Category: News

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Jason Bloomberg.

Surveys of IT executives regarding their Cloud Computing initiatives can be strangely misleading. Take for example two studies that fellow Forbes authors reported on over the last few months. Back in March, Forbes contributor Louis Columbus reported that a key take-away from an IBM study was that “Cloud computing has rapidly accelerated from 30% of CIOs mentioning it as a crucial technology for customer engagement in 2009 to 64% today.”

And yet, a recent Forbes article by Joe McKendrick indicated that 57 percent of the executives in a recent Saugatuck survey reported that “they are leveraging the cloud to create new revenue-producing products and services. What is suspicious about these results is that the first study asked whether Cloud was a crucial technology, but not whether they were actually implementing it – while the second survey queried about actual implementations, and yet the numbers (64% to 57%) are suspiciously close together…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tom Groenfeldt.

Everyone knows how cloud computing works. You log onto Amazon Web Services, pick out the resources you want to use, enter your credit card and start working. But it’s not quite the same thing if you are a global bank planning to move key processes to a cloud environment. For starters, banks tend to be concerned about security and privacy, so many are initiating cloud systems on premises, tucked safely behind their firewalls.

And banks tend to have big, complex applications that may sprawl across numerous servers or even data centers. Managing a complex cloud environment is a task for specialists. Enter BMC with Cloud Lifecycle Manager (CLM) which helps firms develop Amazon-like cloud flexibility in-house. The company recently released CLM 4 for hybrid clouds that enforces IT compliance and change management policies across private and pubic cloud services…

Grazed from CFOWorld. Author: Loek Essers.

Cloud providers seeking business from EU institutions could become subject to more scrutiny from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS). The supervisor is preparing guidance on the use of cloud computing and mobile devices for data transfers by EU institutions to non-EU countries and international organizations.

Part of that guidance could require extra checks for personal data shared with cloud computing services, the supervisor said in a position paper published Monday. "The rapid development of technology, including cloud computing and mobile applications, creates new challenges, which have to be addressed to ensure that the fundamental rights of individuals are fully respected," the supervisor said…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Teppei Kasai.

Silicon Valley-based VMware Inc said it will form a cloud computing partnership with China Telecom Corp, expanding in China at a time when many U.S. technology firms’ businesses there are experiencing fallout from a cyber security squabble. VMware said on Tuesday it will work with China Telecom to build a hybrid cloud service to be operated by the state-owned company, China’s biggest cloud service provider.

Hybrid services can be used to combine private infrastructure such as on-premises data centers with public cloud services. U.S. equipment and software providers such as IBM Corp and Cisco Systems Inc have seen their China sales drop after last year’s revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of U.S. spying…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: John Riberio.

Amazon Web Services is offering on its Marketplace annual subscriptions to over 90 software products, which could help customers cut software costs by over 40 percent, the Amazon.com unit said. Customers can purchase AWS Marketplace products on an annual subscription basis and have unlimited use of the software for that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance for the next 12 months, wrote Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for Amazon Web Services, in a blog post on Monday.

Users can apply one annual subscription to a Marketplace software product to one EC2 instance, Amazon said in its help section. The products on offer under the annual subscription program include those from software vendors such as Alert Logic, Barracuda Networks, Citrix Systems, Fortinet, Riverbed Technology and Sophos…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

The benefits of OpenStack, a free and open-source software cloud computing platform, from an end-user perspective are clear. Transitioning to a cloud computing environment promises many benefits, including greater economies of scale and greater flexibility to adopt new application workloads.

With these benefits, however, come new challenges – such as the need to control and re-configure this hyper-dynamic environment as application workloads move in, out, and around the networking infrastructure. Many organisations are turning to cloud orchestration solutions to overcome these issues…

Grazed from Livemint. Author: Dina Bass.

Microsoft Corp. is planning its biggest round of job cuts in five years, as the software maker looks to slim down and integrate Nokia Oyj’s handset unit, people with knowledge of the company’s plans said. “The reductions, which may be unveiled as soon as this week, will probably be in areas such as Nokia and the parts of Microsoft that overlap with that business, as well as marketing and engineering,” said the people who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public.

“The restructuring may end up being the biggest in Microsoft history, topping the 5,800 jobs cut in 2009,” two of the people said. “Some details are still being worked out,” two of the people said. The announcement would come one week after chief executive officer Satya Nadella issued his first company mission statement, calling for greater emphasis on mobile devices, cloud-computing and productivity software…

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Rachel Lerman.

Amazon announced last week that it plans to roll out a new sharing service for businesses through Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing division. Amazon Zocalo, which the company describes as a “secure enterprise storage and sharing service,” will compete directly with Microsoft’s SharePoint Online, Dropbox and Box.

Already reaching into every corner of the web, Amazon Web Services has been making a big push into enterprise cloud services. Amazon’s latest service helps the Puget Sound region, or “Cloud City” as we could call it, brand itself as the place where the world’s most innovative cloud companies are located…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Esker, a worldwide leader in document process automation solutions, announced today that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named Esker on Demand as a 2014 Cloud Computing Excellence Award winner. “As our preeminent product offering, it’s rewarding to see Esker on Demand be recognized for its achievements both nationally and globally.”

The Cloud Computing Excellence Award, presented by Cloud Computing magazine, recognizes companies that have most effectively leveraged cloud computing in their efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market. “Receiving this prestigious award is a great honor for our organization, and helps confirm our continued investment and development in the dynamic market of cloud-based document process automation,” said Steve Smith, U.S. Chief Operating Officer at Esker. “As our preeminent product offering, it’s rewarding to see Esker on Demand be recognized for its achievements both nationally and globally.”…

Grazed from GovTech. Author: Todd Newcombe.

Last month, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revealed that Lois Lerner, the tax agency official under investigation for allegedly mistreating Tea Party groups seeking tax exemptions, had lost copies of her emails when her hard drive crashed. But why was she was backing up email on a desktop computer in the first place?

It turns out that Lerner and other IRS officials were supposed to be following a policy of backing up emails on paper. But because the policy was unclear about how an email meets the standard of an official record, it doesn’t appear to have been followed or enforced. When all records were paper-based, retention policies led to the storage of vast amounts of government records in warehouses…