Articles about Cloud

One of the main reasons businesses move their systems to the cloud is to save money. Where business communications are concerned the savings can be significant but can lead to having yet another separate platform.

Now though business communications specialist RingCentral is announcing the integration of RingCentral Office with Microsoft Office 365. This blends RingCentral's cloud business phone system with Microsoft's cloud productivity work environment, giving joint customers a powerful solution.

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Businesses turn to the cloud in search of efficiency and cost savings, so being able to measure how successful a strategy is at these aims is important.

A survey by hybrid financial management provider Cloud Cruiser shows that 72 percent of respondents indicated that tracking cloud usage and costs is extremely or very important to their IT function.

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Well, July 15th is behind us and Amazon's promise of deals bigger than Black Friday. If you were looking for Christmas in July, did you get it? I wasn't that impressed with the selection of Lightning Deals and exclusives, but perhaps you were. Or not. My purchase, and call me crazy (some commenter usually does): I plunked down $143.86 for two years of Kindle Unlimited, saving 40 percent off the $9.99 for each of 24 months. The bookstore will become my personal library of sorts. There are many books I would read and reference for my professional writing but not necessarily buy.

Briefly, Amazon offered the 32GB Nexus 6 for $399 and Echo for $129—that's $50 off. The smartphone sold out quick at that price but still remained available for $499 the rest of the day. The other device built up a waitlist before finally being closed out. The 6-inch Kindle sold for $49, discounted from $79, and was still available as Midnight approached here on the West Coast (where I live; BetaNews offices are Eastern Time).

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As businesses move towards cloud and hybrid environments, providing real-time access to digital assets from anywhere and on any device becomes more of a challenge.

Integration solutions company Jitterbit is launching a new Harmony Live! cloud platform that lets companies quickly design, orchestrate and manage real-time APIs. This allows the connection of thousands of B2B, consumer and mobile apps, as well as smart devices and the Internet of Things.

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For a long time, Google Cloud Platform has been a Linux-only affair. Now that has changed. Recognizing that many of its customers work in mixed platform environments, Google has added Windows Server support into the mix.

Specifically, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2 are now supported, after seven months of beta support. During the beta period, Google made a number of Windows-specific tweaks to the Compute Engine virtualization stack.

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This week is a big one for Microsoft and its Azure cloud platform, with major updates coming through before its Worldwide Partner Conference. The updates introduce a raft of juicy new features, including Azure Data Catalog and Power BI Desktop.

Azure Data Catalog is actually available in public preview today, and Microsoft describes it as an enterprise metadata portal for the self-discovery of data sources.

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I remember working on an IT helpdesk, responsible for managing technical and administrative issues for multiple large-scale sites. The particular network I worked on was especially large, with desktops, Exchange servers, etc., and the resources to potentially maintain the work flow of sites and keep our clients satisfied. The keyword here is 'potentially', as sites experienced network outages at a rate well beyond reasonable.

When receiving call after call and listening to every voice, no matter how stoic or exasperated, I quickly picked up on a common tone. I heard dissatisfaction, disappointment, a loss of trust and confidence. Not only was I realizing the failure of a system, but also the permanent damage to the reputation of the IT firm that I represented, its purpose to be keeping our clients working.

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Google and Microsoft are the two big players in the cloud office suite market. But what do the customers of each look like and how are they implementing and using the software?

Cloud management specialist BetterCloud has released the results of a survey of 1,500 IT professionals looking at customers of both systems, the age and size of their companies, cost-savings for each, and when companies will achieve 100 percent cloud use.

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With the increased threat of data loss from security breaches or system failures, many enterprises are turning to cloud solutions to look after their information.

Backup specialist Acronis is keen to take a slice of this market with the launch of its Acronis Data Protection Platform. This is a cloud platform that seeks to transform the way data protection is delivered to end-user customers by service providers, resellers and distributors.

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You might think that by moving applications to the cloud your data is automatically protected and worrying about backups is a thing of the past.

But just storing and processing data in Office 365 or Salesforce doesn't guard against user errors like accidentally deleting files. To offer extra peace of mind, backup specialist KeepItSafe is launching a new Cloud2Cloud service to protect data in SaaS applications.

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Thanks to the wide availability of fast connections, online video is no longer confined to the likes of YouTube but crops up on all kinds of websites.

This presents a challenge for the developers who need to maintain those sites but a new solution from online image management specialist Cloudinary is set to make life easier.

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Big data can provide many benefits for businesses, but the complexities of dealing with systems like Hadoop can make it expensive and time consuming to roll out projects.

California-based Kyvos Insights is launching a new product specifically designed for big data that enables business users to easily and quickly derive powerful insights from their data for more informed decision-making, with no programming required.

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Thanks to the Internet of Things and the growth in the use of mobile devices, network traffic is growing faster than ever. But the tools used to manage and monitor that traffic haven’t kept pace.

Network visibility specialist Kentik (previously known as CloudHelix) is launching a SaaS platform to enable full visibility into networks of any size giving real-time, actionable insights into network traffic activity, DDoS attacks and peering efficiency.

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It's not uncommon for businesses to have multiple access points, whether on a single site or in multiple locations. This can lead to challenges when it comes to managing access and ensuring software and security are up to date.

To make life simpler NETGEAR is launching a software as a service platform called Business Central designed to provide small to mid-sized organizations with an affordable way to establish and manage key IT networking services and network devices.

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Google closed its own project hosting site, named Google Code, earlier this year, in a move that allowed GitHub and Bitbucket to become the dominant platforms. The move away from project hosting only lasted a few months, with a new place called Cloud Source Repositories now available on the Google Cloud Platform.

Part of Google’s ever growing line of services on the cloud platform, Cloud Source Repositories allows users and teams to upload, build and deploy applications for the web and mobile.

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