concerns beyond updating software and managing servers. However, there is still the issue of managing all of those desktop computers and making sure they are kept up-to-date with the most recent operating systems and security platforms.

Enter Desktop-as-a-Service

A virtual desktop may be the solution for SMBs. According to Drew Robb in Small Business Computing, desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) addresses budget-related problems. It eliminates the need for a traditional IT infrastructure, "because a DaaS provider already has it set up using economies of scale that small businesses can never achieve." It also allows IT departments to purchase only the services they need, when they need them, because DaaS adapts to changes in the SMB’s growth…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Hoping to lure more enterprises to its cloud, Hewlett-Packard is offering a trimmed-down basic infrastructure service for lighter workloads. Called HP Helion Managed Virtual Private Cloud Lean, the service can be put to use on things like development jobs or running collaboration software.

"We’re targeting this for enterprise and medium businesses that are just now starting to get comfortable putting workloads in the cloud," said Jim Fanella, HP vice president for workload and cloud enterprise services. For its entry into the cloud services market in 2012, HP crafted a set of standard infrastructure services best suited for running heavier workloads, such as ERP and CRM…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Scott Koegler.

Enterprise employees understand how to use external consumer resources available as cloud or software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, and they often take advantage of the simplicity of these services without consulting IT. But using systems without company approval, a practice known as “shadow IT,” can eventually become liabilities for businesses in terms of management, costs and security.

Organizations that help executives address IT-related challenges, such as the MIT Center for Information Systems Research, caution against leaving shadow IT unchecked. “Local innovation is great,” says Jeanne Ross, director at the center, “but only if IT has gained control of shared infrastructure and common enterprise systems. Otherwise, shadow IT can spell disaster.” To understand the practice and risks of shadow IT, and to help you learn how to corral it to meet employee needs, take these seven steps:…

Grazed from BizTech. Author: Alexander Slagg.

When the leading influencers within an industry have difficulty agreeing on the right label to slap on something, you know it’s a real phenomenon and not just another product push. Such is the case with the Internet of Things (IoT). Cisco Systems calls it the Internet of Everything. Data analytics firms Gartner and IDC use the terms Nexus of Forces and the Third Platform, respectively. And GE calls IoT the Industrial Internet.

All of these terms refer to the same technology development, the growing digital connectivity of everything. This includes everything from inanimate personal objects (such as a fitness band or a car) to business systems (warehouse operations or mining equipment) to municipal resources (street lighting or water treatment operations)…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Stephan Meyn.

To get a glimpse into the future of cloud computing, it’s useful to look for analogies from the past in computing. It has been 30 years since the birth of the IBM PC. Its beginnings were humble and acceptance was slow, but a few years later something very special happened that would make the computer as common as the telephone: the convergence of the introduction of Graphical User Interfaces and Object-Oriented Programming. Until the early 1980s, computers were the domain of technical enthusiasts, with little appeal to the masses. Even the advent of early GUIs didn’t help all that much. Then came OO.

But once these two technologies met, it turned out to be a match made in heaven. OO allowed programmers to eliminate much of the complexity of GUI programming, making it increasingly accessible to programmers to develop ever more powerful applications. That in turn made the PC accessible to the everyday user thanks to memes (desktop, folders, and files) that were easily comprehensible to non-programmers…

Grazed from TechInsider. Author: Sean Campbell.

In a Push to strengthen its cloud computing business even more, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) revealed that Microsoft Dynamics CRM is now available in many more countries. Bob Stutz, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Dynamic CRM made the announcement on Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Dynamics Community page yesterday.

The countries that have been added to the fold of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online include Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, U.S. Virgin Islands, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, Philippines, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates…

Read more from the source @ http://www.techinsider.net/microsoft-corporation-msft-dynamic-crm-expanded-to-more-countries/1110817.html

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Nivis, a global leader in Smart Grid and Industrial Wireless networking, today announced the availability of the Cloud Network Operations Center (NOC), a core component of the Nivis Smart Object Platform. Cloud NOC is a web-based management tool that leverages cloud computing technologies to provide a simple yet powerful interface to support Smart Objects in highly scalable wireless mesh networks.

Cloud based NOC provides a robust platform for the Internet of Things (IoT), enabling the deployment of applications in hosted or cloud (private or public) environments that automatically scale to meet demand, from the first prototype to field pilot tests and production systems. Cloud NOC offers easy integration with Internet of Things (IoT) — connected Smart Objects devices, remote network management, secure data transport and storage, data visualization, and export capability. Web services facilitate integration with external systems, simplifying the development of applications using device data…