Category: News

Grazed from Baseline. Author: Maggie O’Neill.

Cloud computing, diversification and virtualization are among the initiatives that federal agencies could deploy to save billions, while increasing efficiency. A new report states that government agencies could save as much as $19.7 billion a year by improving their infrastructure and deploying five key initiatives that are based on consolidation, cloud computing, diversification, remote access and virtualization.

That represents more than double the $8.5 billion savings already reported by federal agencies that have partially or fully enacted these initiatives. The additional savings would be leveraged through improved operating efficiencies, processes and services, as well as reduced capital and operating expenditures, according to the report, which was issued by MeriTalk, a public-private partnership that focuses on improving government IT outcomes…

Grazed from LogicWorks. Author: PR Announcement.

Logicworks, a global leader in cloud computing and managed hosting, today announced the launch of its Managed High Availability service on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Designed for mission-critical applications, Logicworks’ new Managed High Availability service provides clients a 100% application uptime SLA with a fully monitored and managed AWS infrastructure that is highly secure, fault-tolerant, and actively tested for resiliency by the company’s top-tier team of administrators, cloud engineers, and network technicians.

"As customers across industries increasingly run mission-critical applications on top of AWS, the question of how they manage and automate the underlying infrastructure to guarantee uptime and resiliency of those applications becomes paramount," says Kenneth Ziegler, CEO of Logicworks. "Logicworks has taken the lessons-learned and industry best-practices surrounding AWS and curated them for the benefit of our clients looking to optimize and automate their AWS installation for high availability based on their specific applications and business models." …

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM today announced that it is accelerating the adoption of open technologies for cloud computing to assist companies to more quickly integrate its existing infrastructure, respond to market changes with greater agility and deliver additional value to its clients. To provide a more flexible way to build, scale and deploy applications and reduce the time and expense of cloud, IBM is announcing it is working on an open integration model with Docker and the open source Docker project community.

While the Docker open source community further advances its position toward open governance, IBM has taken steps to further integrate with Docker. IBM has taken steps to further integrate with Docker including:

• DockerHub will be hosted on SoftLayer to provide companies with greater ease of use and maintenance
• IBM and Docker will ensure that customers have access to all relevant content from the Docker data repository (or Hub Registry), including compatible portions of the 14,000 Dockerized applications currently on the DockerHub Registry
• IBM will offer a certified Docker image of the cloud optimized WebSphere Liberty Profile Application Server to provide companies with the greater performance and flexibility…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

SOASTA , the leader in cloud and mobile testing, today announced the results of its Cloud Computing Survey. SOASTA commissioned Harris Poll to conduct this online survey of 2,051 adults to discover the prevalence of cloud computing in everyday life. The results show that 39 percent of all Americans use the cloud and of those, 86 percent say the cloud has improved the lives of Americans who work. When it came to using the cloud, SOASTA discovered the following:

• The highest percentage of Americans who use the cloud live in the South (44 percent); the lowest use was in the Midwest (29 percent)
• Millennials (18-34) used the cloud the most (54 percent) out of any age group
• Households with children were more likely to use the cloud over households with no children (52 percent to 33 percent)
• Individuals who made $75,000 – $99,999 a year (53 percent) were most likely to use the cloud, followed by those who made $100,000 or more (46 percent) a year; those who made less than $50,000 (31 percent) were least likely to use the cloud
• Students were most likely to use the cloud (55 percent) followed by the employed (44 percent), and then the unemployed (33 percent); retired Americans were the least likely to use the cloud (24 percent)…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Andrew Froehlich.

At Cisco Live in San Francisco last month, I attended a panel discussion on the Internet of Things (IoT), where the participants talked of an impending tidal wave of Internet-connected devices and data that could overwhelm data centers and cloud infrastructure. But I don’t believe that IoT adoption — and ultimately cloud growth — is as absolute as many make it out to be. In fact, I feel that we’re actually in for a backlash against IoT, which could seriously impact the predictions and even stall cloud growth forecasts.

The panelists included startup entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and healthcare IT forward-thinkers, all who painted a picture a mind-blowing "everything-connected" world. In fact, most agreed that in the not-too-distant future, IoT devices will not only become more integrated into our daily lives, they will actually begin making decisions for us…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Jyoti Trehan.

Cloud computing is yet another buzzword that has been metamorphosing constantly. In other words, it continues to grow but the evolution has been very zigzag. A few decades ago, IBM used to offer its mainframes to banks, utilities and other industries on a rental basis and the billing used to be metered. Even today IBM is doing the same thing with much success thanks to the amazing performance of its mainframe servers. However there are various new forms of cloud computing that have made it a common household word.

SaaS:

Salesforce is the company that showcased to the world more than a decade ago what SaaS could do. Having said that, SaaS, with multi-tenancy and metered billing model at the heart of it, is more applicable for product and services companies that offer per use services over the net. A lot of verticals, for better or worse, are not comfortable with the fact that the data lives somewhere outside of their brick and mortar structure…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Fighting has erupted between Netflix and Verizon over who bears responsibility for the low quality of service some Netflix subscribers purportedly experience on Verizon’s FiOS broadband service. The angry banter escalated sharply on Thursday when Verizon sent Netflix a letter threatening legal action if the video-streaming company doesn’t stop talking smack about Verizon.

Verizon sells a cloud service of its own that Netflix does not use, and both companies sell streaming video services. Verizon customers who are also Netflix subscribers must access their Netflix content via their Verizon account. That seems to be where things go wrong for Netflix customers with Verizon accounts. Who didn’t see this coming?…

Graze from Blazeclan. Author: Prachi Bhatnagar.

How Many Times have we seen this, we go to buy that favorite handbag for our Mom right before Christmas, and instead of making the happy purchase, we end up with an Error page that says, the site is suffering technical difficulties!! Take any of the other Holidays like Cyber Monday; last year the pain of the consumer accounted for 1.4% of social media chatter that day!

We all Know what it’s like to wait & not get served, ecommerce sites loose millions every year! The Infographic below does an analysis on the percentage of sites going down on different holidays & the major problems they suffered from on the left. On the right, we have sites that were saved from Downtime, who also used AWS Cloud. Is that a coincidence? We think Not! Check out the major ways on How you can use Cloud to reduce downtime and improve your customer satisfaction!…

To view infographic and read more from the source, visit http://blog.blazeclan.com/cloud-computing-infographic-savior-ecommerce-websites-2014/

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Shirley S. Wang.

Google Inc. and Autism Speaks, a major autism research foundation, plan to announce on Tuesday a deal in which the Internet giant will house the sequencing of 10,000 complete genomes and other clinical data of children with autism and their siblings and parents. The hope of those involved is to accelerate research on the developmental disorder.

Studying genes has been touted as a key to understanding Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and autism. But huge DNA databases require computing and storage that many universities and research hospitals don’t have. The database will be part of the AUT10K, the Autism Speaks genome-mapping program…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Joel Schectman.

The U.S. is loosening its policy on how companies may store sensitive defense data, allowing use of cloud services like Google Inc.’s Gmail, provided adequate security steps are taken, according to U.S. State Department officials. The State Department recently told the startup Perspecsys Inc., in an advisory opinion, that it could store defense data in the cloud provided it “take all steps necessary” to make sure only U.S. persons could view the data, according to an official from the agency.

Both Perspecsys and the State Department denied Wall Street Journal requests to review the advisory opinion. To stop rivals from eroding the U.S. military edge, defense contractors are prohibited from bringing both physical arms and information on how to build them out of the U.S., without special permission…