Benefits Of Cloud Computing [Infographic]

Cloud Computing has been booming day by day and this technology has been adopted by Amazon, Google, Salesforce, IBM and many more companies. People prefer because it is available anywhere, anytime access to data. SaaS is totally a new concept which was introduced on cloud services. SaaS stands for Software As A Service. Instead of using software from desktop or server, use the third party software via this service on cloud platform. Following infographic explains what are the advantages of cloud computing and the concept of SaaS precisely.

By making the right choices for your cloud computing technology you stand to benefit from improvements in profitability, improved time to decision, improvements in complete and on-time delivery and reduction in downtime.

Source: TSG

Amazon Introduces Cheap Unlimited Cloud Storage Plans

Amazon is offering some amazing unlimited plans. Amazon Cloud Drive which is the most popular storage provider available worldwide. This eCommerce giant has launched two new plans - one plan with $5 a month and another one is less than $1 per month.

  

Let us know the highlights of the plans :

1. Unlimited Photos Plan : It comes with a free three-month trial and an $11.99 annual cost. It allows users to store “an infinite number of photos” in Cloud Drive, ignoring the need to store images on phones, cameras or other devices. The plan also includes 5 GB of additional storage for videos or other documents and files.

2. Unlimited Everything Plan : It comes with a free three-month trial, comes with a $59.99 per year bill. Users can store an unending number of photos, videos, files, documents, movies, and music in Cloud Drive.

Amazon Cloud Drive director Josh Petersen said “Most people have a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays, and everyday moments stored across numerous devices. And, they don’t know how many gigabytes of storage they need to back all of them up. With the two new plans we are introducing today, customers don’t need to worry about storage space — they now have an affordable, secure solution to store unlimited amounts of photos, videos, movies, music, and files in one convenient place.”

If you want more about the new plans, or to sign up, please click here.

Amazon Announces New WorkSpaces For Businesses

Amazon announced Wednesday it’s new WorkSpaces is available for businesses usage. There will be series of testing after this announcement.

Amazon WorkSpaces enables users to work from the cloud by connecting them to their virtual desktop. This cloud services works for PC, Mac, iPad and Android tablets. So users can access all of their applications whether they are in the office or outside or at home.

Peet’s Coffee & Tea, California-based company is one of 10,000 that signed up for the service.

They posted in their blog post about the Amazon's new service which is very much useful and flexible to use.

The post stated that “In order to support our growth, we had been looking at options to scale and support mobility of our desktop deployment across all channels including retail and corporate with cost reduction in hardware, software, and operational work. With Amazon WorkSpaces we will be able to reduce downtime, operational efforts, and our data center size, while achieving significant cost savings, getting the scalability and performance needed in alignment with compliance and security goals, and providing seamless experience to our employees.”

When it comes to cloud computing, the company Amazon has grown over the past few years massively. Lets hope this new service brings better user experience.

IBM Will Invest $1.2B Into Data Centers In 2014

IBM is now concentrating on its cloud space and willing to spend more than $1.2 billion this year to grow its global cloud footprint.

Senior vice-president of IBM Global Technology Services Erich Clementi said "IBM is continuing to invest in high growth areas. Last year, IBM made a big investment adding the $2 billion acquisition of SoftLayer to its existing high value cloud portfolio. Today’s announcement is another major step in driving a global expansion of IBM’s cloud footprint and helping clients drive transformation.”

This new cloud investments will provide business clients with the ability to place and control their data globally. IBM already spent around $2 billion to acquire SoftLayer Technologies Inc. which was the world’s largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider which obviously helped IBM in scoring better to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other cloud providers.

IBM started the cloud computing arena in 2007 and has spent more than $7 billion snapping up 15 smaller companies. After the acquisition, IBM’s data center count sat at 23. By the end of 2014, the company will have doubled that amount.

Microsoft Acquires Parature For $100M

Microsoft has acquired Cloud Customer Service Firm Parature Inc. in a bid to make Microsoft Dynamics’ vision of “helping organizations deliver amazing customer experiences” into effect in real.

Though the terms are not disclosed yet but it is being reported the purchase is costing $100 million.

Tricia Morris in a Parature blog post mentioned that “It all adds up. Microsoft + Parature = Amazing. We’re very excited to share this news with you as we head into the New Year. This acquisition will add world-class customer care capabilities to further accelerate Microsoft Dynamics’ vision to help organizations deliver amazing customer experiences, and bring together two companies dedicated to customer care and innovation.”

Microsoft declared that it will continue to offer Parature services and support all new and existing customers. Parature has 70 million users worldwide that include more than 500 well-known brands, including Ask.com, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, IBM, Saba Software Inc., Tagged Inc. and Threadless.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM corporate vice-president Bob Stutz mentioned “Customers are more connected and better informed than ever before. Organizations are looking for business solutions that can strengthen their ability to connect with customers on their own terms, using whatever device and whatever channel they prefer. Parature is a perfect fit for every business and will enable us to offer customers one of the best cloud-based solutions for customer self-service. This is a compelling combination for organizations committed to delivering the best service experience that consistently exceeds their customers’ expectations.”

How Cloud Services Help Business [Infographic]

Since several years Cloud Services have been helping small, mid and large businesses and it is still growing.

Here is an infographic which shows the how the cloud is disrupting the business landscape and the booming market for it.

Source : NowSourcing

Cloud Computing Boosts Businesses [Infographic]

With cloud computing, you eliminate those headaches because you’re not managing hardware and software—that’s the responsibility of an experienced vendor like salesforce.com. The shared infrastructure means it works like a utility: You only pay for what you need, upgrades are automatic, and scaling up or down is easy.

Cloud Computing has been adopted by businesses and it boosts improvements in IT performance. The below infographic which describes how the cloud computing technology changes the way of business.

Source: Standfordkaystudio

How Much The Cloud Has Grown [Infographic]

Gradually the cloud computing technology is spreading over business organizations for their IT infrastructure. Utilizing the cloud for many of your business data solutions will continue to be an attractive and perfectly reasonable option going forward. Yet it’s important to remember that cloud computing isn’t the end-all business solution that many of its proponents make it out to be. Thus, the decision to adopt cloud technology into your business model is one that should be made only after careful consideration has been given to the many benefits and security.

They are using the cloud and cloud apps more and more for reliability and easy access. Among public cloud providers, AWS maintains its lead, but Azure continues to make inroads in the percentage of respondents running applications as well as those who have plans to use it. Here is nice cloud infographic which explains how much the cloud has grown these days.

Source : Livehiveapp

Google Introduces Free Encryption to Cloud Storage Service

Already Google has made their reputation in the field of cloud storage service. Now it offers free security service to its cloud storage users. It is adding a free encryption to cloud storage. Google Cloud Storage product manager Dave Barth stated “There is no setup or configuration required, no need to modify the way you access the service and no visible performance impact. The data is automatically and transparently decrypted when read by an authorized user. If you require encryption for your data, this functionality frees you from the hassle and risk of managing your own encryption and decryption keys.”

Even if you have stored the files previously then also the files can be gradually encrypted and re-written to disk in coming days. Before writing to cloud storage you can encrypt your data. Google says “Commitment to evolve the security capabilities of our platform".

SurDoc Offers 100GB Of Free Storage

Several companies have come up with their exciting offer for cloud storage. We are talking about the brands which promotes free cloud storage facility. Now one more new entrant is there - SurDoc. It offers 100GB of free cloud storage for one year. It is literally an attractive offer for customer, where other competitors release space on cloud very less compared to SurDoc. Lets look into the competitors free offer :

1. Google Drive -> Offers 15 GB

2. SkyDrive -> Offers 7 GB

3. Dropbox -> Offers 2GB

4. SugarSync -> Offers 5GB

What About After One Year :

Once the 1 year promotional period is over, it will change a annual fee of $30. If you want to continue with SurDoc then you have to pay the amount. While browsing Google Play, we found an update from SurDoc which says "We believe that cloud storage should be free, just like e-mail. Free doesn't mean that we don’t take responsibility for your files. We know that you care about security and privacy, and that you don’t want anyone else being able to read your files. This is why our service is ultra-secure. We are the only company in the market that ensures that only you can access your files."

The patent protection is applied by TruPrivacy technology which is used to encrypt all files. Hope you will make a try for this service. We would welcome suggestions from users who are using it.

Guide To Cloud Apps [Infographic]

Veracode presents a nice vintage style study about the current state of cloud apps adoption as well as the critical points an IT manager should consider during the decision process of a buy.

Cloud applications are becoming more popular and prominent than ever and they aren’t going anywhere. Working in the cloud makes sense as it allows for greater efficiency and easier collaboration.

Source : Veracode Application Security

VMware Launches vFabric Suite 5.1

vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric applications on VMware cloud infrastructure and SQLFire Enterprise Edition, an in-memory distributed SQL database that will enable application data to meet cloud scale with the needed performances.

vFabric Suite leverages Spring development framework, inherited from SpringSource acquisition in 2009, vFabric application services and a per-VM licensing model to provide a comprehensive infrastructure oriented to the deployment of cloud-ready applications.

Part of this broader shift in application infrastructure was the move to cloud and application deployment on virtual infrastructure. Traditional application servers simply weren’t designed, optimized or licensed for this new world. These legacy systems are too cumbersome, too costly, and definitely not cloud-ready. We saw the need for a new breed of application infrastructure to support this new world of applications.

said Jerry Chen, vice president, Cloud and Application Services, VMware.

Here follows a quote of the original news:

The VMware vFabric Suite provides a complete set of runtime services to build, run and manage modern applications in distributed, cloud environments. The new capabilities in vFabric Suite 5.1 will allow customers to:

Automate application deployment for operational efficiency –To drive greater efficiency and better performance, vFabric Suite will include vFabric Application Director™ and vFabric Application Performance Manager. vFabric Application Director automates the deployment of applications through easy-to-use blueprints with standardized templates, component libraries and workflows. vFabric Application Performance Manager provides comprehensive monitoring of end-user transactions, Java code, middleware servers, and VMware vSphere hosts, enabling customers to proactively manage application performance, find and fix problems quickly, and meet SLAs.

Maximize data scalability – Many of today’s mobile and web-oriented applications must support highly variable access patterns, putting pressure on any database-only approach to data management. To support this evolution, in-memory databases have emerged as a standard component of the core technology stack developers use today. VMware vFabric SQLFireis an in-memory distributed SQL database built on the strength of vFabric GemFire®,which is used by many of the most demanding applications in the world. vFabric SQLFire delivers dynamic scalability and high performance for modern, data-intensive applications all accessible through a familiar SQL interface.

By pooling memory, CPU and network resources across a cluster of machines, vFabric SQLFire eliminates the main performance bottleneck in traditional databases – disk access. vFabric SQLFire can manage data across geographies, accelerating application performance, minimizing latency and increasing reliability. vFabric SQLFire Professional will be included in the vFabric Suite 5.1.

Reduce database total cost of ownership –To reduce database costs and increase agility vFabric Suite 5.1 will include vFabric Postgres, a VMware-optimized relational SQL database. vFabric Postgres is fully compatible with open source PostgreSQL, enabling customers to leverage existing standard PostgreSQL tools. vFabric Postgres comes in a virtual appliance and has virtualization optimizations such as elastic database memory to share database memory pools and smart configuration to reduce tuning time after resizing virtual machines.

Provide enterprise support for popular open source technologies – The VMware vFabric Suite 5.1 will include support for the open source runtime components most frequently used in production deployments of Spring applications, including Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server and RabbitMQ® messaging. This greatly simplifies the adoption path of vFabric technologies for those organizations using these open source components today.

“From the increasing number of programming languages used to the heterogeneous nature of today’s hybrid infrastructures, application development is changing quickly,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst with RedMonk. “Faced with such diversity, enterprises are increasingly turning to lightweight application containers to ease the pains of deployment.”

Social Computing Microsoft Cloud 2.0

As per the title and the whole idea of this site in general is that it maps vendor technologies to best practice programs. In this case how Microsoft offers tools for implementing Cloud 2.0.

FAST Social Computing

Using Microsoft for this type of Enterprise 2.0 working mode, is what they refer to as 'Social Computing'.

In their white paper People working together (13-page PDF) Microsoft describe how their ‘Information Worker’ product set (Office, Sharepoint, Unified Comms etc.) is ideal for what can be referred to as `Knowledge Process Management`.

In the case of Salesforce.com they`ve bought companies like Chatter, Rypple and Radian6 to add a `social layer` to their core CRM platform, so it will be a pound for pound comparison of these two main areas. With Microsoft the other main technology that will be incorporated comes from their 2008 acquisition of FAST, the enterprise search engine software start-up.

Hence the title, not only is social media intended to be quick and lightweight, but literally the inclusion of the FAST product is what makes the formula really successful. So I`ll mainly be focusing on what FAST can do and how it augments social media working practices.

Source : CloudBestPractices

Dropbox Website Redesigned – Adds Action Bar, Photo Viewer, Drag-and-Drop and More

Dropbox website undergone major design changes with the addition of action bar, photo viewer and new drag and drop and many other features. Anyone who signs into dropbox.com will see a simpler, more powerful, and more beautiful web experience.

Image Credit : Dropbox

A focus on the stuff you care about: Dropbox has slm down its website and focus on the star of the page: your stuff. Dropbox have put all the tools you need at your fingertips, but only when you need them. The new action bar at the top of the screen does it all. Think of it as a multi-tool that adjusts to your needs. You can use it to sort your files by name, date, size, and type. Or, if you select a file or folder, the bar will change to let you perform a variety of actions on your selection. A new right-click menu includes these actions as well.

Better photos experience: Dropbox have built in a simple and gorgeous photo viewer that lets you use your entire screen to view your pictures or videos. Dropbox also added thumbnails for image and video files (Photoshop and Illustrator too!) so you can get a preview of your stuff without needing to open or download it. This way, you’ll always know what IMG1234.JPG or view1.PSD actually looks like, and which video to share with grandma.

Faster, happier, more productive: It’s way faster and easier to get stuff done using the new site. New drag-and-drop makes moving stuff as easy as on your desktop. Dropbox have also replaced the checkboxes on the page with better multiple file selection (click-dragging works!). And for all you power users out there, dropbox have added keyboard shortcuts to make mouseless browsing a breeze — just hit ‘?’ for a full list. The newely leveled up Dropbox search, not only does it live right in the file browser, but it also instantly fetches results as you type.

Source : Dropbox

Cloud Privacy [Infographic]

A new infographic on cloud computing privacy outlines concerns with privacy in the cloud with Microsoft’s approach to addressing them – Transparency, Control, and Responsibility.

There’s much more on cloud computing privacy on the cloud computing section of our Privacy Site. Find the below infographic which describes the privacy in cloud and its transparency.

Source : Microsoft

Acer Announced AcerCloud - A Free Cloud Service

One more anytime anywhere web cloud service AcerCloud is going to be launched soon. This service will serve like other cloud services and can retrieve multimedia and data files anytime, even when their main PC is not at all connected to the cloud server. People can avail these features and their information is stored and transferred securely via strong encryption and authentication. Acer is going to provide AcerCloud service with it's available consumer PC.

Image Credit : Acer

Acer has enabled devices to communicate, simplifying the process of content sharing with ease. The number of smart digital devices are growing rapidly and obviously users need to share and back up their multimedia and data files in a simple and easy way.

AcerCloud does it very effectively make photos in mobile/gadgets and you can view them from anywhere without the delay and complication. You have the option to purchase a movie and then watch it on a tablet or in any gadgets. Acer Always Connect technology uses Wi-Fi so media can be retrieved via a mobile device. AcerCloud uses local and cloud storage together so all data is always available anytime and from anywhere.

The following are some other features of AcerCloud :

1. PicStream : You can take snapshots on mobile and back them up on the PC or laptop and share them efficiently with other smart devices. You can also stream photos via clear.fi in the Cloud to PCs and other devices. All the photos are backed up permanently on their PC, and temporarily accessible for 30 days in their personal cloud and on other devices.

2. AcerCloud Docs : You can put into the personal cloud and streamed to other devices. TWith the service you can then go to your meeting with your notebook or tablets and have immediate access to all the updated/uploaded files. In this case the files will be temporarily accessible for 30 days in the personal cloud and on the devices.

3. clear.fi Media : The unique clear.fi Media application of Acer has a lot of features which include - access all their multimedia at any time. Youcan use clear.fi to connect to the personal cloud and stream live, or download and see content offline too. Acer has come up with these easy, wonderful and free cloud media service.

How To Save Files To Cloud Services From Your Web Browser

We know the normal way to save files to cloud services or download from there. But how it would be if you can save files to multiple cloud services directly from the web browser. Yes, it is possible via an extension which can be installed to your web browser. By using this you don't need to download the file to your local disk and then upload it to the cloud storage service. Instead of doing this you can now directly save the file to multiple cloud storage.  In this way you can save a huge amount of internet bandwidth in downloading/uploading the files.

Image Credit : Chrome

Cloud Save - This is a Google Chrome extension which allows you to save files to multiple cloud storage services.

Some features of Google Chrome Extension are described below :

1. You can save any file format to the cloud storage service. Be it text, audio, video, documents or any other file format provided that it is the direct link to access that file.

2. You can upload images to your Picasa, Flickr web albums and lots of such online image storing and sharing services.

3. As Cloud Save supports multiple cloud storage services including Dropbox, SugarSync, Amazon Cloud, Box.net, SkyDrive and much more services so it enhances the support-ability with different cloud storage services. See the picture above.

How do you use it?

Follow the below simple steps to use it.

1. First you need to visit Google Chrome Web Store and install Cloud Save. (Click here)

2. Click on Cloud Save from the right click menu, and choose the desired cloud storage service where you want to save the file.

3. Allow access to the service to save the file. Make sure to access the file via the direct link.

Drag2up : Mozilla Firefox users can enjoy this service using this Add-on - Drag2up. (Click here)

You can save files to your cloud storage services from your web browser similarly what we found in Chrome.