Enterprise organizations are bombarded daily with the myriad reasons to deploy their line of business applications in the cloud. Efficiency, flexibility, cost savings, agility – and the list goes on and on – are just some of the benefits exhorted by cloud computing supporters. And industry analyst firms such as Gartner believe these various benefits will help drive spending on cloud services to $210 billion in 2016 [1].
By all accounts, the future of cloud computing is anything by cloudy. Unfortunately, that assessment doesn’t paint a complete picture of everything impacting cloud adoption at the enterprise level. High-profile outages at several different cloud providers have led some to question whether or not the cloud is reliable enough to trust to “important” applications. The typical argument goes something like this: “The Internet is great, but it wasn’t really designed for business use. I need to be really careful about what kinds of applications I put in the public cloud. In other words, it’s okay if email is out for a couple of hours, but we certainly couldn’t endure extended downtime if our supplier portal was inaccessible.”

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«When it comes to securing business information, taking the proper precautions on the front-end is well worth the time and effort,» said Cbeyond director of information security Jeff Jenkins, as Cbeyond shared its top five tips to help businesses secure critical information, maintain business continuity and ensure ongoing productivity.
Jenkins continued, «If your business does not have the in-house resources, it’s critical to consult with a technology ally who can provide the insight and support needed to secure your data and maintain operations.»
These guidelines, part of Cbeyond’s «Technology Ally» best practices series, are designed to help SMBs better communicate the benefits of securing information when addressing employees and customers in particular.

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Today four converging IT trends are changing the IT paradigm and will forever change the way businesses communicate, collaborate, store and manage information. Each on its own would have significant impact without the others. However, combined together, they are a disruptive force.
They are:
Mobile devices (BYOD) are becoming a universal portal for individual access to personal and business information.
Social media has moved beyond its initial use case (our kids) to infiltrate businesses for data access, business collaboration, Business to Consumer and more recently Business to Business communication.
Information growth (volume) with rapid access (velocity) from multiple sources (variety) continues unabated and is enabling ‘Big Data’ as predicted a few years ago.
Cloud is becoming increasingly more mainstream from a compute, data retention and access perspective, enabling global information access.

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The OpenNebula Project has just announced the first update of the fourth series of its widely deployed OpenNebula cloud management platform, a fully open-source solution for data center management and enterprise cloud computing. With a sysadmin-centric approach, OpenNebula is the open operating system of choice in the converged data centre, combining a powerful virtualization manager that supports traditional IT features such as fault tolerance and failover, with the dynamic provisioning, elasticity and multi-tenancy of the enterprise cloud.

OpenNebula 4.2 gives users and administrators an easy way to create, publish, share, and manage multi-tier cloud applications and define auto-scaling policies based on service level metrics and time schedule. The new service flow functionality converts an infrastructure cloud into a powerful environment for the execution of elastic business applications. OpenNebula 4.2 also includes improved VMware drivers, enhanced support for Xen4, a new simple provisioning tab for Sunstone, and other minor enhancements like datastore monitoring and more hooks.

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Dell CEO Michael Dell told the Wall Street Journal in an e-mail exchange over the weekend that he intends to stay with the company if his multibillion-dollar offer to buy the joint and take it private isn’t approved by the stockholders.

He also said that he won’t support Carl Icahn’s notion of a leverage recapitalization or Icahn’s schemes to put the company deeper in debt or sell off some its assets to pay shareholders an ostensibly higher price.

Michael reiterated that the specter of $13.75 a share that he and private equity house Silver Lake Partners dangled in front of stockholders last week was a “best and final” offer worth $24.6 billion.

It’s a dime better than the $13.65 a share Dell’s board accepted in February.

He justified the uptick on the grounds that he’s asking for a change in the way the shares are counted so any abstentions are discarded.

Currently abstentions count as “no,” a situation he claims Icahn, who was never a Dell stockholder before Michael put his buy-put offer on the table, has been “unfairly” able to use a minority of shares to block the deal that “the majority of the unaffiliated shares voting on the transaction wanted to accept.”

“That’s why we’ve now requested that the standard be changed to allow the will of the majority of the unaffiliated shares voting on the transaction to control the outcome.”

Icahn personally controls about 8% of the votes but other stockholders like Southeastern Asset Management and T Rowe Price are backing his play.

The paper suggests that Michael’s comments may be a signal to stockholders planning to vote against the buy-out that they’d better support Icahn’s proxy fight to gain control of the company too or be prepared to walk away holding stock that’s lost all of its deal-inflated luster.

The same message may be intended for the Dell board’s special committee which has until August 2 to decide to change the rules or not.

Bloomberg reported last week that the committee wants $14 a share to change the rules.

“Given where we are today,” Michael told the Journal, “I believe the challenges we would face as a public company, including a potential proxy fight, would be significant. But I am ready to fight and I am committed to doing what I believe is right for the company.”

The 10-cent price increase is coming from both Michael Dell and Silver Lake on a pro rata basis. It works out to about another $150 million.

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Software defined networking (SDN), as well as moving “beyond the cloud”, are two of the seven technology trends which will change the game for enterprise, according to the latest industry report.

For companies looking to take the next step and move ahead of the competition, establishing a sophisticated digital strategy is paramount. This much we already know of course, but IT consultancy firm Accenture has gone a step further and noted the trends underpinning it – with SDN featuring heavily.

This could be the start of a real paradigm shift. Companies are certainly noticing that simply migrating to the cloud isn’t enough to be a business game changer – it’s what you do with it that counts.

And this is reflected in the Accenture paper. “The value lies in putting the cloud to work,” the report notes, adding: “No vision would be complete without commenting on the cloud.

“The technology …

Join us and guests Kim Celestre, Forrester Research Senior Analyst, and Bill Hussey, Manager of Developing Platforms at Bell Media, for this compelling educational webinar on Wednesday, August 21, 2013, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. Kim will share Forrester’s Total Economic Impact report to show you the specific, hard-dollar results businesses have driven by engaging customer communities with gamification.
Forrester will provide real life data on how companies leveraging gamification have:
Dramatically increased customer retention revenue
Significantly lowered product support costs
Sourced innovative ideas through the community
From Bell Media, you will learn how they drove up registrations and fan engagement, ultimately driving greater value for advertisers and their brand.

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