Bitcasa, iOS, Mobile, Storage

Bitcasa Releases Infinite Drive Apps for Android, Windows 8/RT

Bitcasa announced today the release of its Android and Windows 8/RT apps. The new mobile apps allow instant streaming of music, photos, videos, and documents from the Bitcasa Infinite Drive™. The Android and Windows 8/RT apps are available today for new and existing Bitcasa users on Google Play, Windows Store, and at www.bitcasa.com/download. Mac and iOS apps will be available in January.

With Bitcasa, users can backup and consolidate all of their files and media into one Infinite Drive. The Bitcasa Infinite Drive acts like an external drive that users are already familiar with, except that it never runs out of space and is accessible from anywhere and any device. With the new Infinite Drive and mobile apps, Bitcasa users get immediate benefits:

  • Instant Streaming, Access Anywhere: With Bitcasa, users can
    play whole music albums, watch videos in various formats, view and
    share photo albums, and read documents from anywhere. Instant
    streaming from the Bitcasa Infinite Drive allows users to stream their
    personal jukebox of music, videos, and photos to mobile and desktop
    devices without having to sync or store files locally on each of your
    devices.
  • Infinite Storage: The Infinite Drive acts as a virtual external
    drive that expands with the user’s growing storage needs without ever
    worrying about running out of space again.
  • Safe Backup: Continuous and automatic backup gives peace of
    mind. Users can mirror their content from all their computers to
    Bitcasa, and access it anywhere. All files and backups are protected
    with client-side encryption, which means that only users can see and
    access their data. Users can easily retrieve files with time-capsule
    versioning by date.
  • Share Content: With one click, users can share any file or
    folder with their friends and family – Bitcasa or non-Bitcasa users –
    regardless of file size. For sharing on mobile devices, users can also
    set up alerts to protect against large downloads that might affect
    their mobile bandwidth charges.
  • Get Organized: Bitcasa automatically categorizes users’ data
    into Music, Photos, Videos, and Documents.
    Users no longer have to worry about managing and organizing their
    files – the same way they do not have to worry about
    storage capacity limits.

“With our mobile app releases, we are now making all of your data easily available from mobile and PC/Mac clients while taking the security of that data very seriously,” said Tony Gauda, co-founder and CEO of Bitcasa. “By announcing our cross-platform support today, we are offering our global users secure access on all computers, mobile devices, or Web browsers by streaming from the cloud while allowing them to keep the data they access more often localized on their hard drive. With an Infinite Drive, mobile users can automatically store and access their photos from any device. It also means that they can send large videos and albums to friends and family, as well as watch videos in multiple formats. It’s an infinite, organized drive in the cloud. Users don’t have to manage it and it’s much safer than their desktop or laptop.”

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VCE Accelerates Private Cloud Deployments from Months to Weeks

One of the major criticisms of private clouds is that the end user still has to build, manage and maintain the infrastructure to the extent that they are continuing the ‘keeping the lights on’ approach of IT. Ultimately this lacks the economic benefit that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept. Hence what we and our customers quickly realized is that a private cloud’s success ultimately depends on the stability, reliability, scalability and performance of its infrastructure. By going the Vblock route our customers immediately attain that stability, reliability, scalability and performance and consequently accelerate their private cloud initiatives.

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SYS-CON.tv Interview: Data Connectivity in the Cloud

“DataDirect is focused solely on data connectivity. We will be launching the DataDirect cloud – a one-stop shop for your data connectivity needs,” noted Jesse Davis, Director, DataDirect Research & Development at Progress Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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REACT to the Cloud: A Tale of Horror and Unified Security

Introducing a new security paradigm that leverages the cooperative functionality of various security tools. However, the key is still monitoring the results in real time; and the best case scenario (most efficient/effective means) for most companies to achieve this is via the cloud.
Today’s is a cautionary tale. One that you’ve probably heard before, but I promise a new spin on making sure it won’t happen again.

It’s a true story. It recently happened to a colleague’s friend’s business. But it is not an isolated incident. Because the information is sensitive and the wounds still raw, I have changed the names to protect the innocent and the not-so-innocent.

It was a dark and stormy night…

Dan is the CEO and CTO of a privately-owned business that develops software tools to manage lease lifecycles and other financial information. His primary customer is commercial real estate agencies across the country. For the past 12 years, it has been highly successful despite some of the economic battering the housing market took over the past several years. The company clears somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-50 million per year. He employs about 150 people. And it is the story of one of those employees where the story takes a dark turn.

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Bluebeam, Business Processes, Collaboration, Computer-aided design, Partnerships, Portable Document Format, ProjectWise, Skanska

Bluebeam Revu for PDF-based Collaboration Now Available to Skanska Projects

Skanska has entered into a global purchasing agreement with Bluebeam® Software, the developer of PDF-based solutions for digital project workflows. Under this new agreement, Skanska project teams throughout the world can deploy Bluebeam’s Revu®, for digital project communication and collaboration.

Bluebeam Revu is a PDF-based solution that enables architecture, engineering and construction professionals to streamline workflows, improve communication and reduce paper use. Revu includes 2D and 3D PDF creation and a variety of industry-standard redlining tools including text, highlights, shapes, clouds, CAD symbols and measurements. Advanced features include automatic drawing comparisons, hyperlink management, integration with SharePoint® and ProjectWise®, and tablet PC compatibility. Additionally, Revu includes an integrated cloud solution, Bluebeam Studio™, for storing PDFs and other project files online and collaborating in real-time on PDFs.

Skanska’s NKS project team is currently using several of these features to electronically share information for this massive, 3.4 million gross square foot facility. Project team members are using Revu to create and annotate PDFs, enabling them to easily share detailed drawings, comments and questions with project team members downstream. The team is also organizing and managing the enormous amount of project information by using Links – Revu’s hyperlink manager – to link PDF drawings to additional project data stored in SharePoint®.

“Revu is a powerful solution that creates so many opportunities for streamlining project communication and collaboration and allows project teams to work more efficiently,” said Christian Gren, Director of Account Services, Bluebeam AB. “With this agreement, Skanska project teams can increase productivity, create significant time savings and reduce costs, ultimately having a substantial impact on the bottom line.”

“Skanska’s implementation of Revu on the incredible New Karolinska Solna project proves that anything is possible with Bluebeam,” said Kristine Hopkins, Bluebeam Software’s Director of Account Services. “Bluebeam is thrilled to enter into this purchasing agreement with Skanska, making it easier for its project teams around the globe to communicate and collaborate digitally and work without limits.”

Bluebeam Software products are available direct and through a global network of authorized resellers. For more information, visit www.bluebeam.com.

 

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Cloud disaster recovery: 5 key steps to secure your data

Hosting applications on the cloud is tempting many IT organisations for sundry reasons like availing benefits from outsized datacentres, backup power sources and other capabilities that till lately only established IT organisations could afford.

Pay-as-you-go culture or guaranteed availability makes cloud adoption an easy and unperturbed choice for many SMBs and large scale organisations.

Many hosting providers maintain compound data centres, so decision makers often assume disaster recovery to be the inherent feature in the cloud culture that is offered to them. But little do they realise that this is a vital issue that warrants concern. Disaster Recovery (DR) is not a default configuration for many providers that offer cloud space in the IT market.

The 9/11 attacks cautioned many towards IT disaster preparedness (though probability of such disasters are extremely rare but not impossible). Before dealing with your cloud space provider and before signing on the dotted line …

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Weather Channel Forecasts Heavier Reliance on Cloud Computing

The Weather Channel weathered its own storm of sorts when it experienced its highest traffic ever over the course of Hurricane Sandy.
The media company typically supports about 90 million Web and mobile users a month. During Sandy, that figure jumped to 450 million, nearly double its previous high for Web traffic.
Fortunately, The Weather Channel was prepared for the traffic surge, according to an article on NetworkWorld.com.
The company’s IT team had recently architected its real-time radar mapping. On typical days, the mapping system runs on about 20 instances, but during Sandy it scaled up to run on 175 nodes.
It’s a classic use-case for the cloud: Variable and unpredictable peak demand for Web services is outsourced to a public cloud provider. It would have required a major investment to spin up a system across the company’s on-premise and colocation environments to support the traffic load it experienced when Sandy ripped up the Eastern Seaboard, and then it would have likely gone mostly unused during other times. The alternative would have been not to have the compute horsepower to serve all the visitors to The Weather Channel’s platforms.

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SYS-CON.tv Interview: One-Stop Shop for Cloud Computing

“We are a SaaS tool that helps engineers, developers, IT operators, etc., manage and monitor the performance of the production, web, mobile, and cloud applications,” noted Bill Hodak, Director of Product Marketing at New Relic, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Connecting Clouds as Easy as 1-2-3

Hybrid cloud models continue to outpace pure-public (and pure-private) models for most organizations. There’s value in being able to leverage the cloud for a variety of reasons from periodic, expanding compute resources to dev and test environments. Whatever the reason, hybrid models are here to stay.
One of the difficulties experienced in executing on such models, however, is connecting them to the corporate cloud or data center. Sure, the model is simple: simply deploy resources in the public cloud and leverage them as expandable compute from the private cloud/data center. But to do that requires a way to leverage them. You need to connect them together in such a way as to make those externally deployed resources appear to be part of the data center.
That’s where cloud bridges come in handy. Cloud bridges, as we’ve previously defined, integrate environments at the network layer – extending the operational domain into remote environments such as public cloud. Bridges are the «connective tissue» that is the basis for a hybrid cloud.

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