A recent Gartner study states that the function of the modern CIO is in flux and that his or her future focus must incorporate digital assets (aka cloud-based data and applications) to remain relevant. Towards the goal of riding the sea change a compiler of stacks to a broker of business needs, security from the cloud is used as the example of this new prioritization and strategic thinking.

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We are all familiar with collaboration in a local area network (LAN) environment, which was fulfilled by a Windows File Server or some device that provides a network share. This is a device in the office that people can all map a network drive to the

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Companies around the world are collecting massive amounts of data everyday that’s sitting around and not being utilized. Take for example the fact that companies collect demographic and location-based data via mobile devices all the time, but have to figure out how to monetize that data. In this session, Joyent CTO and founder Jason Hoffman will examine the state of Big Data, taking a look at what we’re doing now to discussing what’s on the horizon, as companies prepare and realign their business strategies for new streams of revenue.

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Cloud, SaaS, Big Data, Fast Data, NoSQL, PaaS…while this economy cannot produce jobs, it can definitely produce jargon at the speed of light.

As a tech-savvy business person who is not an engineer, I’m always trying to figure out how these new technologies and trends help my customers.

So when I had the opportunity to work on a press release announcing ServiceSource as a MongoDB customer, I wanted to understand the value for my market. Even though MongoDB sounds like something you’d see in the X Games, I knew it must be a differentiator for our business.

I went to the MongoDB website and found “MongoDB in a Nutshell.” When I clicked on it, this is what I saw

"name" : "mongo",
"type" : "db",
"doc_links" : {
        "installation" : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation/",
        "tutorial"     : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/getting-started/",
        "reference"    : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/"
},
versions ...

Cloud, SaaS, Big Data, Fast Data, NoSQL, PaaS…while this economy cannot produce jobs, it can definitely produce jargon at the speed of light.

As a tech-savvy business person who is not an engineer, I’m always trying to figure out how these new technologies and trends help my customers.

So when I had the opportunity to work on a press release announcing ServiceSource as a MongoDB customer, I wanted to understand the value for my market. Even though MongoDB sounds like something you’d see in the X Games, I knew it must be a differentiator for our business.

I went to the MongoDB website and found “MongoDB in a Nutshell.” When I clicked on it, this is what I saw

"name" : "mongo",
"type" : "db",
"doc_links" : {
        "installation" : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation/",
        "tutorial"     : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/getting-started/",
        "reference"    : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/"
},
versions ...

On Wednesday, Google held its annual developer-focused conference, Google I/O, in San Francisco, California. As expected, the tech giant made tons of big announcements, highlighting updates to existing products and showcasing new programs and hardware. All of the conference’s biggest announcements have been highlighted on this site already, but if you’re looking for a greatest…

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Email management provider Mimecast has experienced a UK-based outage due to a hardware network failure today, with customers being temporarily unable to send or receive emails.

The first reports of irregularity occurred at approximately 1100GMT, with Mimecast acknowledging the problem at 1215.

Around forty minutes later, the company further tweeted that a fix was on the way purportedly on a tower-by-tower basis, with the majority of servers back up and running at the time of printing.

Yet the outage itself does not explain the full story. Mimecast, for better or worse, promises a 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA) – which now is torn to shreds after today’s unfortunate difficulties.

To rub further salt into the wound, a blog post dated May 8 from Orlando Scott-Cowley concerning Postini Services notes: “Any downtime can be expensive and disruptive.

“That is why Mimecast offers a 100% uptime SLA to our customers, because …

You’ve adopted the cloud, got a high level of storage and moved a lot of apps in – but you’re still not getting as much work done as you thought.

That’s the alarming case with more than half of respondents to an Oracle-conducted survey entitled ‘Cloud for Business Managers: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.

54% of the 1355 executives polled said that they had suffered staff downtime as a result of difficulties with cloud integration. In terms of specific numbers, this amounted to 11 downtime situations per department surveyed in the last six months. Struggling cloud integration also affects departments which don’t even use cloud apps, the research found.

Similarly, 54% of respondents also said that deadlines had been missed during the past six months “due to a lack of cloud data being shared effectively around the organisation”. Whether cloud technology can actually be blamed …

Legos have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest, fondest memories involve Legos – starting from a small car made from a couple of simple bricks to very complex spaceships and wild creatures. I’m always amazed at how nicely and cleanly they snap together to create something solid, functional, and – in the case of the Millennium Falcon – amazing. Let’s be honest, I’m not the only one occasionally sneaking down Target’s Lego aisle to discover what new theme they’ve cooked up from the same core concept: clicking bricks together.
It’s magical what happens to the brain when snapping those colorful, simple blocks into place. Visions of larger, cooler creations are conjured and we find ourselves scrambling for additional blocks to connect to create something that has a whole new purpose or function.

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“Trust is an ongoing journey and sits at the foundation of any vendor relationship – the companies that don’t consistently earn trust won’t be around long,” noted Henrik Rosendahl, Senior VP of Cloud Solutions at Quantum, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “As they do more with cloud, trust will organically grow – maybe it’s just about meeting SLAs or seeing firsthand that data is there when you need it,” Rosendahl continued.
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?
Henrik Rosendahl: I believe it is actually both. Time is money, as they say. I typically think in terms of efficiency, which encompasses economics as well as the positive impact on administrative workflows. This is certainly true when we talk about cloud-based backup as a service (BaaS). Typically with BaaS customers, the first question is “How much is this going to cost?” Monthly costs are primarily capacity-driven – store more, pay more; however, you don’t have to buy future capacity that’s not being used for a while so in that sense you save a lot of money. Cloud-based backup and archive solutions enable companies to reduce or eliminate tape, as well as realize the promise of true business continuity. Another benefit of cloud-based solutions, particularly when it comes to backup, is in paying only for the capacity you immediately need, with the ability to scale up as needed, and convert CAPEX to OPEX, which is an important element of flexibility.

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