The way humans understand the world, the way we think, and the way we put our thoughts into language require both vagueness and ambiguity. Without them, we lose important aspects of meaning. Furthermore, how we structure our language is culturally and linguistically relative. As a result, current semantic interoperability efforts will be able to address a certain class of problems, but in the grand scheme of things, that class of problems is a relatively small subset of the types of communication we would prefer to automate between systems.
AWS Makes Amazon Redshift Available to All Customers
“With order of magnitude improvements in price/performance, Amazon Redshift makes big data analytics accessible to more people, allowing large organizations to analyze more of their data and smaller ones to afford fast, scalable data warehousing technology,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services at Amazon Web Services as AWS today announced that Amazon Redshift is now broadly available for use.
Amazon Redshift is described by the company as “a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud,
5 reasons VPNs suck in the cloud
If you’ve been around the block a few times, you’re probably wondering why the title of this post isn’t, 50 Reasons VPNs Suck in the Cloud.
VPNs have long been the bane of both administrators and users (and lets not forget, support). They’re clunky, complex, and costly, and the same is true when they’re deployed to secure cloud access.
Today, VPNs are increasingly used to connect to cloud computing resources. Either by routing traffic back through the corporate network or direct to the cloud provider, VPNs offer authentication and transport-layer encryption to keep the bad guys out and sensitive information secure. But at what cost?
Both VPN configurations (corporate and provider) are complex to set up, require client agents with loads of support, and can be expensive to maintain. Arguably, there’s room for – and exists – a better approach to securing access to cloud servers …
Companies afraid to move to the cloud because of government snooping
Cloud security is once again on the agenda after a report from Lieberman Research showed that nearly half of IT professionals were wary of keeping sensitive data in the cloud due to government intervention.
The survey was conducted at November’s Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Congress and found that the majority of respondents prefer to keep their most sensitive data on private networks rather than on the cloud.
Other top-line findings were:
- Nearly nine in 10 (88%) of IT professionals believe some cloudy data could be lost, stolen or corrupted
- Less than half of respondents (46%) believe that moving to the cloud has increased their IT security
- Yet 56% think migrating to the cloud has saved money, and 86% think their move to the cloud has been successful overall
“There are a number of reasons why so many IT professionals are apprehensive about storing corporate data in the cloud,” writes …
Opera optimises with Skyfire purchase
Norwegian software firm Opera has acquired Silicon Valley based Skyfire Labs, a specialist in mobile video optimisation and cloud. The firm is known for its Rocket Optimizer software which allows mobile operators to use cloud computing to optimise video and multimedia on crowded cell towers, in 3G and 4G LTE networks.
The acquisition price includes $50m cash upfront and performance based earn-out payments over three years, including $26m in cash held that can bring the total deal size to $155m.
A Beginner’s Guide to Netsuite
As a mid-tier ERP and CRM solution, NetSuite is an affordable software-as-a-service platform for small to mid-sized businesses. The cloud-based interface makes the platform available from anywhere with Internet access. Some of the many business tasks covered by NetSuite include sales and service tracking, order fulfillment management, project collaboration and lead tracking.
NetSuite Benefits
The benefits offered by NetSuite will differ between businesses. However, there are a number of service tiers and pre-configured options from which to choose that can help to provide maximum benefit with minimal start-up and implementation times. Benefits offered across most business types and sizes include:
- Improved efficiency
- Reduced maintenance
- Improved collaboration
- Greater accountability
- Faster communication
- Global access to data, reports and processes
How NetSuite Works
NetSuite is most often provided as a hosted service. This means that the platform is accessed and used through a web interface. Every person within the business uses the same interfaces and databases. This allows for real-time updates, instant access to information and improved interaction between departments and business segments. Setting access rights and roles by account or tier provides simple data management, user accountability and security.
Things to Consider before Choosing NetSuite
Though NetSuite offers many ways to customize and personalize the ERP experience, it is, at its core, a pre-configured product. This means that in-depth customization is often a highly involved process. Many NetSuite service providers will offer demonstrations or free trials to see if the product’s interface and features are a good fit for your business.
To help determine if NetSuite is a proper fit for your business, consider NetSuite consulting services. Professionals can help explain what to expect and provide an in-depth look in how your business can utilize the platform without the worry of service contracts, costly set up fees or time intensive research and training.
More Food for Thought…
As a cloud-based service, NetSuite offers a unified platform that is accessed using a high-speed Internet connection. However, with lack of local back up or local server solutions, any interruption in Internet service will result in an inability to access your NetSuite services.
NetSuite is a modular solution. This means that features can be added or removed on-demand to suit the needs of your business. Unfortunately, this also means that updating the platform can be tricky. Since modules are updated independently, you may find that you are forced to wait to implement an update due to conflicting module configurations and other issues.
The most common way of signing up for NetSuite service is through a value-added reseller. Comparing resellers and service providers is an essential part of finding the best NetSuite configuration. Phone and email support directly through NetSuite require recurring subscription costs as well. By finding a reseller that offers support, you can avoid unforeseen fees and service issues.
NetSuite is a proven platform for businesses of nearly any size. However, like any software suite, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the platform is essential to maximizing benefits.
nCircle Gets Additional Patent for Their Security Services
nCircle today announced the award of its second PureCloud patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. nCircle’s intellectual property portfolio now includes 11 patents. nCircle’s patents cover a wide range of security innovations and represent the company’s significant, ongoing investment in security technology research and innovation.
nCircle PureCloud is a cloud-based security services platform that requires no hardware or software to be installed or managed. nCircle PureCloud dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of a wide range of security services — including vulnerability scanning, PCI scanning and web application scanning — making these practices easily accessible to small and medium businesses.
“Attackers are targeting smaller businesses that typically have fewer security resources than larger companies,” said Tim ‘TK’ Keanini, chief research officer for nCircle. “The breakthrough technology in nCircle PureCloud helps level the playing field by making enterprise class security tools accessible to all businesses, regardless of size.”
Mavenlink Launches New Financial Management, Reporting Capabilities
Mavenlink today announced the launch of new capabilities which provide users with end-to-end financial reporting and management control. With real-time visibility into their projects and financials, Mavenlink customers benefit from greater visibility and control over their business performance, and staying in alignment with business goals becomes more certain.
“Mavenlink, and our new smart class of products, is improving the way work is defined and managed across distributed teams,” said Ray Grainger, Mavenlink’s CEO. “With the addition of these new financial management and reporting capabilities, Mavenlink becomes even more compelling, enabling businesses to improve productivity, increase profitability and more effectively manage business outcomes.”
Mavenlink enables companies to efficiently manage more of their business online, including team & project management, messaging & conversations, file management, time & expense management, invoicing & online payments and financial reporting. Mavenlink’s new reports, available in real-time and multiple currencies, provide users a detailed view of the entire financial life cycle of projects.
Key new features include:
- Utilization Reports: Maximize revenue through more efficient resource utilization and planning
- Work In Progress (WIP) Reports: Keep track of planned and actual costs, as well as what has been billed and awaits billing on any project for every client
- Accounts Receivable Aging Reports: Reduce time-to-payment through better visibility of upcoming and late invoices
- Time Sheets: Effortlessly capture time, view and report on billable and non-billable hours for each team member or workgroup, with a real-time view of project costs
- Task-Level Budgeting: Manage cost expectations and ensure tighter project controls by tracking budgets (hours and dollars) down to the task level
“Social Task Management (STM) platforms combine project management and social networking to enable teams to more effectively get their work done,” said Alan Lepofsky, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. “By adding capabilities with financial related areas such as budgeting, invoicing payments and management reporting, Mavenlink has created a single place for team members to seamlessly organize all aspects of a project. I’ve yet to see this type of broad project management and financials together from any other STM SaaS provider.”
Open Source PaaS for Parallel Cloud Application Development
Improving application program performance will require parallelizing the program execution at ever finer granularity now that the processor clock rates are no longer increasing. However, even in a per-application dedicated computing environment, the parallelization overhead is known to place a limit on how much application on-time throughput performance increase can be achieved via higher levels of parallel processing. The throughput-limiting impact of parallelization overhead will be significantly amplified when executing multiple internally parallelized applications on dynamically shared cloud computing environment, since the allocation of processing resources to instances and tasks of any given application cannot be done in isolation, but instead it needs to be done collectively across all the applications dynamically sharing the given pool of computing resources. There thus is an urgent need to solve this complex challenge of developing internally parallelized programs for dynamic execution on shared cloud computing infrastructure, if we expect to be able scale the performance and capacity of cloud hosted applications going forward.
QuickBooks Online Adds Mobility With New iPad App
With today’s introduction of QuickBooks Online for iPad, small businesses that are mobile by nature will no longer have to save the books for last. Rather, they can get more out of their workdays with an app that helps them work more productively, wherever they are.
“As a wedding planner, I spend 70 percent of my time away from my desk meeting with clients and vendors. At the end of the day, I used to sort through my meeting notes, map out next steps, track payments and expenses, and follow up with invoices,” said Sadie Waddington of Locally Grown Weddings in San Francisco, Calif. “Now, I save time by catching up on accounting during the four hours I commute on public transit each week using QuickBooks Online for iPad. The app also helps keep me more organized and look more professional in front of my clients and vendors.”
Now available in the App Store, QuickBooks Online for iPad brings the world’s No. 1 small business cloud accounting solution to one of the world’s fastest-growing computing devices. It packages the most useful on-the-go business tasks in an easy-to-use, friendly app with a native iPad experience, including integration with the Camera, Contacts, Push Notifications and Location Services.
“Managing a small business is a different game today than it was a few years ago, due in large part to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets,” said Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Financial Management Solutions division. “We found that more than 20 percent of QuickBooks Mobile for iPhone users access the app through iPads. And, customers like Sadie told us they need more than mobile point solutions – they need an all-in-one app that lets them work in a whole new way, and that’s what we created.”
