Category: News

Grazed from Investors. Author: Reinhardt Krause.

Corporate America has been moving computing workloads to the cloud more slowly than expected. Equinix aims to change that with Cloud Exchange, a new offering for enterprise customers. Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX), a provider of computer data centers, is expected to lay out more of its Cloud Exchange strategy at its analysts day event in New York on Wednesday. Equinix stock touched a 13-month high Thursday.

Data-center operators provide space, power and cooling. Customers pack the centers with their own computer servers and other gear. Equinix also specializes in providing connections to high-speed, fiber-optic networks operated by AT&T (NYSE:T), Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ) and other telecom services providers…

Grazed from WashingtonToday. Author: David Blankenhorn.

Today, you can’t attend a technology-focused conference in the Washington, DC area without hearing at least one panel or presentation on cloud computing. The benefits have been touted loudly and often: reduced costs, increased efficiency and agility, and enhanced productivity. According to a 2013 Gartner report, between fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2013 the value of awarded cloud contracts in the federal government nearly quadrupled. By 2018 the market is expected to hit $10 billion.

Despite a few agencies that were early adopters of cloud computing technology, many agencies have remained slow to leverage the technology. Why? I see four major roadblocks to accelerated adoption across the federal government: education on the different cloud computing models, security, procurement, and industry noise…

Grazed from Computing.co.uk. Author: Editorial Staff.

Financial services giant Morgan Stanley has dealt with the problem of "rogue IT" – departments contracting their own IT services from cloud computing companies – by restricting access to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Dropbox and other big-name providers at the network layer.

The security problem posed by cloud computing services being used or procured under the radar of IT has become endemic – and poses a particular problem to organisations, like banks, that need to operate to a high degree of security. But at a presentation at the World Cloud Forum this week in which Laszlo Kollar, executive director of global cloud at Morgan Stanley, revealed how the bank is – slowly – shifting some services towards an internal cloud, Kollar admitted that the bank simply blocks Amazon, Dropbox and other popular cloud service providers to prevent staff from using them…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Jeff John Roberts.

It’s not often you write “Microsoft” and”open” in the same sentence but, well, these are special times. The company is straining to make its Azure cloud service a bona fide rival to Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, and believes that offering customers openness and options are one way it can stand out.

“It’s a change from the historical Microsoft by embracing openness in a new way,” said Scott Guthrie, EVP of the company’s cloud and enterprise group, speaking Wednesday at Gigaom Structure in San Francisco. Guthrie pointed out that Azure offers tools for clients to run Linux and a wide variety of SDK’s, and touted its drag-and-drop machine tools for machine learning as a “democratic” way for companies to get more analytics…

Grazed from CiteWorld. Author: Matt Weinberger.

Moore’s Law means that every year, RAM gets cheaper, hard drives get bigger, and processors get faster — which means that public cloud providers like Google can both improve performance and drop prices on the regular. The problem is that even as your IT infrastructure grows by 50 percent year after year, the CIO’s hiring budget probably isn’t keeping pace.

That means IT professionals have to learn to do more with less, said Google infrastructure chief Urs Hölzle on stage at the GigaOM Structure conference in San Francisco. And the way to get there is by automation and a move towards the DevOps model, where every developer is also responsible for infrastructure…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Syed Raza.

It was during the 1970’s we evidenced the beginning of personal computing technologies being introduced by IBM with its first portable computer, Intel with its first microprocessor, and the first Apple computer. Before this period, organizations used to function no different than today, even without the sheer power of computing technologies. Fifty years later, we find ourselves becoming dependent to digital computing. Everything is either run, managed or controlled by computers and sophisticated machines. While the advancement in technology over the last five decades has been instrumental in changing our work environment, it has successfully penetrated our daily life routine.

Generally speaking, just like any other tool, the primary purpose of personal computing is to perform complex manual tasks in a faster and more accurate manner. However, as noted earlier, with the passage of time, inadvertently, technology has become an inseparable part of our personal lives. For example, daily use of tablet-PC, mini-computers, android devices – all with immense computing power are constantly used us, reflecting dependency in its true sense. Researchers are now beginning to reveal the consequences of adopting this technology with adverse effects on general health…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Paul Korzenlowski.

Like the tired analogy, the cloud market is filled with big fish in a small — but growing — pond. Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft have made a splash in the cloud market and get most of the attention. However, under the surface there is another group of providers — vertical market specialists that are also making waves.

"With cloud gaining acceptance, we are seeing a number of new solutions emerge that are geared to meeting the needs of specific companies," said Jillian Mirandi, senior analyst at Technology Business Research Inc. These niche cloud vendors are found in a number of industries, including in particular healthcare and financial services, where anything as a service (XaaS) options are trying to meet specific industry demands…

Grazed from HedgeWeek. Author: Editorial Staff.

NCC Group surveyed chief investment officers from financial services companies with over 1,000 employees, and found that less than half of those surveyed carry out third party audits of prospective cloud providers prior to engagement, and over 60 per cent do not have any contractual protection in place if their cloud provider fails.

Cloud adoption in the sector is gaining momentum, with a massive 80 per cent of respondents planning to adopt further cloud services in the next 12 months. Daniel Liptrott, managing director of NCC Group’s escrow division, says: “Financial services firms are increasingly turning to the cloud due to the benefits of cost and flexibility, but many are not taking the proper precautions…

Read more from the source @ http://www.hedgeweek.com/2014/06/19/205122/financial-sector-adopting-poor-%E2%80%98cloud-practice%E2%80%99

Grazed from BroadwayWorld. Author: PR Announcement.

North Bridge Venture Partners, in conjunction with Gigaom Research and a record 72 collaborating organizations, today released results for its fourth annual Future of Cloud Computing survey. This survey is the industry’s deepest and broadest examination of the cloud technology revolution. It analyzed the inhibitors and drivers behind cloud adoption, separating the hype surrounding the cloud from genuine industry trends and real world cases across a sample of 1,358 respondents. See the complete findings slideshow here: 2014 Future of Cloud Computing survey, along with analysis and commentary on the results here.

"With four years of data, we’re now really beginning to see some interesting trends, such as the five-fold increase in SaaS adoption to 74% and the nearly six-fold increase in PaaS adoption to 41%." said Michael Skok, founder of the Future of Cloud program and General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners…

Read entire report here: http://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwgeeks/article/Industrys-Largest-Cloud-Computing-Survey-Reveals-5X-Adoption-of-SaaS-20140619#.U6LsXZRdWRM

Grazed from TMCNet. Author: Gilad Parann-Nissany.

The global village, mobile devices, online marketplaces, social networks, and on-demand entertainment all have a part to play. People all over the world are increasing the time they spend in the virtual world. They’re buying, selling, sharing, studying, developing apps, hanging out in social networks, and starting to use digital currencies that bypass traditional banking.

Alongside these community-driven ideas, we are also seeing enormous change in business to business relationships. Cloud computing enables any size business to obtain and manage big-business manufacturing, warehousing, marketing, data analytics, enterprise applications and global spread. Supply chains are radically altered: a business of any size can buy, produce and sell globally, and leverage vertically and horizontally integrated supply chains…