Category: News

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

DLT Solutions, a leading value-added reseller in government information technology (IT) software and services, today announced the launch of DLT Cloud Navigator, a new initiative that provides public sector customers with simplified access to today’s leading products, services, contracts, tools and expertise for cloud computing.

“Cloud computing is a groundbreaking technology; one which Deltek is predicting the federal market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 30% over the next three years,” said David Blankenhorn, chief cloud technologist at DLT Solutions. “With such significant growth forecasted and many of our customers already seeing the tangible benefits such as cost savings, improved efficiency, and agility and scalability of their IT environments, we see the need for increased guidance and a more practical approach to cloud computing. Understanding how different cloud deployment models (public, private, hybrid and community) and service models (Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service) fit together to achieve desired business outcomes can be a challenge.”…

Grazed from HPBlogHub. Author: Don Randall.

It’s easy for us in the IT industry to get wrapped up in the technology. That’s what we’re good at. So when a new technology—like cloud computing—comes along, we’re eager to put it to work and see what it can do. But there are a lot of surrounding elements required before a technology can go prime time—when business leaders entrust their success to it…

Things like security and reliability, support, education, and expert assistance when you need it. You would like those things to come from a trusted partner who has been in the business a while. But you don’t want to be locked in—you should have choices. It was when those things came together for Linux, for example, that it took off. Now it runs thousands of businesses and is embedded in tens-of-thousands of products…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

SoftLayer, an IBM Company, today unveiled Direct Link, a new service that allows customers to establish a dedicated network connection from their own IT infrastructure to the SoftLayer private network and cloud services. With faster and more consistent network performance, and higher data security, Direct Link brings customers new opportunities for creating hybrid-computing solutions that merge private infrastructure with the SoftLayer platform.

"The power of a company’s private infrastructure and internal applications increases exponentially when they are able to scale out onto the cloud. We have customers ranging from startups to enterprises, from SaaS providers to financial institutions that want to do just that," said Matt Chilek, chief technology officer for SoftLayer. "Direct Link helps them optimize their workloads and get more value out of their data. They can move both to and from SoftLayer as easily as if our bare metal and virtual servers and storage were part of their local area network."…

Grazed from FederalTimes. Author: Editorial Staff.

U.S. federal government agencies are adopting cloud infrastructure and services at a growing pace. Over the past few years, the Department of the Interior, General Services Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Forest Service and others have moved ahead with cloud implementations, ranging in scope and size.

As they transition, many of the early adopters are discovering the benefits of implementing a hybrid cloud computing strategy. A hybrid cloud provides both on-premise and off-site resources that allow agencies to gain the cost benefits of a public or community cloud for the applications and data that are appropriate for those environments, while utilizing the security of a private cloud and managing risk for sensitive data and applications…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Docker is a hot topic this week. If you’re unfamiliar with what this technology is or what it means for your business, here’s a guide.

What is it?

Docker is both an open source project and the name of a startup that focuses on Linux Containers. Containers are the idea of running multiple applications on a single host. It’s similar to compute virtualization, but instead of virtualizing a server to create multiple operating systems, containers offer a more lightweight alternative by essentially virtualizing the operating system, allowing multiple workloads to run on a single host…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Roger Kay.

The litany of computing buzzwords has been repeated so often that we’ve almost glazed over: mobile, social, cloud, crowd, big data, analytics. After a while they almost lose their meaning. Taken together, though, they describe the evolution of computing from its most recent incarnation — single user, sitting at a desk, typing on a keyboard, watching a screen, local machine doing all the work — to a much more amorphous activity that involves a whole new set of systems, relationships, and actions.

The single user becomes a collaboration among people. The desk becomes a car, plane, back deck, conference room, or hotel. The keyboard becomes voice or data inbound from other connected systems. The screen may still be a screen, but it could be a bigger screen, or a smaller screen, and it could be a voice, or an action, or a command sent somewhere else. And the work is being done everywhere: on premise, in the cloud, by people, and by machines…

Grazed from OnBase. Author: David Jones.

I like to compare the different enterprise content management (ECM) cloud deployment types to my children playing with Legos. We have a large box of Lego pieces that my children can use to build anything. My eldest daughter loves this ground-up style of playing and can make some fascinating creations – simply by combining raw bricks and her imagination.

This compares to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in that all of the raw components to host a cloud solution are provided – servers, virtual machines, load balancers and so on. What is required is the guile and skill to combine these components (Lego bricks) with the required software tools (imagination) to create the desired effect…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Christopher O’Connell.

By September 2015, no new purchasing contracts are to go through the federal government’s Standard Procurement System (SPS). The entire legacy procurement system is slated for sunset by 2017. With the sunset of SPS, there’s an opportunity to do procurement better in the federal government. Let’s call this notion "acquisition-as-a-service."

Some agencies already seem headed in that direction. But before we turn our attention to them, here’s a hard truth: Federal procurement processes have been poorly served by technology. Acquisition is a costly and complicated business, with little uniformity among the applications that automate acquisition’s repetitive functions…

Grazed from CloudServicesWorld. Author: Claire Umney.

In an industry where collaboration and visibility are key requirements, cloud computing is a rather new business model with great potential. In their IT cloud services forecast 2013-2017, market intelligence provider, IDC, reports that on a global level only 20 percent of manufacturers, process agents and retail businesses currently use cloud computing. The same research stated that 75 percent of the companies surveyed were however looking for cloud solutions as an alternative, while projecting a growth rate of at least 7 percent for 2013. What exactly is it that’s driving supply chain professionals into the cloud?

Cost savings

The most obvious benefit of adopting cloud computing solutions is cost savings from deployment and the short implementation time frames. Unlike legacy systems, either custom–built or packaged software – there is no IT infrastructure to maintain on-site, no upfront licensing fees, and no software programmes to install and maintain…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Cade Metz.

When Google engineers John Sirois, Travis Crawford, and Bill Farner left the internet giant and went to work for Twitter, they missed Borg. Borg was the sweeping software system that managed the thousands of computer servers underpinning Google’s online empire. With Borg, Google engineers could instantly grab enormous amounts of computing power from across the company’s data centers and apply it to whatever they were building–whether it was Google Search or Gmail or Google Maps. As Sirois, Crawford, and Farner created new web services at Twitter, they longed for the convenience of this massive computing engine.

Unfortunately, Borg was one of those creations Google was loath to share with the outside world–a technological trade secret it saw as an important competitive advantage. In the end, urged by that trio of engineers, Twitter went so far as build its own version of the tool. But now, the next wave of internet companies has another way of expanding their operations to Google-like sizes. This morning, Google open sourced a software tool that works much like Borg, freely sharing this new creation with the world at large…