IBM has announced a new big data service available on its app-store-esque IBM Cloud Marketplace from today, called IBM Navigator on Cloud.

The service, an IBM press release boasts, “is transforming how organisations engage with business content and make it more usable and interactive across the enterprise to deliver better results and improve decision making.” In plain English, this means employees can synchronise data and content across any browser, desktop and mobile device.

“IBM is fulfilling an unmet need in the marketplace by providing a new service that combines enterprise grade security, governance and integration with mobile and web apps that are easy to interact with and use,” said enterprise content management general manager Doug Hunt in a statement.

Navigator on Cloud is built on SoftLayer, and utilises enterprise content management (ECM), which theoretically gives employees that consumerisation-of-IT feel through file sharing without making any compromise on security. It’s …

Developers are continually upping the ante by creating better, smarter and more valuable apps. However, these apps also have increasingly sophisticated data requirements, and the ability to take them to the next level may be stymied by an archaic approach to databases in which developers are required to either make serious compromises about how they store and query their data, or learn to manage their own data infrastructure.

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ServiceNow this week launched its Eureka version of its online service management suite with new features aimed at letting non-technical folks build custom applications and process flows.
IT service management (ITSM) has long been a huge benefit to complex and exception-rich IT operations by helping to standardize, automate and apply a common system-of-record approach to tasks, incidents, assets, and workflows.
ServiceNow has been growing rapidly as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider of ITSM, but clearly sees a larger opportunity – making service creation, use, and management a benefit to nearly all workers for any number of business processes.
It’s one of those rare instances where IT has been more mature and methodological in solving complexity than many other traditional business functions. Indeed, siloed and disjointed «productivity applications» that require lots of manual effort have been a driver to bring service orientation to the average business process.

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As the cloud wars gain pace from the big vendors, customers are losing out due to overwhelming failure rates, according to new research from enterprise cloud infrastructure provider iland.

“Stories about successful cloud implementations are captivating, but the reality is that cloud is more complex than many news headlines make it out to be,” said EMA vice president Dennis Drogseth. “Companies must be self-aware.”

The research, of more than 400 professionals across three continents, found that respondents used on average three cloud vendors. Even though vendor lock-in is thankfully scarcer now than a few years ago, this lack of a pressing need for a single vendor indicates an ongoing effort to find the right cloud solution, according to iland.

Customers are suffering as a result of the cloud wars, the research asserts. The highest failure rates customers reported were by Rackspace (63%), followed by AWS (57%) and Microsoft Azure (44 …

“We are seeing a lot more of the enterprise class customers building a hybrid type solution as well as expanding into managed services,” explained Darryl S. Brown, VP Product Management & Marketing at Net Access, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 14th International Cloud Expo®, held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4–6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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What do a firewall and a fortress have in common? They are no longer strong enough to protect the valuables housed inside. Like the walls of an old fortress, the cracks in the firewall are allowing the bad guys to slip in – unannounced and unnoticed. By the time these thieves get in, the damage is already done and the network is already compromised. Intellectual property is easily slipped out the back door leaving no trace of forced entry. If we want to reign in on these cybercriminals, it’s high time we start thinking the way these thieves think. If we don’t, malware, rootkits, AETs and other nefarious threats will continue to undermine our sense of security.

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SOASTA on Tuesday announced complete native app support with mPulse, its award-winning Real User Monitoring (RUM) solution, which now delivers the first and only multi-dimensional views of actual user behavior whether on mobile web, web or native mobile applications. Using the same advanced touch-tracking technology as SOASTA’s TouchTest, mPulse records precise mobile user gestures and actions to monitor native Apple iOS and Google Android mobile applications. Best of all, native app monitoring is delivered instantly, without long delays waiting for app store approval or re-certification.

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SOASTA on Tuesday announced complete native app support with mPulse, its award-winning Real User Monitoring (RUM) solution, which now delivers the first and only multi-dimensional views of actual user behavior whether on mobile web, web or native mobile applications. Using the same advanced touch-tracking technology as SOASTA’s TouchTest, mPulse records precise mobile user gestures and actions to monitor native Apple iOS and Google Android mobile applications. Best of all, native app monitoring is delivered instantly, without long delays waiting for app store approval or re-certification.

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“Organizations take time to evolve. That’s why we’re bound for a hybrid future, where public and private clouds blend to create a shared infrastructure that spans application, organization and data center boundaries,” noted Esmeralda Swartz, CMO of MetraTech, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez.
Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers?

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Simon Taylor, Chairman and Co-founder, Next Generation Data

There isn’t much in the way of silver linings when clouds stop working, which they tend to do from time to time. While no doubt you will have put in place comprehensive service level agreements with your providers, these on their own cannot deliver maximum cloud cover.

In the end your cloud lives in a data centre or data centres which could be based anywhere – locally, on the other side of the country, in another country altogether. Unfortunately some of these aren’t always particularly secure or efficient and even the most diligent cloud provider cannot predict or prevent the consequences of data centre downtime caused by power outages, storm damage or security breaches.

Many cloud providers are also often reliant on third party data centres for hosting services being delivered to your business which can cause added complications. But in …