Category: News

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…

Grazed from PCMag. Author: Michael J. Miller.

As we’ve moved into a "cloud-first, mobile-first" world, corporate programming has changed. But I would argue that the change depends on the kind of cloud computing we’re talking about and that the long-term implications could be very significant. If we’re talking about moving from individual data centers to private clouds or even to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), I don’t think the change in corporate programming is necessarily all that significant.

Sure new tools will be used—Open Stack, Amazon services, new mobile-centric frameworks, and languages such as Node.js, Angular, Swift, and Python. But programming is still programming. But when you think about moving from big monolithic corporate applications to using more Software as a Service (SaaS) services working together, that’s a completely different model. And I see that happening in a lot of places…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Itron, Inc. announced today its intent to use Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform for Itron Analytics. The cloud computing and infrastructure platform will provide a secure, reliable and cost-effective option for hosting Itron Analytics, Itron’s analytic application that harnesses the value of the data generated by utility smart grid and smart distribution investments.

With Microsoft Azure, Itron will have access to highly-available, scalable and durable cloud storage, backup and recovery capabilities. Microsoft Azure maintains the infrastructure and performs routine maintenance, patching, load balancing and health monitoring for continuous availability. This will allow Itron and its customers to focus on running Itron Analytics rather than upgrading and maintaining hardware. Itron Analytics can either be installed locally, run by the utility in the cloud environment or operated and managed by Itron as a part of its Itron(R) Total Services…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

Red Hat has been on an acquisition run with the aim of building an open source stack that leads the hybrid data center. The primary rival: VMware. How the Red Hat vs. VMware duel plays out remains to be seen, but Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, argued that open source will ultimately define the enterprise IT architectures of the future. I caught up with Whitehurst to talk cloud, open source and Red Hat’s master plan. Here’s a look at some of the key themes from my conversation with Whitehurst:

Recent acquisitions and the big picture. Red Hat recently acquired OpenStack integrator eNovance and Inktank, a software defined storage company known for Ceph, an enterprise platform. Whitehurst said that Red Hat "is looking to create an open source stack for infrastructure and platform as a service." Red Hat makes acquisitions not based on intellectual property as much as people and involvement with innovative open source projects like Ceph, an object and block storage platform…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Is cloud computing finally a bona fide business strategy, versus an IT optimization strategy? It may well be, a new survey suggests. But this new second phase of cloud means things are going to be tougher to measure, define and conceptualize in the big picture. Business agility has become the primary advantage being delivered by cloud, says a new survey by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services of 527 HBR readers in large and mid-size organizations finds. The study was underwritten by Verizon Enterprise Solutions.

Business agility leads the list of drivers for adopting cloud computing, with nearly a third of respondents (32 percent) saying it was their primary reason for pursuing cloud. This was followed by increased innovation (14 percent), lower costs (14 percent), and the ability to scale up and down in response to variations in business demand (13 percent)…