Category: News

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…

Grazed from TheNation. Author: Nathakom Potejanasaja.

Information technology is being transformed by four powerful trends – mobile, cloud computing, big data and social networking. The first trend is mobile – that is, the use of smartphones, tablet computers and new form-factor personal computers to access applications and information from anywhere.

Second, cloud computing is transforming how organisations think about their IT infrastructure. Customers are transforming their data centres into fully virtualised and automated private clouds while also running some applications in a public cloud. The combination of these two environments is called "hybrid cloud" computing. Increasingly, these hybrid clouds will be "software-defined" – fully automated and policy-driven – delivering new levels of efficiency, agility and choice for IT departments…

Grazed from BSMinfo. Author: Neal Bradbury.

The IT channel exists because businesses — especially SMBs — have a difficult time keeping up with the demands of IT. Yet with the growing adoption of cloud computing, some industry pundits are questioning where the channel fits. To successfully ride this shifting IT environment, channel companies must move their focus from technology provider to service provider. In this way, channel companies can remain relevant and become even more valuable to their overloaded SMB customers.

Take a look at what happens when end users disregard the channel’s value and try to go to the cloud alone. A study conducted by the IT Process Institute (ITPI), for example, revealed that 37 percent of IT projects fail. When the same group honed in on cloud-specific projects, they discovered the failure rate to be much higher, with 76 percent of companies reporting only low to medium success — nearly twice the failure rate of general IT projects. The reason given is the higher degree of automation and new skills required to manage cloud projects…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bsminfo.com/doc/is-cloud-profitability-an-oxymoron-0001

Grazed from DarkReading. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Your cloud, datacenter, and infrastructure all contain flexible and agile components. Your security model should be the same. Cloud computing has become a much more defined platform. There are more use cases, and many more organizations are actively looking at cloud models today than ever before. We have better infrastructure, more resources, and a much more connected user. All of this is fueling tremendous growth in cloud adoption. For example, the latest Cisco Global Cloud Index report predicts that:

• Annual global cloud IP traffic will reach 5.3 zettabytes by the end of 2017. By 2017, global cloud IP traffic will reach 443 exabytes per month (up from 98 exabytes per month in 2012).
• Global cloud IP traffic will increase nearly 4.5-fold over the next five years. Overall, cloud IP traffic will grow at a CAGR of 35 percent from 2012 to 2017.
• Global cloud IP traffic will account for more than two-thirds of total datacenter traffic by 2017…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: Noreen Seebacher.

Marc Benioff-backed Cloudwords is continuing its quest to help global marketers manage multi-lingual content. The cloud-based translation management application today announced Campaign Manager, an enterprise-ready solution designed to help marketers "plan, execute and track" the localization and translation of marketing content for global campaigns.

Benioff, the CEO of salesforce.com, was one of the original investors in the San Francisco-based company. Cloudwords was founded in 2010 by "individuals who gave birth to cloud computing," including Scott Yancey, a key architect on the salesforce.com platform, and Michael Meinhardt, a consultant who advised numerous enterprise customers on their global translation strategy, including Cisco Systems, Hitachi Data Systems, Apple and Symantec…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Editorial Staff.

SMEs (Small/Medium Sized Enterprises) make up the bulk of businesses today. Most cloud based applications created today are geared toward the SME market. Accounting, Storage, Backup services are just a few of them. According to the European Commission, cloud based technology could help 80% of organisations reduce costs by 10-20%.

This infographic provided courtesy of Towergate offers insights into the uses and benefits of cloud computing, as well as tips for a successful implementation…

To see infographic and read more from the source, visit http://cloudtweaks.com/2014/07/cloud-infographic-cloud-computing-smes/

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Fortinet — a world leader in high-performance network security — today announced enhancements to its existing FortiWeb-VM Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to include on-demand, pay-as-you-go offerings. FortiWeb-VM for AWS helps AWS enterprise customers secure their cloud-based Web applications and meet PCI DSS compliance requirements.

FortiWeb-VM for AWS can now be utilized seamlessly on an hourly or annual subscription basis, complementing existing Bring Your Own License (BYOL) options. When procured via AWS Marketplace for on-demand delivery and integrated metering, billing, and payments, AWS customers can now consume "security-as-a-service" in the same simple and elastic manner as they would with the AWS infrastructure itself. A significant benefit of the new on-demand, pay-as-you-go model is scaling the solution to meet immediate needs, while still offering predictable cost models. The new AWS Marketplace annual subscription options potentially allow CAPEX savings of up to 40 percent when compared to hourly pricing over the same 12 month period…