Category: News

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: David Streifeld.

The C.I.A. isn’t afraid of the cloud. Amazon, a relative baby in the field of technology services, triumphed over stalwart IBM to gain a $600 million C.I.A. contract, but the most remarkable part of the deal was that the agency was a cloud convert in the first place. The fact that a tech company could warehouse data involving the government’s spies is the clearest signal yet that cloud computing is having its moment.

Somewhat like outsourcing a decade ago, cloud computing is the coming technology destined to sweep away all before it. Amazon Web Services is the fastest-growing part of fast-growing Amazon, and analysts expect it someday to be the dominant part of the company. Google, IBM, Verizon, Microsoft and a host of smaller players are competing for a part of the action. Global spending on public cloud services alone is forecast to hit $210 billion in 2016, up 172 percent from 2010…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

When it comes to cloud computing, data is the once and future king. While most of the cloud computing focus for the last four years has been in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), traditional enterprise IT vendors have figured out the best chance they have to thwart the ambitions of rivals is to leverage all the data they have access to inside their applications.

All things being relatively equal when it comes to cloud platforms, the most important factor in deciding where to host that application is access to data. After all, building an application is one thing. But that application is only as valuable as the data it contains. What Salesforce.com, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and IBM have figured out is they already have a lot of the critical data that developers are looking for within their application environment…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Skyhigh Networks, the Cloud Visibility and Enablement Company, announced that more than 50 cloud service providers (CSPs) who are rated Skyhigh Enterprise-Ready™ have joined the Skyhigh CloudTrust™ Program since its launch in January 2014.

Skyhigh evaluates thousands of CSPs and grants the Skyhigh Enterprise-Ready seal only to those CSPs who fully satisfy the most stringent requirements for data protection, identity verification, service security, business practices, and legal protection. The Skyhigh CloudTrust Program is an objective, comprehensive, and free program available to all CSPs including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS providers…

Grazed from OpenPR. Author: PR Announcement.

A recently released report from TechNavio, the independent tech-focused global research firm, shows the Global SaaS-based Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Market is projecting healthy growth, with a CAGR of 31.11 percent from 2013-2018. While on-premise ECM held a 90.73 percent share in the Global ECM market in 2013, its share is expected to decrease by 2018.

Traditionally, the biggest advantage of on-premise software is that it gives businesses complete control over their critical data, as opposed to SaaS-based models wherein the solution is hosted in the cloud and accessed via the web. The solution is deployed and managed by cloud service providers, and end-users are able to use the service on a pay-per-use model…

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…