Articles about Cloud

When it comes to the cloud and Amazon Web Services, IT administrators often buy far more than they need and fail to adjust to realities once they have a good understanding of their deployment's needs. These are the findings of Cloudyn, a cloud cost management provider.

Cloudyn estimates that some cloud adopters are wasting on average 40 percent of their annual expense on AWS resources they don't use. The reasons why vary: resources are often over-allocated, instances are left running after they are no longer needed, or even failing to take advantage of Amazon's own cost-cutting offerings.

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Google is the go-to search engine for most people, so the existence of a dedicated mobile app should come as no surprise. There has been a tool available for iOS for some time but the release of Google Search 2.0 sees the introduction of a completely redesigned app that not only boasts a new interface and new features, at least if you have an iPhone, but also easier access to other Google searches such as Gmail, Docs and Calendar.

As before, it is possible to conduct searches by typing, using your voice or taking a photo with your camera and using Google Goggles. There have been improvements made to the speed of autocomplete suggestions  so you should find that results are available faster than ever and you can take advantage of a preview pane that slides in from the side to view individual page results. Switching between search results and pages takes nothing more than a swipe, and this gesture can also be used to switch search modes, such as moving between a standard search and an image search.

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Enterprise cloud-based file sharing service Box strengthened its offering on Thursday, announcing new features that will simplify management for IT administrators. The new functionality allows for greater control over security, and the ability to enable enterprise-wide search.

The company also debuted new pricing structures that enable larger companies to adopt its services with more predictable pricing. This is a move away from the traditional per-seat model of the past, and makes cloud storage more cost-effective for large enterprises.

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HP released better than expected results after the close of the markets Wednesday, and the company overall shows signs of a long-awaited turnaround. But the big story tonight surrounds the 27,000 workers who will lose their jobs as part of a "multi-year" restructuring plan announced by CEO Meg Whitman.

The cuts amount to about eight percent of the workforce and are expected to save HP between $3 and $3.5 billion annually by 2015. It will be phased in gradually though 2014, and involves an early retirement package to be offered by the company. In a conference call with analysts, Whitman described the quarter's results as positive, but added "we have a lot of work to do".

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We all now communicate with people through so many channels that it is often difficult to put names to faces. You may know someone on Twitter and Facebook but when you receive an email from them you do not necessary make a connection between the two. This is where Rapportive can help, by providing you with extended information about the contacts you receive emails from in your Gmail inbox.

Rapportive is available as a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and appears as a right-hand side panel whenever you look at individual emails. The extension pulls in information from social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and more to provide you with a more detailed profile of your contacts, and by connecting the service with your social networking accounts you can build up even more detailed information.

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A day after competitor SAP acquired Ariba to bolster its cloud portfolio, Oracle announced a significant buy of its own, acquiring cloud-based social, marketing company Vitrue on Wednesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although TechCrunch reports it was worth some $300 million.

Oracle's purchase of Vitrue gives the Redwood Shores, Calif. company a foothold in the social CRM segment, an initiative Gartner says companies will spend some $2.1 billion on this year alone. With the rise of social networks, companies need methods to quantify the results of their social marketing. Virtue's platform allows customers to "centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns and activities", Oracle says.

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When you’re manually hunting for malware on a PC then you might start by launching Task Manager, Process Explorer, Process Hacker or a similar tool to see exactly what’s running. But these programs generally won’t directly tell you which processes are safe, and which might be dubious: you’ll have to look at what they’re doing and try to figure this out for yourself.

If this seems a little too much like hard work, though (or you’d just like some pointers to tell you where to look first), then you might be interested in System Security Guard, a very simple tool which can check your running processes for known threats.

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SAP made a major play for the cloud Tuesday as its American arm announced acquisition of Ariba, a German cloud computing applications maker. The transaction is worth some $4.3 billion, and is expected to close this summer.

Ariba is the world's second largest-cloud vendor by revenue, SAP says. With the addition of the German company, SAP now looks to challenge rival Oracle, which also has made a play for the cloud segment as of late.

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More than half of all software acquired by IT in the next five years will be open source, according to a new study, and open source software (OSS) leads in the areas of cloud, big data, mobile apps and enterprise mobility.

"Taken together with applications like mobile and enabled by cloud, we are entering an exciting new era of 'Open Innovation on Demand,' where not only can OSS innovate faster, it can be deployed immediately and consumed as a service from the cloud", says Michael Skok, general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, one of the sponsors of the survey.

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With Facebook now public and sitting on a huge pile of cash, let’s turn the conversation to the social network’s most pressing competitor, Google. Google and Google+ don’t appear to present much of a threat to Facebook, but the game board was reset on Friday and tactics at both companies will change accordingly. Now Facebook has to find a way to grow revenue and users and will increasingly bump up against Google’s huge advantages in search and apps. For Facebook to achieve its goals, the company will have to enter both spaces with gusto.

Google has learned how to leverage its strengths and suddenly one of those strengths is Facebook’s success. Now that Facebook is a $100 billion company, it doesn’t hurt Google to be number two in that space. Who else is? Pinterest? Instagram? Twitter? None of those services offer a full-fledged social network for those who do want a Facebook alternative, and some people will.

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Code sharing site GitHub announced a client for Windows on Monday, aimed at making it easier to search for code on the platform. The move is an obvious nod to Microsoft's dominance in computing, and done more out of necessity than anything.

GitHub is built on top of the command line Git application, and has quickly begun to change the way software is developed. It makes the process of managing an open-source project a whole lot easier, and allows work on code by many developers versus a few "gatekeepers" who control what gets into daily builds.

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I'm not the biggest Gmail fan. Sure, I use the service, but my inbox fills up too fast, and managing the madness is measured procrastination. Email in general is the problem; Google's service is simply easy to blame. But a new enhancement coming in days has me finally ready to adapt behavior to attitude -- and stop being the email file clerk.

Google is in process of adding nifty contextual, autocomplete capabilities to Gmail -- that is if you find this kind of soothsaying useful. I confess to making more typing errors when Google search autocomplete tries to anticipate my thoughts. Mind reader it is not enough, so what good is all that information Google supposedly collects about us all? :) As for Gmail, the new autocomplete starts with what you've got.

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First in a series. Many IT professionals know how difficult major technology purchases can be. Projects like picking a new CMS system, selecting a data center or replacing helpdesk software are relatively infrequent. This means employees are not well-practiced with determining and organizing requirements or the product selection process.

They are often biased towards those products they already know, and may not be familiar with some others competing in that market segment. Throw aggressive sales people and tight deadlines into the mix and you have the recipe for a technology purchase that is decidedly not optimized for the business.

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Surely it can't be this one, but that's what StatCounter's weekly report would have you believe. Can it be true? Has IE really fallen so low and Chrome come so far? That's my question for you, as we revive our browser usage poll.

For the week May 14-20, IE global usage share is 31.94 percent compared to 32.76 percent for Chrome. This change in leadership comes after a May 1 methodology adjustment that should penalize Chrome. Google's browser pre-renders pages to speed up search, but not all are viewed. StatCounter now adjusts for them. I must say that StatCounter's data dramatically differs from Net Applications', which on May 1 put Chrome third to Firefox and IE usage about three times more.

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Halfway through May and the software release schedule shows no sign of abating, and beta releases stand out over the past week. Some of the biggest releases come from security experts Norton, which updated 2013 public betas. Norton AntiVirus 2013 v20.0.0.106 beta, Norton Internet Security 2013 v20.0.0.106 beta and Norton 360 2013 v20.0.0.106 beta provide an early look at what to expect from the upcoming security line, and all of these tools are free during the beta testing period.

But Norton is far from the only name in the security world, and ESET Smart Security 6 Beta (32-bit) includes not only antivirus protection but a firewall and interesting anti-theft features for laptop users; there’s also a 64-bit version of the program available -- ESET Smart Security 6 Beta (64-bit).

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