Is Adobe embracing the cloud a sign of the times?

Recent headlines are full of companies moving towards SaaS (software as a service) models.

Many of these are perky start-ups utilising new opportunities, whilst others are high-profile players like Adobe, which has announced going forward that its “Creative Suite” products will exist solely in the cloud.

 

Adobe, at the annual “MAX” event, has completely re-branded the companies most well-known Creative products which consists of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Premiere Pro. Each will now gain a CC moniker (e.g. Photoshop CC) which represents “Creative Cloud”.

The blog post announcing the changes quotes: “As the world changes, so must the tools and services we use to create. This presents a unique opportunity to re-imagine the creative process.”

Interestingly, Adobe has also made the decision to kill off web-design tool ‘Fireworks’. The product was only used by a small subset of users, but very diehard fans.

Adobe says in a post …

TWD & Associates, IP Data Solutions Partner For Compliant Cloud-based eDiscovery

TWD & Associates, Inc. (TWD), a communication and collaboration solutions provider for the public sector, today announced it has partnered with IP Data Solutions (IPDS), a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business, to provide electronic discovery (eDiscovery) solutions for archived content systems.  Archived content, including legacy email and data files, are migrated to a secure, cloud-based environment with sophisticated, integrated software search tools, allowing users to quickly and easily locate documentation for litigation, research, Inspector General (IG),General Counsel, U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Congressional Budget Office (CBO) requests.

“Government agencies must comply with data retention and email archival legislation to ensure information is available and accessible,” said Larry Besterman, President and CEO, TWD.  “A normal eDiscovery process could require weeks to cull through existing archives.  Our solution allows a search to be performed in seconds.”

The eDiscovery solution works with customers’ current cloud strategies and is compliant with all federal mandates.  By placing archived email and files in the cloud, users have infinite scalability, allowing their data to grow or reduce in accordance with their retention policies.  It also has synergy with existing discovery systems, if current systems are in place across an organization.  The solution requires no hardware or software and is provided as a managed service, improving efficiencies, increasing cost savings and allowing accessibility from any location by an authorized user.  It allows agencies to integrate their storage, archiving and eDiscovery needs into one solution, reducing the requirements for duplicative data storage.

“Electronic discovery has traditionally been a very expensive and reactive activity,” said Gary Thompson, President, IPDS.  “Given these times of intense budgetary constraints, a solution like ours is valuable because it helps clients implement a more proactive, cost-effective and efficient approach to what is normally a complicated process.”

The cloud-based infrastructure is Statement on Accounting Standards (SAS) 70 Type II, PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Level 1, International Organization of Standards (ISO) 27001 and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliant.  Additionally all client data resides within the continental United States (CONUS).

To learn more about the joint TWD and IPDS eDiscovery solution, call IPDS at (301) 519-8015.

Certifiably Cloud: AWS Announces Accreditation

Are you AWS certified?
Last week several reporters, including Gathering Clouds friend in the field Barb Darrow, analyzed Amazon’s recent announcement of its cloud certification program. Widely seen as a positive move for the company, the announcement does raise some questions.
While the practice of certification is well established, AWS’ announcement is of particular note, as it both solidifies the company from the perspective of it’s platform and tools becoming trainable skills (and therefore more applicable to enterprise standards of usage) and positions the service as becoming far more self-supporting (since it will require those specific trainable skills). If we thought AWS was a sticky service before (in terms of its proprietary functionalities, third party tool sets, and APIs, this move certainly makes that notion even clearer.

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VMware: Hybrid Cloud Leader?

As Amazon (AMZN) continues with its amazing public cloud momentum, Palo Alto-based VMware (VMW) has stepped up its efforts to educate the industry about an even more powerful and disruptive form of cloud computing, called hybrid cloud. According to VMware, hybrid cloud promises to be an upcoming disruption in how applications and services are delivered […]

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UK G-Cloud to champion public cloud

Joe Dignan, Chief Analyst, Public Sector Technology

The third iteration of the UK government’s cloud store is about to go live, so what has changed and what is likely to happen next?

The good news is that we appear to have reached the end of the beginning for G-Cloud, with the Cabinet Office reporting sales of £18.2m going through the first two procurement frameworks, G-Cloud i (Gi) and G-Cloud ii (Gii).

The delay in getting G-Cloud iii (Giii) up and running is apparently due to there being 50% more suppliers and a much greater diversity of offerings. The increase in volume has caused the small G-Cloud team issues in sending out award letters.

However, the government has finally agreed on a “public cloud first” policy. This policy is something that the G-Cloud team, led by Denise McDonagh, has championed and it is a game-changer in a number of …

Lunch Keynote at Cloud Expo | Strategies for App Delivery in the Cloud Era

Cloud computing continues to gain momentum as enterprises of all sizes and across all industries seek to harness the business agility promised by this computing model. Despite its long-accepted benefits, the cloud has also fallen victim to performance and reliability challenges, combined with a perceived lack of security. As a result this has led to slower predicted growth and adoption of this still promising infrastructure methodology.
In his Lunch Keynote at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Neil Cohen, Akamai’s Vice President of Global Product Marketing, will discuss how to overcome these challenges, and the role application delivery solutions play in optimizing public and hybrid cloud architectures without sacrificing performance, security or control.

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Is Windows Server 2003 EOL a Mini Y2K Event for the Enterprise?

A mini Y2K event for applications stranded on those old, obsolete servers. The challenge is clear. EOL means no more patches and security vulnerabilities increase on a daily basis. For those wishing to keep their machines running, this is a situation that requires action..
There are things in life that are just painful — Doing dishes, paying taxes, going to the dentist, and upgrading software. One of the most painful IT lifecycle events is upgrading from an older version of an operating system (OS) to a newer one. In fact, there are 10s of millions of servers still running Windows Server 2003, hosting applications that run important functions. The problem is that Window Server 2003 is about to lose support from Microsoft (end of life (EOL)) leaving many with a really difficult choice. Upgrade or face escalating risk of security holes being exploited without any patches or support. Holy strawberries Batman, we’re in a jam.

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Cloud Expo New York: Why Hybrid Cloud Is Necessary

Server virtualization was just the beginning of the journey to IT-as-a-Service. Businesses today are looking for on-demand access to cloud resources by extending beyond their data centers without sacrificing performance, agility and security. They want to maximize their existing investments in technology, people and processes while still providing their users access to the support, applications and device choices they demand.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Mathew Lodge, VP of VMware’s Cloud Services group, will tackle the transition from building a traditional private cloud to seamless access and utilization of a customized hybrid cloud environment, creating a borderless data center with limitless resources for IT, developers and their users.

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Dell Buys Cloud Management Company Enstratius

Dell – while it’s trying to go private – is apparently also going full-tilt at this cloud thing trying to diversify out of PCs because it’s just bought a respected infrastructure management start-up called Enstratius.
Born Enstratus Networks, Enstratius has a platform that’s supposed to be a unified way of managing single or multiple clouds.
It’s said to support more than 20 public and private cloud platforms, including OpenStack, VMware, Rackspace, Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure. It also supposed to be easy to add more clouds.
It’s meant to help organizations manage applications across private, public and hybrid clouds by supplying automated application provisioning and scaling, application configuration management, usage governance, and cloud utilization monitoring.

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The cloud news categorized.