Articles about Cloud

IBM and Box have announced a global partnership that aims to transform work in the cloud by integrating existing products and services to develop new solutions for a range of industries and professions.

Box will combine its collaboration platform with IBM’s extensive portfolio of solutions in security, analytics, content management and social capabilities to partner in three key areas:

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Whether you’re the CIO of a large corporation or run your own enterprise, it’s imperative that you understand the benefits, as well as the inevitability, of data center migrations. Migrations advance business practices by creating greater tactical efficiencies, agility and by reducing costs. Because they provide such great opportunities, migration plans are often high on the list of strategic projects for CIOs, IT managers and other managers involved in corporate plans.

However, despite the hype, companies need to understand that data center migrations are among the riskiest and most complex undertakings an enterprise can pursue.

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As my colleague Manish Singh reports overnight, Apple reversed course and now plans to compensate artists for the first three months of music streaming. It's time to ask: Were the whiners grandstanding or sincere? The question mainly is meant for Taylor Swift, whose Father's Day Tumblr post seems to have brought, eh, swift response to the—what I call—"play for no-pay" plan.

The company unveiled Apple Music during the World Wide Developer Conference on June 8. The streaming service will be free to subscribers for the first three months, with Apple initially choosing not to make royalty payments to artists. I condemned the ridiculous strategy last week. The company sits on a nearly $200 billion cash horde, and content creators are among its most loyal customers. Stiffing them makes no sense from several different perspectives, with good public relations being one and expressing thanks to artist customers being another.

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For a company that generates more profits than any other ($18 billion during fiscal first quarter 2015), sits on a cash horde of nearly $200 billion, and has the gall to charge $150 for a watchband, stinginess is an unbecoming trait. Scratch that. Greediness. Putting profits before people, particularly devoted customers, when corporate advertising is all about how they matter more, is simply stupid public relations. In business, perception is everything.

So Apple's reported decision to give away music for three months, without compensating artists, is cheapskates behavior that demands criticism -- particularly about a company claiming that music means so much. Speaking to developers last week, CEO Tim Cook: "We love music, and music is such an important part of our lives and our culture". Oh yeah? If it's so important, why diminish its value? To zero. "We've had a long relationship with music at Apple". For how much longer without artists' cooperation? You don't own the content, Mr. Cook.

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Modern businesses invariably have access to lots of data, but deriving simple straightforward insights from that can be difficult, especially if it's stored across multiple applications or extracted from the web.

SaaS analytics provider FirstRain is unveiling a new analytics platform that lets enterprise customers deliver business-critical and actionable insights to departments, teams and individuals.

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Dropbox is no longer the only non-Microsoft cloud storage service that integrates with Office Online, as enterprise-focused rival Box now also makes this feature available to its customers, taking advantage of Office 365 -- Cloud Storage Partner Program. Box already integrates with Office mobile, allowing smartphone and tablet users to easily create and edit Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents that are stored on its servers.

It is a win-win for both companies. Box gets to give its customers easy access to one of the best online office suites around and become more attractive to potential customers, while Microsoft gains more Office Online, and potentially more Office 365, users in the process. Let's see what this integration brings to the table.

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Increasingly mobile workforces have led to a loss of data control. Information on laptops and smart phones as well as within multiple cloud applications means increased risk of company data loss and the inability to track, hold or monitor data for regulatory compliance and legal obligations.

Data protection specialist Druva is announcing Microsoft Office 365 integration of its InSync product, offering a centralized conduit for enterprises to manage this dispersed data.

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With distributed networks, virtual servers and the cloud, corporate data is increasingly stored in lots of different places, making backup and business continuity more of a challenge.

Following its acquisition of Backupify in December last year, backup and recovery specialist Datto is launching a range of new products and enhancements designed to protect data no matter where it resides -- across on-premise physical or virtual servers or in the cloud via SaaS applications.

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For some companies, bringing the internet to the entire world is an important part of giving people greater opportunities. Mark Zuckerberg has been pedalling Internet.org for some time now -- even if a lot of people don’t like the scheme -- and now there's a new kid on the block.

Airbus is due to start building more than 900 satellites for OneWeb, a company looking to bring highspeed internet access to billions of people all over the world. The aim is to offer 100 percent coverage of the globe, and there is a great focus on speed. Airbus is hoping to build more than one satellite per day and launch the first batch in 2018.

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Adobe has carved out a niche for itself as a provider of industry-standard tools for art and design; Photoshop is now so widely used that, like Google, it has become a verb. The company's Creative Cloud suite receives its annual update today, and as part of the update Adobe is also launching its own stock image service.

Adobe Stock is set to compete directly with the likes of Shutterstock and Getty images. Adobe already has something of a captive market. It is very well aware that the people who tend to use stock images are the same people who use Adobe software -- it just makes sense for the two worlds to collide.

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As data volumes grow managing them and being able to extract meaningful insights in a timely manner becomes more and more difficult, especially for small and medium businesses.

Latvian database-as-a-service (DBaaS) company Clusterpoint is looking to expand its innovative technology to developers and small to medium sized businesses in North America by opening a new server cluster in Dallas.

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Post-Snowden there is great interest in just what involvement the government has with technology firms. There are frequent requests from government agencies for information about users and the likes of Google, Snapchat, and even the NSA itself have all released transparency reports that reveal, in broad strokes, the number of requests for data they have received.

Amazon is the latest company to release a transparency report -- although the term really should be used in the loosest possible sense. The report includes scant details about the number of subpoenas, search warrants, court orders, and national security requests received in the first five months of 2015. The report is so vague as to be virtually meaningless.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is about to become a lot more environmentally friendly after announcing the construction of an 80 megawatt solar farm.

The green proposal will generate 170,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar power each year, the equivalent of approximately 15,000 US homes.

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Cloud management specialist BetterCloud has released the results of its latest survey into the pace of cloud adoption in businesses.

The survey of 1,500 IT professionals from 53 countries also looks at the differences in cloud office systems and their customers, the current and expected usage rates for cloud applications, and the effects of cloud office systems on productivity, collaboration, cost savings and more.

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I have some advice for the European Union Competition Commission: Lay off. You don't need to reign in the Google monopoly. Apple will correct the market around search and mobile. That's one of two related takeaways from Monday's WWDC 2015 keynote. iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan up Apple's push into search and proactively-delivered information in big ways. That is if delivery is as good as the company promises.

The other takeaway harkens back to what I told you last week about Tim Cook's piracy rant against unnamed Facebook and Google alongside the friggin U.S. government -- plural if thinking beyond the Feds: It's BS marketing. Apple prepares a major competitive assault against Big G, hitting where damage can be severe: Perception and profits. I cannot overstate Google's vulnerability, which ironically is where the search and information giant exploited Microsoft during this Century.

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