IBM Expands Business Continuity Services with New Cloud Resiliency Center

IBM this week opened a new Cloud Resiliency Center to help enterprises mitigate business interruptions and recover from disasters.

The company said the state-of-the-art facility in Research Triangle Park, N.C., provides cloud-based business continuity services to protect against potentially costly business disruptions. Such disruptions can be quite costly, according to recent research. IBM pointed to a Ponemon Institute study it commissioned that pegged the cost of a long-lasting outage at $32,000 per minute on average. Beyond that, in these days of instant social media commentary on any major corporate problem or outage, long-lasting disruptions can harm a company's reputation and impact future revenue.

Posted by David Ramel on 09/24/20140 comments

Red Hat Pushes for Enterprise Cloud Supremacy

Red Hat Inc. CEO Jim Whitehurst says the IT industry is undergoing a momentous shift from the client-server model to cloud-mobile, and the vendor of enterprise Linux and other open source software is pushing to come out the other end on top.

In the blog post, "Only a Matter of Time, Cloud Winners Will Be Chosen Soon," Whitehurst yesterday outlined recent moves and successes of the company while letting everyone know that enterprise cloud vendor supremacy is the next target.

Posted by David Ramel on 09/23/20140 comments

'Jeopardy!' Champion Watson Is Back To Answer Your Big Data Questions in the Cloud

Watson is back. The "Jeopardy!" champion has graduated from winning T.V. game show competitions to fighting cancer and other important pursuits, and IBM says it will soon be able to answer your Big Data queries in the cloud.

IBM yesterday announced Watson Analytics will provide cognitive artificial intelligence to the company's cloud service users, who can perform Big Data analytics with natural language queries.

Posted by David Ramel on 09/17/20140 comments

Tesora Brings Database Service to OpenStack Cloud

Tesora today announced its Database as a Service (DBaaS) offering for the OpenStack cloud platform.

Tesora DBaaS Platform Enterprise Edition is the first enterprise-ready commercial product stemming from the open source OpenStack Trove project, the company claimed. The mission of that project is "to provide scalable and reliable cloud DBaaS provisioning functionality for both relational and non-relational database engines, and to continue to improve its fully featured and extensible open source framework."

Posted by David Ramel on 09/16/20140 comments

Cloud Is Helping Companies Avoid Disaster

In a recent survey, half of the companies using cloud computing said they have benefitted by avoiding disasters and keeping the business running.

"Disaster avoidance/recovery and business continuity, as cited by 73 percent of all respondents, was the number one expected benefit of moving to the cloud," the survey report by Evolve IP said. "Of those with services in the cloud, five in 10 respondents indicated that they had already experienced that benefit. Improved flexibility (65.5 percent) and scalability (65 percent) followed suit."

Posted by David Ramel on 09/10/20140 comments

Cisco, Under Siege, Makes OpenStack Cloud Move with Red Hat

You have to give Cisco Systems Inc. credit: It's certainly not sitting idly by while its traditional proprietary networking model comes under siege by upstart software-defined networking (SDN) and virtualization technologies, sophisticated cloud implementations and the open networking movement.

Coming off a tough earnings call last month with investors and the announcement of a massive layoff, the company this week made all kinds of news in conjunction with its partner, Red Hat, a leader in the open source arena.

Posted by David Ramel on 09/05/20140 comments

Tool Aims To Manage Clouds and Software-Defined Networks

Real Status Ltd. today announced a software tool aimed at managing sprawling modern datacenters that encompass public and private clouds and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) implementations.

Now in general availability, Hyperglance version 3.3 seeks to be the one management platform that ties together the disparate systems of today's datacenters, using APIs to hook into cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack, along with SDN controller platforms including OpenDaylight and the HP Virtual Application Networks (VAN) SDN Controller.

Posted by David Ramel on 09/03/20140 comments

Google Cloud Enters the Movie Business

Movie special effects artists will be able to call upon the vast resources of the Google Cloud Platform for their time-consuming rendering processes now that the Internet search giant acquired Zync Inc.

Rendering is the frame-by-frame process of taking all the digital information of a video production, including audio and special effects like animation, texture, shading, simulated 3D shapes and so on, and converting it into a final video file format.

Posted by David Ramel on 08/27/20140 comments

Clouds Fail: Deal with It

When you're high in the sky, you have a long way to fall, and the trip down can be spectacular.

Take airplanes, for example. Study after study has concluded that airline travel is statistically safer than driving your car, but when crashes happen, they get everyone's attention.

Posted by David Ramel on 08/20/20140 comments

Orchestrating Apps through Cloudy 'Internet Weather'

Silver Peak Inc. today announced a WAN fabric aimed at unifying enterprise networks with public clouds and optimizing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) traffic by constantly monitoring service performance and orchestrating traffic according to the current "Internet weather."

Called Unity, the "intelligent" fabric provides a complete map of the cloud-connected network and uses new routing technology so enterprises can manage and optimize SaaS connectivity and bypass heavy weather -- or congested paths.

Posted by David Ramel on 08/13/20140 comments

Cloud Helps Smaller Companies Compete

Small businesses and entrepreneurs are moving to the cloud along with the big boys, enabled to compete by new technologies that democratize IT, according to a new report commissioned by Intuit Inc.

While some 37 percent of U.S. small businesses have so far adapted to cloud computing, that number is expected to grow to more than 80 percent in the next six years, according to "Small Business Success in the Cloud," prepared by Emergent Research.

Posted by David Ramel on 08/13/20140 comments

Federal Cloud Adoption Raises Scary Security Concerns

I figured the government was on top of cloud security.

Awareness of the issue couldn't be much higher, what with all the news of data breaches and software vulnerabilities. Everyone is going to the cloud -- including Uncle Sam -- and security is always of paramount concern.

As a Ponemeon Institute report revealed in a study about the "cloud multiplier effect," moving to the cloud brings increased security concerns.

Posted by David Ramel on 08/07/20140 comments