Cloud

Over the past few years the cloud has significantly changed the way all of us store data, and in many cases how we run software too.

But from an enterprise perspective what impact has the cloud had on traditional data centers, and how is it continuing to evolve? We spoke to Saviz Izadpanah, chief technology officer of HighQ -- which provides cloud collaboration and content publishing services to the world's leading law firms, corporate legal teams and banks -- to find out.

Wait until you hear what employees in Europe are using cloud services for. Oh, boy.

Blue Coat Systems has polled more than 3,000 workers in France, Germany and the UK, asking them about their cloud usage habits, and, as it turns out, some employees use such services (Dropbox, Box, Office 365, Slack, LinkedIn, Facebook, Gmail, etc.) to store data before starting a new job, for corporate espionage, whistle-blowing and even "personal protection".

With virtualized environments performance issues can be hard to pinpoint. IT departments can find it difficult to spot whether the cause is in the application, network, storage, or virtualization layer of the infrastructure.

Software optimization specialist SIOS is bringing machine learning to bear on this problem with the latest release of SIOS iQ, its analytics software for VM environments.

In the past there's tended to be a perception that running applications in the cloud is less secure than keeping them in-house.

However, a new study by data protection company Bitglass suggests that this view is changing as cloud apps mature. 52 percent of organizations are now confident that cloud apps are as secure as premises-based apps, up from 40 percent a year ago.

Microsoft is preparing to increase its commitment to the open-source Apache Spark big-data processing engine this week at the Spark Summit in San Francisco.

At the summit, officials from Microsoft will be offering further insight into its support for Spark with the company’s HDInsight, Cortana Intelligence Suite, Power BI and Microsoft R Server.

My oldest Internet ID, three letters, is vintage 1996. Yahoo's impending demise, which could be to Verizon, almost certainly will mark the end of our long relationship. We mutually will abandon one another. I'm sorry that it comes to this.

Yahoo sealed its fate when cutting the deal to outsource search to Microsoft during summer 2009. The disaster I predicted then will soon end the iconic brand, what little remains of it. Many people will blame CEO Marissa Mayer, but she was but steward of the sinking ship. Doom was a certainty after Yahoo surrendered crown jewel search. That the company limped along for another 7 years is testimony to the brand and to the services infrastructure built around it.

The software-defined data center is gaining widespread adoption across a range of industries according to a new report.

The survey of 500 industry executives by security controls specialist HyTrust finds that many areas of operation including mission critical systems are now moving to a virtualized delivery model.

Salesforce has announced that it has agreed to purchase enterprise cloud commerce solutions provider Demandware in a $2.8 billion cash deal.

Salesforce will commence a tender offer for all outstanding shares of Demandware -- which boasts the likes of L’Oreal and Marks & Spencer as customers -- for $75.00 a share, with the transaction expected to close at the end of July 2016.

Microsoft has today announced a new department designed to invest into disruptive start-ups in their early phases.

The department, led by Nagraj Kashyap (corporate vice president) and executive vice president of business development Peggy Johnson, holds the name Microsoft Ventures.

Iron Man. Captain America. IT administrator. Yes, you read that correctly. As organizations make their shift to cloud computing technologies, including Microsoft Azure and Office 365, IT admins can be crucial -- but often overlooked -- assets.

These superheroes of the technology world can save their organization from technological chaos, stop compliance issues in their tracks, and spread their technical knowledge for the good of the organization. So how can admins prove their worth in the rise of the cloud?

Citrix and Microsoft announced recently that they will be expanding their partnership. More precisely, Citrix will use Microsoft’s Azure as its cloud.

Besides Azure, they will also integrate Citrix XenMobile and NetScaler into Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite.

A new survey by cloud analytics company Cloud Cruiser and Dimensional Research shows that the top challenge with public cloud consumption is the ability to proactively manage usage and costs across the business.

The survey among almost 200 professionals who attended the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Global Summit in April also reveals that nearly one third of organizations are doing nothing to track, manage and allocate cloud consumption costs.

Having a good password can make the difference between your account being hacked and receiving a notification informing you of a failed login attempt. Even though this should be common knowledge, it seems that many folks are in the dark about this. You do not need to look hard to find evidence of this, as there are many reports that reveal passwords like "1234567890" to be very popular still.

Since it is clear that it cannot rely on its users to make the right decisions about their account security, Microsoft is taking a proactive approach by "dynamically banning commonly used passwords". So, if you think that "qwerty123" is good enough to keep all your emails private, luckily you will not have to find out whether you are right or not.

Disaster recovery solutions have usually been a fixed cost for business, involving paying for a fixed amount of storage whether you actually used it or not.

Data protection specialist Druva is launching new usage-based pricing for its Phoenix public cloud solution for backup, archive and disaster recovery. There are no additional hardware or software costs and enterprises will now pay only for the actual storage they consume.

Another confirmation of the heading IT departments are taking this year comes to us from tech giants Toshiba. After an extensive research into business practices in IT departments across Europe, it was found that cloud-based solutions (56 percent) and data security (50 percent) remain the biggest areas of investment for IT departments in the country this year.

The research shows results of a poll of 400 senior IT decision makers in the UK, France and Germany.