Entries categorized under “Cloud”

Backup and the cloud are becoming increasingly linked as they solve two issues that have plagued organizations for years: automating the movement of data offsite and providing a cost-effective means to store it there. But just because one can back up to the cloud does not mean all solutions do so equally well. In this first part of an interview series with STORServer's Jarrett Potts, we examine what specific features a solution needs to offer to effectively back up to the cloud as well as how the solution needs to be constructed. (read more)

Few if any in IT dispute the reality of the cloud or the impact that it is having on businesses. But too many in IT are still prone to say "No" to cloud deployments in THEIR business out of fear of the unknown associated with the cloud. This mindset is now becoming more dangerous as it may turn into a self-fulfilling form of digital Darwinism for you and/or your business. (read more)

Information Technology Divisions (I.T.) traditionally does not deal with securing a device that has not been issued and controlled by them. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has exploded across industries. Rapid adoption of iPhone and Android devices displaced Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) in the mobile enterprise email space. Adoption of new devices drives the need for Mobile Device Data Management software to assert control. (read more)

Companies have spent billions if not tens of billions of dollars putting in place the necessary hardware and software to virtualize their data centers. These numbers fail to take into account the countless man hours that they have also spent planning, configuring and implementing these environments. Yet just as many are ready to take a deep breath and enjoy the fruits of their labors, they are coming to the realization that virtualizing their environment and creating private or public clouds only laid the foundation for the real goal of data center automation. (read more)

Bad news is only bad until you hear it, then it's just information followed by opportunity. Information may arrive in political, personal, technological and economic forms. It creates opportunity which brings people, vision, ideas and investment together. When thinking about a future history of 2013, three (3) opportunities come to mind. (read more)

As companies of all sizes move from physical environments to ones that are more highly virtualized (or even entirely virtualized,) everything changes. While "how backups are done" is sometimes viewed as the biggest change, monitoring the virtual environment and leveraging the cloud are becoming higher priorities for end users. In this fourth and final blog entry in my interview series with PHD Virtual's CMO Steve Kahan, he discusses how virtualization monitoring and the cloud are impacting the future of backup in general and PHD Virtual specifically. (read more)

As the last business day of 2012 it is time for DCIG to unveil its most read blog entries of 2012. While a few long time reader favorites remain in this year's Top 5, a couple of newcomers also made first time appearances on this year's list driven by what is likely growing user interest/concern in managing Big Data and doing eDiscovery across their unstructured data stores. (read more)

It was just a few years ago that "mobile devices" and the "the cloud" were blips on corporate radar screens. Fast forward to today and those blips are fast taking shape as major forces for which enterprises must account. As this occurs, organizations need to re-think the steps they take to control and manage information sprawl going forward. (read more)

This past week nearly 120 million people cast their vote in the US presidential election. But another election that is privately ongoing in many enterprises right now is how they are going to vote with their pocket book in terms of which private storage cloud they are going to deploy. This week after attending the HDS Influencer Summit in Santa Clara, CA, and seeing what HDS has to offer, HDS has for now edged out its competitors and earned my vote for having the best private storage cloud for enterprises. (read more)

The factors that influenced which tape library to use in your environment used to be much simpler in nature when tape was used primarily as a backup target. But as disk has evolved to assume that role, tape libraries have evolved to provide new features so they may assume a much more strategic position within organizations to support their Big Data and Cloud initiatives. In this webcast, I take a look at how to choose the right tape library for your environment in light of these new forces that are impacting the use of tape libraries within organizations. (read more)

In this final installment of our interview series with GroupLogic we look at how mobilEcho enables organizations to wipe only company data off employees' mobile devices, leaving the employee's personal data untouched. We also hear how GroupLogic is helping telecommunications firms increase revenue by adding value to their customers' telecommunications experience, and we gain insight into the DNA of the company as a software provider for over 20 years. (read more)

It is no longer a matter a question of "if" most organizations are going to implement a private cloud; it is more a matter of "when" and "how to best proceed." This is where it can get a little hazy as it is not always clear what path an organization should follow to ensure it ends up with a private cloud that meets its needs. While this path is not the same for every organization, there are three principles that organizations may follow to have a high degree of assurance that they will end up with a private cloud that meets their needs. (read more)

The IT infrastructure that most enterprises want is pretty obvious: it is a private cloud. Less intuitive, however, is how enterprises will transition from simply hosting file, print and web servers in their private clouds today to hosting business critical applications tomorrow. Successfully navigating this transition requires that enterprises introduce a new set of proven technologies that deliver the agility and cost-savings that they have come to expect from private clouds with the availability, performance, manageability and visibility they need for their business critical applications and data. (read more)

Many businesses either rely on in-house custom software or purchase and customize commercial software packages to meet their mission critical business needs. Unfortunately these approaches are failing to meet the needs of enterprises as they demand faster development and deployment times for these apps. To address that challenge, a new group of vendors in the cloud promises to improve these mediocre mission critical business processes by speeding up development/deployment cycles while reducing the total cost of ownership of enterprise applications. (read more)

GroupLogic, a secure enterprise file sharing and syncing solutions provider, is all about responding quickly to customer demands for product features. On September 13th, Acronis announced it had acquired GroupLogic. In our previous installment of this interview series, we examined how GroupLogic engages in "customer development" in lieu of product development to integrate customer-driven innovations into its products. In part 4, we take a look at GroupLogic's strategic partnerships with other companies to create products that fulfill very specific needs for customers. (read more)

As businesses and enterprises of all sizes adopt and implement virtualization and the cloud, they expect the future of their IT data centers to be much brighter in terms of driving down infrastructure costs while improving agility. Yet the global findings coming out of Symantec's September 2012 State of the Data Center Survey suggest that complexity is doing more than surviving and thriving in today's virtualized data centers. The promised benefits of virtualization and the cloud are failing to fully materialize. (read more)

What happens when the market moves so fast that premeditated product development often can't keep up? When extensive planning can lead to products that are out of date or irrelevant as soon as they are released? This is the dilemma GroupLogic faces in the enterprise file share and sync marketplace, where many companies have been building their own solutions--including customizing free and freemium solutions--to handle needs that out-of-the-box products simply don't address. (read more)

In part 2, we continue our discussion with GroupLogic's Anders Lofgren, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management, by exploring licensing options and how the enterprise mobility space has opened up a new market for the company. As well, we dig deeper into activEcho and learn how it is designed to provide flexible and secure file-sync-and-sharing in the enterprise IT organization while being as simple and easy to use as one of the most popular--but unsecure--consumer grade file-sync-and-share cloud services today. (read more)

Today's quickly evolving cloud environment pushes employees to store sensitive information in a variety of public cloud file-sync-and-share solutions such as Box, iCloud, Google Drive and DropBox. This evolution of private and public file-sync-and-share solutions creates an environment where an organization's security and compliance goals are at risk. (read more)

Corporate data making its way to public clouds through the use of consumer-based or department selected tools, is a growing concern for many organizations. So is the cost of backup and storage of ever-increasing volumes of data. Cleversafe and Mezeo Software offer solutions to address these concerns, and the two companies recently partnered to provide information technology (IT) managers with an enterprise-class secure file-sync-and-share solution combined with a limitless-scale data storage solution. (read more)

Earlier this year, DCIG interviewed the executive team at GroupLogic. GroupLogic shared with us how they approach the market for "enterprise file sharing" or what DCIG has been calling File-Sync-and-Share. In addition, we had the privilege of talking to Chris Broderick, CEO of GroupLogic who covered some of the company's history. (read more)

To say with any degree of certainty what technologies will be hot in the next 6 - 12 months generally takes equal amounts of smarts and industry insight coupled with a little bit of luck sprinkled in to get it right. So as I compare what I forecast earlier this year to what I see taking place now, I was certainly right on some points but premature in predicting others. So today with the midpoint of 2012 upon us, I thought I would take a look at the five specific technology trends impacting organizations right now. (read more)

A convergence is happening in the cloud service provider space. More cloud-based archive and backup providers are evolving to account for transactional/production data while managed service providers want to extend their reach into the archival/backup space. One company at the forefront of this convergence is cloud service provider American Internet Services (AIS). Today I talk with AIS's VP of Network Engineering, Steve Wallace, about how this convergence is impacting cloud service providers in general and AIS specifically. (read more)

Everyone talks about how Big Data is changing how data and storage is managed but what many forget is that Big Data also comes with "Big Costs" in terms of the hardware needed to store it and the software and people needed to manage it. Imation saw these three costs coming down the pike and now provides SMBs and SMEs a very affordable and practical solution to address all of these concerns (read more)

Dell has made a number of acquisitions over the last few years as it seeks to transform into a storage company. But after attending Dell Storage Forum in Boston this past week it is evident that it is well down the path of becoming something far more compelling than just a "storage" company. It is on track to becoming an infrastructure company. (read more)