Category: News

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Amy Reichert.

Your organization is ready to move to the cloud in order to reap all the benefits of pre-built development and deployment tools; seamless data access; and a fast, reliable user experience with your application. All your organization’s "stuff" is accessible, and if the system goes down, the vendor has to respect the service-level agreement and fix it. All your organization needs to do is crank out applications and features. It sounds too good to be true.

It sounds too good to be true because it’s complex. The complication is due to the number of integration points between information and the applications in a cloud platform, as well as the legacy applications that already exist. Any time code is altered to accommodate new technology, those changes tend to expose integration problems…

Grazed from EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet.  Author: Arthur Cole.

The cloud is emerging as one of the key drivers of network modernization in the data center. Across the board, enterprises are beefing up internal infrastructure to make it easier to provision server and storage resources for stakeholders, and the best way to do that is with a top-flight network.

Private cloud needs drive network infrastructure upgrades in the data center

According to Infonetics, the average spend for enterprise networking upgrades was $1.1 million last year, and if current trends hold, 2014 should see a healthy 20 percent gain. While wireless LAN technology is a top priority, most CIOs report that the need to build private clouds is paramount. This upgrade is being fueled by two main factors: the need to provide services and applications directly to users to stem the flow of data to public clouds, and the desire to ultimately build hybrid networks that can provide both the ease of use and scalability that emerging, data-driven industries require…

Grazed from CRN.  Author: Kevin McLaughlin.

Salesforce.com has acquired RelateIQ, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that has been touting its big data-infused software as the next generation of customer relationship management.  Salesforce.com is paying $350 million for RelateIQ, which sells a "relationship intelligence platform" that gathers and analyzes data from salespeople’s interactions with contacts, including email, calendars and smartphone calls. It then uses this data to provide insights that can help deals move faster.

RelateIQ’s software supports Office 365, Exchange 2013, Exchange 2010 and Google Apps. It also works with Facebook to let users add photos and verify contact information…

Grazed from ITBusiness.ca.  Author: Shawn Freeman.

It’s not every day that NASA creates a position just for you.  NASA did just that for Chris C. Kemp in 2010. The tech pioneer became the space agency’s first Chief Technology Officer for Information Technology, appointed to lead and nurture IT innovation at the U.S. space agency.

Kemp focused on cloud computing, open-source software and open government, and prior to becoming CTO for IT, partnered with Google and Microsoft to help create Google Moon, Google Mars, and Microsoft World Wide Telescope. He also led the development of OpenStack, an open-source cloud project, with the goal of enabling any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware…

Grazed from PC Magazine.  Author: Michael Miller.

In my last post, I talked about how cloud computing, and in particular Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), is and is not particularly flexible. Flexibility comes from a model that doesn’t require any data center hardware and from a series of extensive APIs that are an integral part of the best SaaS offerings. But at the same time, SaaS applications are inflexible in that they don’t allow much customization to the core software itself and that typically every customer has to be running on the same, most current version with no options.

As I look at it, I’m beginning to think that the areas in which cloud applications are most inflexible may actually turn out to be one of their strongest features. I can argue that traditional client-server applications have offered too much flexibility, and large organizations in particular have spent too much time, effort, and expense in customizing them. We all know examples of organizations that have spent millions (or sometimes, tens of millions) of dollars on customizing their ERP solutions, perhaps with limited upside…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Colby Hochmuth.

Cloud computing has become ubiquitous for the federal IT workforce, as many if not most agencies have begun to move functions like email or data storage into the cloud. But approaching cloud as a software-defined environment is still a relatively new concept in government.

A software-defined approach holistically automates network, computing and storage capabilities and opens the lines of communication between them, according to Anil Karmel, founder and CEO of C2 Labs Inc. and former deputy chief technology officer at the National Nuclear Security Administration…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

The rise of cloud computing means that many enterprise IT resources have moved out of IT’s control. Indeed, many people went directly to Amazon Web Services, Google, or Microsoft for IT services, bypassing IT altogether. IT leaders have no one to blame but themselves for this shift. Although there are certainly very responsive IT organizations, many more have not provided solutions at the speed the business needs.

When the cloud arose, users took the initiative and solved their own problems. I can’t blame them. Ironically, as organizations use more and more cloud resources, IT has a new way to reassert itself, even if users continue to get their own services. That way is the service catalog, a collection of public cloud and local services stored in a huge registry, much like in the days of SOA…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Lawrence Garvin.

One of the significant developments emerging as a result of cloud computing and software-defined infrastructures is a blending of the system administrator and network administrator roles. With this convergence in mind, I can’t help but wonder what the future holds in store for the toolsets that IT pros in each of these traditional roles have come to rely on.

Before we explore this issue further, though, let’s set the stage by taking a closer look at the demise of the distinction between sysadmins and network admins. Historically, the demarcation between the two happened at the RJ-45 socket on the NIC. Anything that involved the cable, switches, routers, etc. was not the concern of sysadmins. Likewise, if the light was blinking on the NIC, anything happening inside the box was not the problem of network admins…

Grazed from DarkReading. Author: Krishna Narayanaswamy.

Organizations are adopting the cloud in a big way. Today, representing about 23% of IT spend, cloud computing has accelerated because it allows people to get their jobs done more quickly, more easily, and more flexibly than they can using traditional computing tools. Set to account for 60% of cloud services in 2017, software-as-a-service has proliferated in enterprises and has now reached a tipping point.

IT has responsibility for some cloud apps. Most IT departments I’ve talked to say they have responsibility for a handful of cloud deployments, maybe 10 at most, and further estimate that they have 40-50 total apps running per organization. In reality, they have an average of 461 cloud apps, according to our latest Cloud Report, an aggregated, anonymized measure of cloud app usage from the Netskope Active Platform…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Editorial Staff.

It’s a perfect fit and it isn’t a new trend, but Big Data’s migration to the cloud seems to be accelerating recently. The advantage of running your Big Data analytics in the cloud rather than on-premises — especially for smaller companies with constrained resources — are numerous and well-known. Oracle Corp. summed up some of the major business drivers in an article titled "Trends in Cloud Computing: Big Data’s New Home":

• Cost reduction
• Reduced overhead
• Rapid provisioning/time to market
• Flexibility/scalability…