Category: News

Grazed from GCN. Author: John Moore.

With pressure on government to streamline IT operations to control costs and spur performance, a growing number of city IT managers are pursuing the latest hardware architectures and tools to renovate their legacy data centers. But while the emphasis on physical devices may seem like a hardware renaissance, the cloud is still very much a part of data center overhauls.

In such cases, agencies are using cloud in a backup role, a resource that soaks up spikes in data center workload or as a disaster recovery utility. The city of Asheville, N.C. , for example, found that traditional disaster recovery involved a high, fixed capital expense. As a consequence, city’s budget only supported disaster recovery plans for applications it absolutely needed to protect – enterprise resource planning (ERP), for example, said Jonathan Feldman, Asheville’s CIO…

Grazed from MBTMag. Author: Adam Stern.

As adoption of cloud computing gains momentum within the manufacturing sector, there’s a corresponding growth in infrastructure-related services, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) — a way to provide access to compute resources in a cloud-based environment. What sets IaaS apart is that the resources consist of virtualized hardware — infrastructure that is virtual as well as physical. IaaS offerings range from virtual servers to network connections to load balancers.

The major appeal of cloud server hosting is that the software (and with IaaS, the hardware), is virtualized. The hardware resources that support IaaS are pulled from multiple servers and networks, located across multiple off-site data center and maintained independently of the manufacturer using the service. The company pays a monthly fee to access these resources as needed. It’s the responsibility of the cloud service provider (CSP) to ensure ongoing maintenance of the hardware and virtualized services. And now that enterprise ERP solutions can live and prosper in the cloud — and that CSPs can install, manage, update, protect and support ERP software for a low monthly fee — the question has shifted from “to migrate or not to migrate?” to “which cloud environment suits us best?…

Grazed from GlobeNewswire. Author: PR Announcement.

TargetX, an industry leading CRM provider for colleges and universities announced their new "Cloud" suite of bundled services for Recruitment, Retention and Advancement data management and engagement solutions. Built on the proven Force.com platform of Salesforce.com, the worldwide leader in customer relationship management and a pioneer in cloud computing, these unparalleled services address longstanding gaps and challenges in the student communication lifecycle.

"Today we are launching a suite of services for higher education professionals, and of the many new exciting developments, we are thrilled to identify many new opportunities to better ensure student success," announced Sasha Peterson, CEO of TargetX at the company’s annual users conference called the CRM Summit—held this year in Las Vegas…

Grazed from NIST. Author: PR Announcement.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a draft report summarizing 65 challenges that cloud computing poses to forensics investigators, and the report considered technical challenges related to keeping track of data in the cloud, something federal agencies are increasingly being confronted by.

The task of keeping track of and protecting agency data in the cloud overlaps with forensic investigation in some areas such as the chain of custody of data, and it’s worth considering the fundamental challenges. “Decentralization of logs among different layers, accessibility of logs, the multi-tenancy nature of clouds, and preserving the chain of custody make log analysis challenging in clouds,” the report notes, for example…

Grazed from ITProPortal.

While the private sector is building on cloud computing’s various benefits, government organisations are also having a go at benefitting too. This HP whitepaper looks at how governments are trying to make a fist out of cloud computing and how they are overcoming the obstacles in doing so.

After having to face financial constraints over the last five years as a result of the economic meltdown, government agencies have been forced to seek optimised business models to deliver government services at reduced cost. Under the US Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, for instance, the US government instituted its CloudFirst policy to accelerate the pace of cloud adoption, and enjoy financial savings as soon as possible. Such a CloudFirst strategy has been followed by the UK government and various other countries…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Jonathan Feldman.

As a student and practitioner of enterprise cloud computing, I’ve written a lot over the past five years about what I’ve learned. So I’m very pleased that my organization has won a prestigious award for one of our cloud computing efforts, competing against organizations four times our size. Here’s our story and a bit of analysis behind this "five-year overnight success."

What exactly did we win? The Amazon "City In A Cloud" competition, for midsized cities, including a pretty hunk of Lucite and a service credit of $50,000. Sweet. Mind you, there aren’t a huge number of cities even experimenting with cloud computing. Nonetheless, our city, Asheville, N.C., with a daytime population of 120,000, was up against a field of innovators that included Tel Aviv, Israel (population 414,000), Almere, Netherlands (196,000), and Santa Clarita, Calif. (209,000)…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Guido Soeldner.

Enterprises planning a diverse software-defined datacentre strategy – in which all compute parts and network and storage infrastructure are virtualised – need a tool to manage, automate and orchestrate their software-defined infrastructure. That is where VMware vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) and vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) come in.

VMware vCAC is a software product for unifying cloud management. Enterprise IT can use it to provide and configure storage, network and compute resources across multiple platforms. It also enables administrators to automate application delivery and manage multi-cloud infrastructures…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

My last couple of columns have addressed cloud adoption patterns by IT organizations. Has Cloud Computing Been A Failed Revolution discussed the seeming ennui regarding cloud computing on the part of IT groups – that they seem less interested in the field, despite the belief on the part of vendors that the cloud represents tomorrow’s technology infrastructure. Most recently, The Real Cloud Computing Revolution described three real-world examples of companies using cloud computing to solve problems they couldn’t have addressed in the infrastructure models of traditional IT.

This week, two sets of information brought to mind William Gibson’s well-known aphorism "The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed." Despite evidence such as that outlined in my most recent blog post, each describes a future of IT as little changed from a decade ago – mostly on-premises, mostly static with little possible resource elasticity and mostly unable to support the kind of innovation described in that post…

Grazed from GlobeNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Five9, Inc., a leading provider of cloud contact center software, today announced that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, and to provide education on the uses of cloud computing to help secure all other forms of computing. As a member of CSA, Five9 collaborates with other industry leading companies, such as Microsoft, Dropbox, Box, Google, Salesforce and Workday to develop and apply best practices in cloud security.

"The leadership role CSA has in advocating for cloud security aligns with our mission at Five9 to be at the forefront of information security for the cloud contact center. We look forward to sharing knowledge with the other CSA members on industry best practices for effectively safeguarding our customers’ data." – Scott Welch, executive vice president, cloud operations, Five9…

Grazed from Information-Management. Author: Editorial Staff.

"Cognizant computing,” the next phase of the personal cloud movement, will become one of the strongest forces in consumer-focused IT, according to a new report from Gartner Inc. It will have an immense impact on mobile devices and apps, wearables, networking, services and cloud providers, the firm says.

Cognizant computing is a consumer experience in which data associated with individuals is used to develop services and activities according to simple rules, Gartner says. The services include alarms, bill payments, managing and monitoring health and fitness, and context-specific ads. Cognizant systems will provide services across multiple devices…