Cloud

Utilizing the power of cloud technology and mobilizing the workforce are two key interests for most organizations, but several issues are currently affecting progress in the field.

In a survey conducted by NaviSite and Time Warner Cable on migration to the cloud and BYOD (bring your own device) support, several key points were brought up on the reasoning behind the slow progress.

With increasing pressure to produce new apps to meet customer demand, testing is vital as problems can lead to the loss of customers and revenue.

Yet the test process can often prove a bottleneck as the tools involved are cumbersome and can struggle to cope with modern complex apps and sites.

Social marketing has become an increasingly popular option for companies, but delivering it often involves using a number of different tools to handle publishing, monitoring of campaigns and more.

To streamline the process brand and audience specialist Parllay has announced some new integrated, knowledge-based tools. Parllay Studio is a complete content marketing and trend Intelligence platform powered by a semantic knowledge engine.

One of the key reasons why businesses migrate their systems to the cloud is to make them easier to access from anywhere.

But that can create complications where office systems are Windows based and mobile devices are running a different OS. Cloud services provider dinCloud has an answer in the form of webHVD, its HTML5-based virtual desktop.

As the year comes to a close, I'd like to ask you something: What was the best tech purchase you made (or received as a gift)? What about it is so good?

December is a time of reflection and preparation for a new year and when blogs and news sites fill space with stories looking back on the past 12 months and making predictions for the year ahead. I avoid writing the latter type but have opined about some companies' successes and failures, typically Apple, Google, or Microsoft. But if you'll oblige me, I would like my 2014 reflection(s) to be about you -- to make you the star.

Theft by hackers is a constant problem for software companies, so solutions that can prevent license abuse can help protect revenue.

In the past these have often been quite clunky, involving hardware dongles and such. The cloud era means that more sophistication is needed and Flexera Software has created a secure licensing technology with leading tamper resistance and detection.

One of the problems that larger businesses face is pulling together information from different sources in order to get an overview of the whole.

Integration specialist Jitterbit has upgraded its Harmony cloud platform to allow it to bring together digital processes spanning multiple applications, departments and partners in real time.

Bombarding customers with irrelevant communications is not an effective way of getting across a marketing message and generating new sales.

The key is to understand the consumer and deliver the right message at the right time. Cloud marketing specialist AgilOne is making this easier for retailers with a new 'predictive intelligence' product.

Moving applications to the cloud is a major step for businesses and finding the right partner to make the transition a success is vital.

The latest fruit of the long-standing alliance between technology consulting specialist Accenture and Microsoft is aimed at providing a powerful hybrid cloud platform to bring new capabilities, economics and innovation to the enterprise.

Is the role of the CIO (chief information officer) still intact after the introduction and rapid advancement of cloud computing? According to a report by Advanced 365, cloud computing is one of the 12 disruptive technologies that are changing the nature of business.

The CIO was initially called the data processing manager and then the title evolved to management information system director. Their main objective is to innovate in line to the IT vision of their company.

As more and more data gets moved to the cloud it's easy to forget that it still needs to be protected against corruption and loss.

Cloud backup specialist Spanning has a new solution for Office 365 users with the launch of an enterprise grade cloud-to-cloud backup solution. It's aimed at bringing the same application-centric focus and backup and restore expertise to Office 365 that it already has for Google Apps and Salesforce solutions.

Whilst access to data is often the key to things running smoothly in business, providing access to that data for the right people at the right time can be a challenge.

Enterprise collaboration specialist Clarizen combines social engagement with powerful project management to redefine enterprise collaboration and has announced a new release of its product bringing a number of tools together in a single solution.

The IT needs of businesses are constantly evolving and technology giant HP has announced a raft of new products aimed at optimizing today's workloads whilst preparing for the future.

Offerings include new servers, faster storage, converged systems and an expanded range of services including combining HP Enterprise Services with Microsoft Office 365.

One of the current challenges for a business IT team is supporting a variety of desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile end user devices for employees. This task can be a considerable overhead in terms of time, resource and cost. Physical desktops are not only expensive, insecure, and maintenance heavy, they are also not necessarily a good fit for an increasingly mobile and demanding workforce. The groundswell of Windows 7 migration plans, an expanding virtual workforce, the growing popularity of mobile devices, and tighter IT budgets each point to the need to re-evaluate desktop strategies.

While virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) seems like a promising alternative to managing physical desktops and mobiles, in reality, it’s too costly and complex for most companies to implement successfully. Cloud services, however, are helping to mitigate many of the challenges of traditional VDI implementations. Cloud based virtual desktops deliver benefits around centralized management and simplified deployment without the high costs, limitations, or difficulties of VDI.

Bare metal recovery (BMR), restoring a machine with no requirement for operating systems or software to be present beforehand, isn't always seen as a reliable technique.

To look at how successful it really is, cloud backup and disaster recovery specialist Zetta.net has released the results of a survey looking at companies’ real world experience of BMR.