Category: News

Grazed from EnterpriseTech. Author: George Leopold.

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has appointed a tech industry veteran to help oversee its uneven cloud rollout. Jennifer Kerber, former president of the industry group TechAmerica Foundation and most recently executive director of the Government Transformation Initiative, will join GSA’s Office of Citizens Services and Technologies as director of its Federal Cloud Credential Exchange program.

Kerber’s move to GSA was first reported by the web site federalnewsradio.com. The GSA exchange is working with agency partners that include the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology that its developing security standards for the federal cloud initiative FedRAMP, or Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program…

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Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Exoprise, a provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) based monitoring and enablement solutions for enterprise cloud applications and services, today announced the availability of a new weekly report on the health and performance of leading enterprise cloud services. Leveraging data aggregated from Exoprise’s global network of performance monitors, deployed at user points of access by customers, the service provides a free weekly report card on the health and performance trends of mission critical, enterprise cloud services.

Initially, the reports will cover leading cloud services including Microsoft Office 365 and Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Apps. Additional enterprise services, such as Salesforce.com, Dropbox, and Workday are scheduled to be added over the next several weeks and months…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR NewsWire.

Ingram Micro Cloud, a global division of Ingram Micro Inc. (NYSE: IM), today announced the general availability of three new, Ingram Micro-branded and Ingram Micro-hosted cloud solutions. Available now to channel partners in the U.S., the new cloud solutions are managed by Ingram Micro’s wholly-owned subsidiary SoftCom and include:

• Ingram Micro Hosted Exchange – Based on Microsoft Exchange 2013, Ingram Micro Hosted Exchange offers sophisticated communication and collaboration tools which provide seamless access to email, calendars, contacts, and tasks; regardless of location or device.
• Ingram Micro Virtual Private Servers (VPS) – Powered by Parallels virtualization technology, Ingram Micro VPS offers a full-service Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution that allows customers to easily spin-up and manage their own server based solutions.
• Ingram Micro Web Hosting – Designed to simplify sales and service, Ingram Micro Web Hosting provides all the resources and services needed for channel partners to host fully managed and secure business websites for their customers…

Grazed from eFolder. Author: PR Announcement.

Atlanta-based eFolder, a provider of software that protects cloud-stored data, said it has acquired Cloudfinder of Sweden, a company that provides business-to-business cloud data backup and text searches.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cloud computing relies on a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet and used to store, manage, and process data rather than storing and processing the data on a local server or personal device, such as a PC, tablet or smartphone. The remote servers can process everything from e-mail to complex data analysis programs…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: David Weldon.

CIOs obviously have many different priorities around the world, but one priority that seems to be common among IT leaders everywhere is interest in the cloud, new studies find. According to recent research from Gartner, while there are some differences in the way IT managers around the world work and the challenges they face, there are also consistencies and "the importance of the cloud is one," notes an article at ZD Net.

Gartner recently surveyed 2,339 global IT businesses on their priorities this year. Differences cited includes growth (according to IT leaders in China), the danger of complacency (emerging from U.S. data), strategic alignment (topping the Latin American companies), and outsourcing (in the U.K. and Europe). But the most common similarity was interest in cloud computing…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Linthicum.

Data warehouses back in the day were hugely expensive. No matter which database you deployed to, you could count on a cool million-dollar minimum investment to get things up and running. A data warehouse, while often defined differently, is just a database that contains abstractions of transactional data used for making business decisions. Data analysis tools run against the data, and the output is different views of that, including reports and visualized data.

In the past, Oracle and other larger enterprise players ruled the data warehousing world. With the emergence of cloud-based solutions, such as data warehouse storage that runs on public cloud providers, the cost of building and deploying a data warehouse has been significantly reduced…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Those who leverage managed server providers (MSPs) often use the MSP to access and manage public cloud services. However, there are right and wrong ways to do this. Many believe that MSPs and public clouds live in very different worlds. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the past, ‘managed service providers’ was a term used to describe infrastructure services delivered on a subscription basis. With the advent of cloud computing, managed IT services and management services have become synonymous. Indeed, most MSPs are very cloud-like. Many even provide auto- and self-provisioning capabilities, as well as some elastic scaling features.

However, as MSPs continue to grow in popularity, along with cloud computing, best practices are beginning to emerge around how to use MSPs as management layers for cloud-based resources. Simply put, it’s the ability to leverage a tiered model to deal with public clouds using the MSP as a point of abstraction…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

AT&T announced today that it has added HP to its network-enabled cloud ecosystem. AT&T customers will be able to use their Virtual Private Networks (VPN) to connect to HP Helion, a portfolio of cloud services, using AT&T NetBond(SM) . This integrated cloud solution can help enterprise customers overcome the barriers that exist for companies needing a highly secure, reliable and scalable connection to HP Helion.

AT&T NetBond creates a highly secure private path between a customer’s AT&T Virtual Private Network (VPN) and a cloud service provider, like HP. It flexes and scales network resources dynamically as a company’s cloud computing needs change. "IDC’s research underscores the importance of the network dimension of cloud enablement and enterprises’ increasing interest in vendors that can deliver a more secure, optimized cloud solution," said Melanie Posey with IDC. "AT&T has established leadership in this domain by combining its impressive ecosystem of leading cloud solution providers with highly secure cloud connectivity options."…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

The price wars that are the focus of the battle between the big and small guys of the cloud computing world are just the beginning, according to Mike Chase, CTO of dinCloud. The cloud wars are evolving, and there are already strong signs of the next major battle—the migration war. Cloud pricing is having an effect on customers and end users.

Particularly, the entry level service for cloud is storage, which continues to drop in price. Not because it’s a major profit center, but because it’s the loss leader tht brings in customers that may want to consume other cloud services. And the low prices are something smaller players can’t compete with…