Gladinet Cloud was designed from scratch for team account, with many team users. As such, more and more team-oriented features are moving into the Gladinet Cloud as teams grow bigger and bigger within Gladinet Cloud.
In the past, there are two types of users, the administrator and the normal team user. Now there is a delegate administrator that can help administrator to setup team folder, manage users in the team and all these administrative works.
Monthly Archives: June 2012
Business-Side Dev: PaaS to the Rescue
I’ve recently written a bit about the job opportunities with PaaS taking over the software development world. One of the great promises of PaaS is the same as one of cloud’s big benefits – the illusion of infinite scalability and elasticity.
Configure a PaaS platform with a cloud infrastructure service (an IaaS) and you now have the ability to dream as big as you want, without having to pay for (or deploy manage) all the hardware and software you would normally need.
But what if you don’t want to dream infinitely big? What if you need to create a neat little business-side service and you are, in fact, a business-side person?
PaaS comes to the rescue here as well, with application platforms rather than integration platforms. Further, there is a distinction here between PaaS software for programmers and software built for the business side, which is visual in nature and uses a “metadata” approach to launch your neat little idea on the fly, as it were.
The irony is that business-side software development may be one of the keys to the kingdom in coming years. If the business side is able to execute its ideas without being bogged down (in its view) by IT and deploy on metered, third-party cloud infrastructures that also bypass IT, then the way we think of enterprise IT and the role of enterprise IT management may be altered, perhaps transformed, forever.
No reason to get carried away with this vision just yet. Security issues will always be waved as red flags by IT management, it may turn out that business-side people may unwittingly end up creating their own little app production departments (which they’ll have to manage), and the entire notion of business-side-driven IT is quite a different concept than simply business-driven IT.
But as I ponder PaaS, I can see that this is not a monolithic part of the computing landscape, not just a single type of cloud. I welcome tweets and emails about any and all business-side PaaS journeys that you’ve already embarked upon.
Making Hadoop Safe for ‘Clusterophobics’
Hadoop remains a difficult platform for most enterprises to master. For now skills are still hard to come by – both for data architect or engineer, and especially for data scientists. It still takes too much skill, tape, and baling wire to get a Hadoop cluster together. Not every enterprise is Google or Facebook, with armies of software engineers that they can throw at a problem. With some exceptions, most enterprises don’t deal with data on the scale of Google or Facebook either – but the bar is rising.
If 2011 was the year that the big IT data warehouse and analytic platform brand names discovered Hadoop, 2012 becomes the year where a tooling ecosystem starts emerging to make Hadoop more consumable for the enterprise. Let’s amend that – along with tools, Hadoop must also become a first-class citizen with enterprise IT infrastructure. Hadoop won’t cross over to the enterprise if it has to be treated as some special island. That means meshing with the practices and technology approaches that enterprises are using to manage their data centers or cloud deployments. Like SQL, data integration, virtualization, storage strategy, and so on.
The Other Futures of Enterprise IT
Between cloud computing, big data and consumer IT, executives feeling capable of making more of their own technology decisions. And with the ongoing business pressures for speed, agility and innovation, executives are eager to rethink and reinvent the IT department, according to a column in the Wall Street Journal.
“Planning the future of IT by projecting today’s technology trends into the future is at best naïve and at worst dangerously myopic. The future that technologists expect and want may not be the world that CIOs get. Shifting social, economic and political forces will influence what businesses will require from IT,” writes guest contributors Jeanne G. Harris and Allan E. Alter.
The article digs into issues faced by CIOs and some of the difficulties technologists face in an uncertain future.
Today’s technology transition is taking place at a moment of geopolitical, macroeconomic and legal uncertainty. Add the joker lurking in the deck – the potential downsides of our dependence on the Internet – and the uncertainty for enterprise IT grows even more, they wrote.
AWS Cuts Support Pricing
It must be getting competitive out there. Amazon Web Services has cut its support prices, expanded free support and added new support features like chat and proactive alerts.
Now all customers will automatically get free support and enterprise support will be based on usage rather than a flat fee, a potential cost saver.
Support levels have been renamed. Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum are now Basic, Developer, Business and Enterprise. All plans cover an unlimited number of cases and can be cancelled at any time. There are no long-term contracts. All plans are available worldwide.
The XaaS that Laid the Golden Eggs
Though expected as part of the enterprise transformation, we are seeing a much faster adoption of Business Process as a Service aka industry SaaS model into large and medium-sized enterprises.
We are seeing that most enterprises looking for cloud-based solutions for the new business process areas, while looking for options to migrate on-premise packaged software into their cloud equivalent.
The following players and their products have already marked their presence as a de-facto choice for many enterprises when they think of modernizing their existing IT operations. While some of these players call their offeringa mere SaaS (Software as a Service), they in fact cover end-to-end business process to be considered as BpaaS.
SYS-CON Events Announces Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley Venue
SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, the 11th International Cloud Expo, will take place November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world’s leading Cloud-focused event. Over 400 corporate sponsors and 20,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Expo since its inception, more than all other Cloud-related events put together.
“Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term ‘cloud computing’ was coined,” said Fuat Kircaali, founder and chairman of SYS-CON Events, Inc. “Cloud has become synonymous with ‘computing’ and ‘software’ in two short years, and this event has become the new PC Expo, Comdex, and InternetWorld of our decade. By 2012, more than 50,000 delegates per year will be attending Cloud Expo.”
An Agile and Revenue-Generating Approach to Cloud Services
Travel insurance provider Seven Corners went beyond the typical efficiency and cost conservation benefits of cloud to build innovative business services that generate whole new revenue streams.
I often hear that culture will trump strategy. It sounds as if in your organization — maybe because you’re an SMB and you can get the full buy-in of your leadership — you actually were able to make culture into the strategy?
Absolutely! By changing the culture and getting the departments out there to ask, “Is this stuff you’re doing going to help me with this problem?” “Well, yes, it will,” and then you deliver on that promise.
When you make a promise and you deliver on it, on or ahead of schedule and under budget people begin to believe, they’re willing to participate and actively suggest other possible uses with technology that maybe you didn’t think of. So you end up with a great technology-business relationship, which had the immediate result for the owners who were out looking to buy an insurance services application or rent one.
Humanizing IT with FortressITX VP of Managed Services, Louis Ardolino
What makes Louis great is his constant dedication to customer service and his unique understanding of the IT world. From virtualization, to full IT closet offload, private cloud solutions, to the FortressITX Hosted PBX and Exchange services, Louis has a great way of breaking down complex issues so anyone can understand them. Essentially, he is our go to guy for humanizing IT.
Dell Reportedly Offers $2.15 Billion for Quest
Quest Software said last Thursday that it got an acquisition offer worth about $2.15 billion from an unidentified “strategic bidder.”
Reuters claims the unidentified mystery bidder is Dell after talks to buy Quest broke down earlier.
The $25.50-a-share cash offer bests the $23 a share Quest accepted back in March from private equity house Insight Venture Partners. Insight has to sweeten its offer or let it go for a break-up fee of either $4.2 million or $6.3 million.
Wall Street punters pushed the stock up ~10% betting it could go for better than $26 a share. JP Morgan has said the company is worth $28 a share or around $2.36 billion.
Quest reportedly got several offers during the 60-day “go-shop” arrangement it struck with Insight to see if it could fetch a better price.