There’s a lot of things we do to improve the performance of web and mobile applications. We use caching. We use compression. We offload security (SSL and TLS) to a proxy with greater compute capacity.
We apply image optimization and minification to content.
We do all that because performance is king. Failure to perform can be, for many businesses, equivalent to an outage with increased abandonment rates and angry customers taking to the Internet to express their extreme displeasure.

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Companies are exploiting technology advances in procurement and finance services to produce new types of productivity benefits.
We’ll now hear from a procurement expert on how companies can better manage their finances and have tighter control over procurement processes and their supply chain networks. This business process innovation exchange comes to you in conjunction with the Tradeshift Innovation Day held in New York on June 22, 2016.

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Infrastructure complexity is not unique to enterprise datacenters. Just because a business or organization is small does not mean it is exempt from the feature needs of big enterprise datacenters. Small and mid-size organizations require fault tolerance, high availability, mobility, and flexibility as much as anyone. Unfortunately, the complexity of traditional datacenter and virtualization architecture hit the SMB the hardest.

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This is the second in a two part series of posts pertaining to using some common server storage I/O benchmark tools and workload scripts. View part I here which includes overview, background and information about the tools used and related topics.

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Choosing the right cloud for your workloads is a balancing act that can cost your organization time, money and aggravation – unless you get it right the first time.
Economics, speed, performance, accessibility, administrative needs and security all play a vital role in dictating your approach to the cloud. Without knowing the right questions to ask, you could wind up paying for capacity you’ll never need or underestimating the resources required to run your applications.

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(c)iStock.com/shylendrahoode

For the vast majority of IT decision makers, cloudy offices fit their organisations like a glove. That’s one of the key findings from a study released by software vendor BetterCloud, which found 95% of the almost 270 respondents agree that Office 365 and Google Apps suit their workplace needs well.

Comparing the two, however, is something which is too tempting to resist. 44% of Google Apps users say that system fits their needs ‘very well’, compared with 39% for Office 365, while Google also comes out on top for users who complain about poor suitability; 1% compared to 6% of Microsoft users. Putting all the figures together, 40% say their cloud office solutions suit their company ‘very well’, with 55%, 4% and 1% going for ‘well’, ‘poorly’, and ‘very poorly’ respectively.

The report also, as one would expect, digs in to the key pain points and benefits of moving to cloud apps. Again, it appears Google has the slight advantage. More Office 365 users (57%) cited security as a key issue compared to Google Apps (37%), while integration with current business systems is also more of a headache for Microsoft houses (29% and 22% respectively).

Whether security is better with Google, or whether it is just less of a hot button issue for its customers, remains to be seen. Yet there is an interesting development in this report. Previous surveys from BetterCloud argue Google is the more likely home for smaller businesses compared to the more enterprise-focused Microsoft. This study, however, focuses solely on medium to large enterprises – so one would expect security to be especially vital.

Elsewhere, more than half (54%) of respondents reported needing less effort with their storage management or data recovery plays, while more than two thirds (67%) say they get things done more quickly with migration to the cloud. This positivity was the key point of the report’s conclusion.

“Cloud applications are at the heart of the evolution of IT,” the report notes. “This is causing a shift in the skills of IT professionals and is changing the jobs they are doing.

“The use of cloud applications is impacting the culture in organisations broadly, and in IT departments especially,” it adds. “Offloading applications to the cloud frees technology administrators from mundane tasks and enables more innovation, while at the same time users become empowered and more productive.”

You can find out more about the report and download it here (registration required).

Competitors can’t compete, and leaders can’t lead if they don’t know the rules of the game. Understanding how points are scored, and what is required to win is key to any competition. In the age of digital transformation there are key rules to learn:
Data is the modern commercial battlefield
Information dominance is the strategic goal

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As organizations shift towards IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. Commvault can ensure protection, access and E-Discovery of your data – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise.
In his general session at 18th Cloud Expo, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist – Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships at Commvault, discussed how to cut costs, scale easily, and unleash insight with CommVault software, the only singular data and information management solution for cloud data protection and beyond.

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SYS-CON Events has announced today that Roger Strukhoff has been named conference chair of Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo 2016 Silicon Valley.
The 19th Cloud Expo and 6th @ThingsExpo will take place on November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
«The Internet of Things brings trillions of dollars of opportunity to developers and enterprise IT, no matter how you measure it,» stated Roger Strukhoff. «More importantly, it leverages the power of devices and the Internet to enable us all to improve the state of the world and lives of people.»

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