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Users of Dropbox can take advantage of 100GB of free OneDrive cloud storage though a Microsoft promotional deal.

This latest storage giveaway from Microsoft appears available for all, unlike the US-only Bing Rewards scheme announced earlier in February. Yet it’s an interesting play to get more users to sign up for OneDrive, which is already free and unlimited to Office 365 subscribers.

Dropbox users can verify they have an account by saving a PDF file entitled “Get Started With OneDrive” into their Dropbox folder.

The partnership between Dropbox and Microsoft, first announced in November, has been interesting to say the least. At the time, Dropbox’s perceived weaknesses in enterprise and mobile was addressed by moving in with Microsoft and gaining greater ground on Windows Mobile, with an updated version released earlier in February.

Previous announcements from either vendor were all relatively equal, yet this release certainly gives more power to Microsoft, which over the past 12 months has been ramping up access to OneDrive. It’s clearly part of CEO Satya Nadella’s strategy to give cloud storage to as many users as possible; as he put it in March 2014 when unveiling Office 365 for iPads: “Cloud that is not connected to devices is latent potential. A device which is not connected to the cloud just cannot complete the scenarios.”

The typical mindset, when comparing companies such as Microsoft handing out cloud storage like confetti, is to compare against the likes of Dropbox and Box, traditional standalone storage vendors. This isn’t the case now, of course, as Box has a litany of collaboration tools up its sleeve – Aaron Levie, the Box CEO, went as far to note that increasingly commoditised storage benefits his company’s infrastructure costs, calling it “one of the misunderstood dynamics” of his business.

The offer is limited to the first 10 million Dropbox users, and can be found here.

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Slowly but surely, capital markets and investment companies are clearly understanding the benefits of cloud computing, with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and data management as the most popular options.

That’s the verdict of a report from TABB Group, based on data from 66 buy-side and sell-side firms. The adoption figures are relatively low – only 23% of companies questioned say they’re comfortable using the public cloud, while two thirds said security concerns such as compliance, security and data control  worried them – yet six in 10 firms polled said they plan to increase spending on public cloud over the next 12 months.

Data management (23%) was most frequently cited by respondents as a key use case, followed by analytics (14%), algorithm development (14%) and regulatory reporting (8%).

Shagun Bali, TABB research analyst and author of the report ‘Public Cloud for Capital Markets: Trends and Uptake’, argues the report’s findings are a step in the right direction, if not a total paradigm shift.

“Although the market at large is still not ready to leverage the public cloud for mission-critical operations and proprietary data it considers competitive differentiators, institutions have opened up to the greater possibility of utilising the cloud to maintain commoditised operations in a cost-effective and timely manner,” she said.

The investment market is an interesting one – it can be put in a similar category to the legal profession, healthcare and financial institutions. All data sets are equal, but some are more equal than others; and it’s these professions which need to be a little more risk averse regarding where their data sits.

A January study from investment firm Piper Jaffray found general dissatisfaction among CIOs with their public cloud solutions, with Google taking the brunt of the criticism. 35% of those polled said security fears of public cloud was the primary reason for keeping data on-premise.

The full report, which will set you back $3,000, can be found here.

When implementing a cloud-based file-sharing solution, the user experience will play a major role in its adoption and overall success. It will be important for you to gather input from your employees and customers and regularly collect feedback to identify ways to better meet their needs.
Here are some questions to ask before implementing a cloud-based file-sharing solution.

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The cloud is now a fact of life but generating recurring revenues that are driven by solutions and services on a consumption model have been hard to implement, until now.
In their session at 16th Cloud Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, and Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia, will discuss how a top European telco has leveraged the innovative recurring revenue generating capability of the consumption cloud to enable a unique cloud monetization model to drive results.

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Business users can conjure new applications, send messages and share information around the world at the speed of light from their mobile devices. But just because they can, doesn’t mean they should – all this sharing and collaboration can have consequences on businesses’ security. Sending this content without consulting the IT department can bring ruin to the best laid plans of an entire organization. There, in the dark regions of Shadow IT lurk the evils of illegality, non-compliance, data loss, information leaks and content theft. For example, a doctor puts patient data on her tablet so she doesn’t have to carry a pile of charts on her rounds. The tablet is stolen and HIPPA regulators are not happy. A marketing guy puts a product roadmap presentation into a file sharing service that gets hacked and future product details are leaked to the press. A salesperson loses his computer bag at an industry conference and price lists and customer contact information are now in the hands of the competition.

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Connected cars will create new business models and provide opportunities for current businesses to greatly improve their service offerings.

Areas like targeted marketing, fleet management, event planning, city planning, insurance, and auto repair will benefit immensely from the data that connected cars will provide in the not too distant future.

Check out my latest post on Forbes to see how.

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Regardless of where you begin, it’s important to internalize the analogy that a DevOps transformation is a journey. “Adopting DevOps is not a ‘one-and-done’ project. It is adopting a mindset, a culture,” says Sanjeev, “It is a commitment to a journey of continuous improvement by adopting a set of capabilities and practices that are based on Lean principles.” That journey consists of a number of steps, or smaller transformations that each will serve to improve the flow of value through your develop/test/deploy process, and bring benefits to the business at each successive stage.

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Those watching federal cloud security in the defense space were pleased to learn the Defense DOD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (v1) (SRG) last month. This 152-page document outlines the security requirements that Department of Defense (DOD) mission owners must adhere to when procuring cloud-based services. While the document is very thorough and is required reading if you currently, or intend to provide, cloud-based services to the DOD, I wanted to cover some of the things that stood out to me.

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Peanut butter and jelly. Love and marriage. Horse and carriage. Coffee and cup. Batman and Robin. Some things just belong together. It’s even a little bit magical the way that certain things can be combined to form a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. That’s certainly true of the classic combo examples above. And it’s also true of the combo of Application Performance Monitoring and Application Analytics.
It’s a shame, then, that many of our customers deny themselves the power of combining APM with Application Analytics.

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I ran into an interesting problems with JavaFX. When the GUI is done in FXML it seems that if a scene has only shapes (e.g., Rectangle, Circle, etc.) the handler method doesn’t receive keyboard events. And the problem seems to be that there is no way (at least I don’t see it) to give a focus to such a scene. I found a workaround, but I’d appreciate if someone could offer a cleaner solution or confirm that this is a JavaFX bug.

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