Category: News

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

 Virtustream, the enterprise-class cloud software and services provider, today announced it has been included by Gartner, Inc. in the “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)” for the third consecutive year. The report evaluates cloud IaaS providers, listing the top 15 leading vendors worldwide.

According to Gartner, the IaaS market is the fastest growing area of public cloud computing that the firm tracks, with a projected compound annual growth rate of 41.3 percent through 2016. To rank in the highly competitive Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS report, vendors must offer high-quality service, with excellent availability, performance, security and customer support…

Grazed from SysConMedia.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The new wonder metal, graphene, is being looked at as a building block for communications and electronic devices on the level of what the transistor was sixty years ago.

Graphene is a one-atom thick, mesh-like (think hexagonal honeycomb or chicken wire), semi metal that will add more battery-life into a smartphone among other breakthrough ideas like bendable displays. It is also ten times stronger than diamonds so its resiliency is perfect for use in a smartphone or any other device that requires super-ruggedness…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Applied Micro Circuits and Canonical planned to demonstrate an OpenStack cloud running on a rack of ARM servers at the Computex tradeshow Friday in Taiwan. Major server manufacturers, including Dell and HP, and original design manufacturers from around the world, such as Quanta, Avnet, and Hyve, were expected to view the demonstration.

ARM is the chip used in many smartphones and mobile devices, and it’s not usually associated with either enterprise data centers or cloud computing. But Applied Micro will show a rack of 14 servers based on its X-Gene server chip. They will be running Icehouse, the latest version of OpenStack, under Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Bill Claybrook.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of services that includes storage services such as Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and more. These IT infrastructure services are offered in the form of Web services that Amazon refers to as cloud computing. Amazon EC2 is the AWS computing service.

When users decide to share their IT responsibility with a public cloud provider and move some of their applications to a public cloud, AWS EC2 is frequently the choice. Prior to services such as EC2, users had to go through a lengthy process to complete the purchase of a server, including finding the money to pay for it. Then the server had to be installed, connected to the on-premises network and tested. EC2 offers computing capacity on demand, no upfront server costs, almost immediate availability and no commitment for length of use. The total commitment a user has to make to EC2 is one hour, the minimum billing period for an EC2 instance (virtual machine)…

Grazed from SAP.  Author: Lindsey LaManna.

Cloud computing has quickly become a driving force of unprecedented change across the IT and business landscape. Organizations are adopting the potential of the cloud to reap the benefits of business innovation and agility, and to enable new processes and insights that were previously impossible. Business and IT are transforming into “everything as a service.” Those companies that do not adopt the cloud will fall behind the pace of change. What can we do today to prepare for tomorrow?

 To find the answer to this question, I interviewed Sven Denecken, VP of Strategy for Cloud Solutions at SAP and speaker at The in Cloud 2020 Forum at SAPPHIRE NOW next week in Orlando, on a Google+ Hangout last week. Sven provided valuable insights on the impact of the cloud, what businesses can do prepare and what cloud will look like in 2020…

Grazed from SmartData Collective.  Author: Ryan Ward.

Working in the information security field, I obviously hear a lot about “the cloud” and its many security implications. There are definitely valid security concerns associated with cloud computing, but isn’t the entire industry of “information security” based on the concept of “securing information” no matter where it resides (including the cloud)? Security professionals need to accept the cloud as simply another platform that must be secured in order to protect information. Rather than talk about security controls though, I thought I would step back and first focus on the journey many organizations take to cloud adoption since security fears and IT change still appear to be hurdles.

The differences between cloud adoptions from one organization to another are very interesting to me. Working with a variety of businesses, I have learned that each takes its own approach to embracing cloud solutions without a 100% direct correlation between specific industries or size…

Grazed from InsuranceTech.  Author: Frank Petersmark.

The summer movie season is nearly upon us, and included in the many potential blockbusters is a remake of that perennially angry but always loveable creature from the deep, Godzilla. Hearing about that remake got me thinking about another classic Godzilla movie, so here’s a quiz. What do the IBM System/360 mainframe and the classic Japanese science-fiction film Mothra vs. Godzilla have in common?

The answer: they both celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2014! The production of the IBM System/360 was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and the film made its debut in Japan on April 27, 1964 before opening in America later that summer…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Elena Malykhina.

Salesforce.com announced Friday that it has received the authority to operate (ATO) on its new Government Cloud, both for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS). With the ATO, granted under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), federal agencies will have one location for all their cloud products and services.

Salesforce got the authorization from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which used the FedRAMP baseline guidelines that help agencies migrate to the cloud securely. Agencies can now use Salesforce’s commercial off-the-shelf applications, as well as the Salesforce1 platform to customize applications with additional functionality or build new applications within the cloud environment…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Nationwide cloud services provider NewCloud Networks has released its newest Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering, Desktop-as-a-Service. By combining this new service with the company’s existing cloud services, NewCloud now has the ability to offer complete-end-to-end cloud infrastructure services to midmarket businesses across the country.

Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) is a service in which the compute, storage and disk components of the individual desktop run from a data center, rather than a local machine. The desktop is accessed with any device connected to the Internet while being managed by the data center provider. NewCloud uses VMware virtualization as the platform for this revolutionary service…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Rick Robinson.

IT customers are going rogue, say industry observers. Business units and individual employees — IT’s customers within the firm — are striking their own deals for cloud access without waiting for IT assistance, or even letting them know about their arrangements. This has been a developing trend for some time, but it is now accelerating.

A new generation of consumerized offerings makes cloud adoption fast and easy, and many business units are quick to make use of cloud convenience. To respond effectively to this challenge, midsize IT can’t "just say no." They must also be able to say "yes."…