As enterprises look to take advantage of the cloud, they need to understand the importance of safeguarding their confidential and sensitive data in cloud environments. Enterprises must protect their data from (1) system administrators who don’t need to see the data in the clear and (2) adversaries who become system administrators from stolen credentials. In short, enterprises must take control of their data: The best way to do this is by using advanced encryption, centralized key management and cutting edge access controls and policies.
When an outside party owns, controls, and manages infrastructure and computational resources, how can you be assured that sensitive data remains private and secure, that your organization is protected from damaging data breaches, and that you can still satisfy the full range of reporting, compliance and regulatory requirements?

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IBM on Monday announced that businesses of all sizes – from start-ups to large enterprises – are rapidly adopting IBM Bluemix to develop software in the cloud with greater speed, security and quality.
IBM also announced additional services on Bluemix, which will move from beta testing and into production later this month. Bluemix, IBM’s open cloud platform, is based on an open standards foundation, Cloud Foundry, and provides developers access to IBM’s software for integration, security, transactions and other key functions, as well as software from business partners. As a result, it can help developers connect two broad categories of systems in a cloud environment: systems of record, such as core banking and accounting systems, and systems of engagement, such as mobile, situational and social apps.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that MangoApps, the unified collaboration company, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
MangoApps provides private all-in-one social collaboration networks allowing workers to securely collaborate from anywhere in the world and from any device. Social, mobile, and easy to use. MangoApps has been named a «Market Leader» by Ovum Research and a «Cool Vendor» by Gartner. 10,000+ business customers worldwide.

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OpenStack has made inroads among companies building elastic cloud environments for on-premise and hosted cloud apps. However, OpenStack and other Cloud OS still have challenges and maturing to do to create robust always-on clouds.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Dave LeClair, Sr. Director of Strategy at Stratus Technologies, will explain why legacy reliability doesn’t work for OpenStack; why the answer lies in a software model that separates availability from application and hardware; how IT can move traditional applications to cloud without rewriting and fill the gap in availability guarantees from public cloud providers; how those providers can use Software-Defined Availability to deliver SLAs that prevent outages that cost millions and damage reputations.

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What are the strategies and technologies that can help you accelerate your IT organization’s journey to private cloud?
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Scott McNeil, Product Marketing Analyst – Enterprise Manager at Oracle, will discuss how to plan, build and deploy different approaches for implementing self-service IT, and discover best practices for how organizations can successfully move to the cloud using a demand-led strategy. He will also provide examples of early adopters who have achieved success using these techniques.

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The Agile Architecture bar is set. Vendors should know what their products must do. Architects have some insight into the patterns they must follow. And business stakeholders can finally rest assured that at least it’s possible to achieve technology-enabled business agility. True, it’s difficult. Many of the pieces are only just now falling into place. Levels of maturity are low across the board. But we’re on our way.

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Of the countless industries using ERP software today, four stand out as benefiting the most from its versatility and functionality. Retail, manufacturing, farming, and real estate management all require a customizable, streamlined management software that can collect and manage data from all business activity.

Whether tracking shipping and payment or marketing and sales, ERP software integrates everything in a real-time view of core processes while sharing this information across the various departments.

Retail

The face of retail is sales and payment. Behind the scenes, inventory management and tracking, shipping, and marketing create the backbone. Clothes, cars, and food all follow the same basic principles and require very similar functionality.

By utilizing an order management system, orders can be coordinated across multiple stores while advanced pricing allows for management of sales and numbers that can be sorted through various hierarchies. Orders can also be tracked based on stock and non-stock items …

Electronic signatures are an important component of any web application. They make it possible to keep business processes online even when a signature is required on a contract, form or application.
If you are interested in learning how to quickly integrate e-signatures into your cloud applications, this session is for you.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Mauro Franco, Senior Sales Engineer at Silanis Technology, will demonstrate how to use e-SignLive’s REST API and SDKs to enable end-to-end electronic business processes.

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Like electricity, compute resources can readily scale up and burst, and workloads can easily operate geographically. Storage however is more like water, where moving large amounts of data can be very challenging, especially over distance.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Joe Arnold, CEO of SwiftStack, will cover architectures and approaches for storage clouds deployed across geographies. He will break down failure scenarios and disaster recovery behaviors (staying available during catastrophic failures), and the benefits that multi-site access can have to reduce application latency. Fast access that never goes down = happy users.

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