Cloud technology specialist NewVoiceMedia has released the results of a survey showing that customers using its cloud services are growing at 13 times the international average.

The study carried out in July 2015, based on the publicly available revenue data of a sample of 300 UK and US businesses from the last two years, showed that NewVoiceMedia cloud users increased revenues by an average of 44 percent in the last financial year, compared with global economic growth of 3.5 percent.

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Whilst moving systems to the cloud can deliver savings in costs and efficiency, it presents new challenges in terms of managing systems and data.

With the launch of its Universal Cloud Appliance, California-based RightScale is aiming to deliver the self-service access that cloud users demand and give IT teams visibility and control over any cloud, any virtual machine, or any server through a single pane of glass.

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One person's spam is another's feast, depending on who is giver or receiver. That's one way to read new capabilities coming to Gmail on Android and the web. The first, available starting today on PCs and arriving on Android devices over the next week, lets users block designated email addresses. Google describes "block", but the feature is more of an easy-and-quick filter that dumps unfriendly senders into the spam folder.

For either platform, you click the dropdown options menu to the right of the email address, and block appears as an option. Unsubscribe already is available from personal computers but is new to Android. For example, in the desktop browser, marking listserver messages as spam solicits the user to unsubscribe. The feature also will roll out over the next week to Android. 

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On Sept. 16, 2015, Apple released iOS 9, which enables users of iPad and iPhone to disable ads. The company claims the capability improves the overall user experience. As someone covering the tech industry for more than two decades, I perceive it as something else, too: Competitive assault against Google and means of pushing publishers to iOS 9's new News app. There is nothing friendly about Apple's maneuver. It is aggressive and tactical. But does it really matter?

Stated simply: More than 90 percent of Google revenue comes from contextual and search-related advertising. Apple derives about the same figure from selling devices and supporting services. At the same time, mobile is the future of Internet advertising and the battleground where the two meet. The entities' respective mobile platforms, Android and iOS, long ago put the tech titans on a collision course. Conceptually, what Apple can't gain from iPad and iPhone sales, it can take by shaking pillars supporting its rival's business.

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The growth of cloud and hybrid environments brings challenges for security professionals when it comes to control, monitoring, and management of access to critical systems by privileged users and third-party vendors.

A new solution from secure access specialist Bomgar allows companies to quickly enable controlled system access and defend against cyber attacks without requiring complex process changes.

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The introduction of as-a-service delivery models is affecting the way companies operate as they increasingly buy services to supplement their existing systems.

A new report by consultancy firm Accenture looks at how technologies such as cloud, automation, analytics, artificial intelligence and mobility have forever changed the way companies receive and deliver significant business value.

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Backup specialist Spanning will be using next week's Dreamforce '15 event to showcase the latest developments in its Saleforce backup solution.

Spanning Backup for Salesforce will now offer a European data center giving companies a choice of backup destination and aiding compliance with policies that specify data must be stored within the EU.

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Recent discoveries like Adult Player have brought ransomware back into the news, but it's not just individuals that are being targeted.

Data recovery specialist Kroll Ontrack says it's seeing a rise in ransomware attacks aimed at corporate virtual drives. Recently Bitcoin payment was demanded in exchange for stolen data with the threat of the user's information being auctioned off.

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Over a third of companies are planning to adopt a new file, sync and share (FSS) solution in the next year according to the findings of a new survey.

The study released by enterprise sharing specialist Connected Data shows that 21 percent of companies surveyed plan to make a change in their current FSS solution within the next year. It also finds that 13 percent of companies plan to adopt their first-ever FSS system within the next 12 months.

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Yesterday, I joined the 61 percent. The figure represents the people who, in a MusicWatch survey of 5,000, had turned off auto-renew on their free Apple Music trial, which for all ends September 30. Unless something really big comes out of this week's media event, where new iPhones could debut and iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan receive release dates, I will listen elsewhere. For now, I will stream higher-fidelity tracks from Tidal, and expand my musical horizons at services like SoundCloud.

Strange thing: I don't dislike Apple Music. Curated playlists are "frak me" good. Family pricing, $14.99 per month, is very reasonable. The library is voluminous; if I want to listen to it, Apple Music likely has it. Then there is the benefit of easy access to my own library of about 14,000 tracks alongside juicy fruit picked from the orchard.

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Business intelligence has traditionally relied on centralized data, an approach which is not only time consuming but also represents a barrier to end-user self-service.

Now cloud analytics specialist Birst is launching a new Networked BI technology which aims to redefine the way BI is delivered and consumed by enabling global control with local execution.

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In the modern world of virtual servers, infrastructure can be complex and changes come fast. This also means that the potential for change-related risk to applications is greater than ever before.

IT administrators don't always have the ability or time to study all the known or unknown configuration issues in their vSphere infrastructure. They can therefore struggle to understand whether changes -- intended or accidental -- result in performance disruptions and availability issues in waiting.

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Increasingly businesses are turning to the cloud or to hybrid solutions for their IT. But this can make it harder to track usage and keep control of costs.

Californian company Cloud Cruiser is launching a new CloudSmart-Now solution that allows customers to easily track hybrid cloud usage by user and keep an eye on costs with built-in analytics.

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The rapid growth in cloud adoption might suggest that every workload businesses currently have on-premise is destined for some sort of cloud-based service. The reality is that, other than for small companies, that's probably not the case.

Entrusting key applications to a third party requires intelligent planning in many areas such as management, portability, security and support requirements. What can IT organizations do to reduce risks, tame the complexity and increase their potential for success? We spoke to Jerry McLeod, vice president of business development at hybrid cloud management provider HotLink to find out.

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A pretty staggering amount of folks in the UK still don’t have a clue what some basic technology terms mean, such as the cloud, according to a new survey.

This research comes from telecoms outfit Daisy Group, which questioned British employees to find out how clued up they were on the subject of connectivity, and also subsequently surveyed some 1100 SME owners and managers in the UK.

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