Category: News

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Editorial Staff.

eFolder recently participated in the HTG Vendor Peer Group meeting in Cedar Rapids, IA, at the headquarters of Great America Financial. The highlight of the meeting was the partner panel, where we brought together a panel of three business principals from the local MSP and VAR community. The Vendor Peer Group itself is made up of about 20 IT vendor personnel.

In our recent panel, one partner made a very astute observation: “Cloud computing is not do-it-yourself computing.” The context for the quote was a conversation around Office 365 and client perceptions around ease of use and complexity of the cloud. The largest IT vendors such as Microsoft and Google have successfully marketed the promise of the cloud to clients and users. These vendors have marketed the cloud as affordable, easy, and secure. The reality is far more complex. And this is good news for the IT channel…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

Data storage used to be relatively simple, in the sense that it was generally all in one location. But with the advent of cloud computing, data is now stored both inside and out of the enterprise. Looking to help IT organizations get a better handle on all the storage, Zadara Storage has created a storage-as-a-service offering based on the open source OpenStack cloud management platform that makes it easier to manage storage systems deployed both on premise and in the cloud.

Noam Shender, vice president of business development for Zadara Storage, says the Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) can be deployed on premise, in a managed hosting environment and in the cloud. Regardless of where the VPSA is deployed, Shender says a unified console allows IT organizations to manage petabytes of flash and magnetic storage systems as a single service via RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs) that Zadara exposes…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Blackstone (NYSE:BX) today announced that it has made a strategic investment in Cloud Theory, a technology consulting firm specializing in cloud-based solutions, to expand its product offering with customized Salesforce software for alternative asset managers. Cloud Theory’s FundEngine solution was designed and built in partnership with the Blackstone Innovations team, and offers a turn-key, client-facing customer relationship management ("CRM") system for alternative asset management firms that is built on top of the Salesforce platform, an industry leader in cloud computing and CRM software.

FundEngine customizes the general purpose Salesforce platform and tailors it for alternative asset management business development, fundraising and client relations, as well as fund management, due diligence and research management. FundEngine also integrates with leading industry vendors, back office systems and fund administrators…

Grazed from InsideCounsel. Author: Juliana Kenny.

Big data’s growth and usage is both benefitting and befuddling businesses. As many are still yet coming to terms with what Big Data means, how it works, and the kinds of technologies needed to fully take advantage of what it has to offer, companies that are embroiled in legal cases face particular disadvantages. The storage and archiving practices of old — and the storage of particular amounts of data to prepare for legal issues — are no longer sufficient for businesses that need to be courtroom-ready.

Already, the need is clear for new methods of collecting and archiving large sets of data including social-based content. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) fined Barclays $3.75 million in December 2013 for failing to preserve many of its required electronic books and records from at least 2002 to 2012. The records include order and trade ticket data, trade confirmations, blotters, account records and others. Since the failures were prevalent throughout the firm’s business areas, Barclays could not determine whether all of its electronic books and records were maintained in an unaltered condition…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Jonathan Hassell.

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve heard pundits proclaim the death of the PC. As consumers move to tablets and stop buying laptops and desktops, and as companies pinch IT budgets even harder than they have in the past, it’s easy to paint a doomsday scenario for hardware. Even the hardware companies play into this myth — look no further than AMD to see weakness portrayed. For many, it seems, hardware has lost its sexiness.

Not so fast. Hardware is back. There are two clear catalysts for hardware in this era: Mobile devices as well as the explosion of cloud computing as a way to host applications, infrastructure and services. Let’s unpack the promise of hardware from these two perspectives a little more…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

The cloud hasn’t killed the company-owned data center. Companies from General Motors to Fidelity are taking the best infrastructure ideas from Web giants such as Facebook and Google and adapting them to their very different business needs in order to build a new generation of data centers.

To highlight the different approaches and strategies these companies are taking, we looked at six companies beyond the Web giants that have made or are planning major data center investments. Our point isn’t that data center construction is booming; Gartner forecasts only 2.3% growth in data center spending in 2014, to $143 billion. Companies will spend more than twice that on enterprise software, by comparison, at a growth rate of nearly 7%…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloudwords, the first cloud-based marketing globalization platform, announced today that Michael Meinhardt, Co-founder and CCO, will participate in the panel titled, "Localising in the Cloud: Over-hyped or the Real Deal?" at the Localization World Dublin 2014 conference to be held 4-6 June at The Convention Centre Dublin. Meinhardt joins panel participants from Agilent, GoPro, and SAP, as well as other cloud technology vendors, to discuss best practices, as well as the benefits and challenges, of leveraging cloud technology to manage the translation and localisation of global content.

"Enterprise organisations are increasingly challenged by the enormous amount of content that requires localisation in order to communicate with customers, engage audiences, and stay ahead of the competition. To solve this challenge, they need to implement a better business process, one that enables transparency, visibility and accountability. Cloud technology delivers that today. I look forward to a compelling and informative discussion with my fellow panel participants at Localization World Dublin," said Meinhardt…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Eric Knorr.

The appeal of making your own data center cloudlike is easy to understand: Who wouldn’t want an entirely flexible commodity infrastructure, where you can pour on compute, storage, and network resources as needed? From the early days of the cloud, CIOs saw promise in the cloud’s magic combination of reduced cost and vastly greater agility and wanted to capitalize on cloud architecture in their own organizations.

But those closer to the ground in enterprise IT have always had a tendency to roll their eyes. They see the advantage of scale-out, self-service architectures for some applications — such as dev and test — but the return on investment in other areas is not always so obvious. Part of that resistance is the usual allergic reaction to change, because major shakeups mean fewer resources to meet project deadlines and keep legacy systems humming…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

Larger companies are among the fastest-growing segments of OpenStack users and advocates. In fact, a survey conducted by Metacloud, Inc., which deploys and supports private clouds for some of the world’s largest companies, reported that 72 percent of respondents at the OpenStack Summit 2014 in Atlanta last week were attending this event for the first time.

Of those first-time attendees, 65 percent are employed by companies with 2,500 or more employees, signifying a shift in the sizes of businesses that are embracing OpenStack as a private cloud option. "The fact that the majority of all respondents are from companies with more than 2,500 employees demonstrates what we’ve known all along – OpenStack provides the scalability and security that large businesses need when deploying cloud solutions," said Steve Curry, co-founder and president at Metacloud…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

AvePoint, the established global leader in enterprise-class cloud management, governance, and compliance software solutions for next-generation social collaboration platforms, today announced a partnership with Cloud|AG, an Atlanta-based products and services company specializing in Microsoft’s cloud-based collaboration and business applications. The agreement will enable the two companies to offer best-in-class managed services for modern businesses seeking enhanced backup, recovery, and administration of their Microsoft cloud services, including Office 365 and Azure.

AvePoint Online Services, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) management platform for Microsoft Office 365 and any cloud-hosted SharePoint environments, in tandem with Cloud|AG’s commitment to helping businesses of all sizes implement Microsoft’s strategic cloud platforms, will provide organizations worldwide a set of robust products and services designed to help customers implement and manage their Microsoft cloud-based solutions…