Another cloud startup is making enhancements to improve the performance and functionality of its services. This one is squarely for enterprises and comes from Huddle, which today is announcing Huddle Sync, a service that promises “intelligent” synchronization of enterprise work files to serve users what they need, when they need it.

Huddle is banking on the idea that services like Dropbox will have limited appeal to enterprise users who have to access masses of data; and that IT managers and CIOs will want to exert control on how users access files, and that users will find managing everything themselves a headache. And that companies like Microsoft or IBM will not beat it to the punch in offering this functionality directly.

“Everyone does cloud synchronization today,” says Andy McLoughlin, co-founder and EVP of Strategy. “That’s fine with 50 gigabytes of personal content, but when you have 50 terabytes, there is no way to know what is relevant. Dropbox is a terrific tool for small teams, but it’s not suitable for the enterprise.”

That is an issue that will only grow in the years ahead. In figures provided by Huddle, IDC in 2011 estimated that the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zetabytes this year, with enterprises accounting for 80 percent of information “in the digital universe” at some point in its digital life.

The service — available today on for Windows desktop and as an iPhone app, with further platforms like Mac coming soon — works like this: enterprise users have access to sections of files that their IT managers enable them to use. Then over time, Huddle says that its algorithms learn what a user is accessing, and starts to offer relevant files to them, which they can use online or offline. IT folks get full audit reports of what gets accessed and when.

London and SF-based Huddle says that from today 100 of its customers will be going live on the platform, with it becoming available to its full user base soon. That base, currently, numbers 100,000 businesses, including 70 percent of UK’s central government and 70 companies in the Fortune 500, such as HTC, Kia Motors and Procter & Gamble, says McLoughlin.

While we have heard many stories of remotely-controlled cloud services going down and causing problems for both enterprises and consumers, Huddle is fairly bullish on its ability to remain robust as it serves its current customers and continues to grow. McLoughlin says the company, so far, has not had to pay back on a single service-level agreement in its years of operation.

Hopefully McLoughlin hasn’t spoken too soon. Meanwhile, the company’s CEO and other co-founder, Alastair Mitchell, says that Huddle expects for its business to triple in size in the next two years — with options to potentially sell services like Sync on to third parties to offer on to other businesses or even consumers: after all, recommendation and personalization services are a hot area today.

The company, he notes, is already profitable and has not raised any more money since raising nearly $15 million several years ago, but he said it expects to announce another funding round soon “to help it grow even faster.”

Attachments.me, the startup that promises to take the pain out of searching through email attachments, is gradually ramping up the services it’s offering to users: from today, it is launching an option to automatically file your attachments to specific folders in the cloud; and it has also expanded support to include Box, which now joins Dropbox in its list of supported cloud storage partners.

The news caps off some significant developments we’ve seen at attachments.me since announcing a seed round of $500,000 from Foundry Group last year: others have included Dropbox support and Gmail extensions for Chrome and Firefox.

The addition of an automatic filtering feature underscores the growth of time-saving services that we’re seeing around cloud storage — in other words, it’s not just yet another set of dumb folders for filing things away. In this case, attachments.me will let users set up rules to decide how attachments get stored, and then when the attachments come in, they’ll automatically go to specified folders.

The service sounds promising, if somewhat limited in this first iteration: for starters, attachments can be filtered by sender and file type — but not subject or other keywords. Also, a user can only set up the rules in attachments.me’s Chrome extension.

However, it’s worth nothing that in a blog post announcing the new service, co-founder Jesse Miller says that this is just 1.0 of this service: “We have a ton more options we are going to add to automatic filing,” he writes.

One of these, apparently, will be letting users set up automating rules via the tools’ iPhone app as well. Another area that has room for expansion: the platforms that attachments.me supports overall. It has yet to add other email providers, apart from Google’s Gmail.

Meanwhile, the new support for Box is a logical next step for attachments.me as it looks to grow its customer base, which currently accounts for some 40 million Gmail attachments.

Specifically, it could see attachments.me make bigger inroads into the enterprise segment: Box.net last year signed a strategic deal with HP to offer its cloud services on selected HP desktops, and, on the back of an $81 million Series D round of funding in October 2011, Box could have other, more aggressive expansion plans on the cards, too.

Cloud Hosting – Data Center Colocation Services Explained!

Article by Harvey Simpson512

A growing number of Cloud Hosting market sectors have a need for support from their data stores, no matter unforeseen occasions as well as instances. From online shops by using virtual entrances which by no means close up, so that you can significant financial institutions which usually no more maintain bankers’ hours, data center colocation services offer business a continual companies to make certain its users’ Cloud Hosting are invariably open to clients, vendors, regulators along with other organizations. Just before Information Center Colocation Solutions wide-spread use of the Web, corporations can afford to operate as well as program with its clients in the course of preset business hrs. Customers grasped in which firms had been shut hours as well as weekends and organized their activities around normal a long time with functions. As the web matured throughout reputation as well as use, on the web purposes made possible businesses to provide carried on assistance over and above classic business hours.

As your buyers have become used to carried on Cloud Hosting gain access to, they’ve got become less tolerant of service interruptions. Whilst automatic equipment let corporations to supply expert services throughout all time during the day, in addition they demand a great IT personnel to be sure most of these Data Center Colocation Services methods keep running seeing that thinking time has become improper. Business a continual services offer institutions the various tools in addition to assistance they must keep his or her computers jogging underneath just about any occasions. The goal of enterprise a continual Cloud Hosting can be 99% up-time. To be able to realize this specific somewhat difficult objective, firms have had so that you can release a range of repetitive methods to ensure that nothing may bring the whole circle lower, including tragedy. Among the first good examples ended up being the actual UPS. Even so, UPS items are considered unsuitable to help keep Information Center Colocation Services jogging, simply to permit them to power down easily. Accurate energy continuity signifies getting onsite diesel powered generators which in turn kick in when the power grip isn’t able.

An additional earlier case in point ended up being the use of Cloud Hosting to ensure regardless of whether an entire remote computer room ended up being damaged in a very fire, data ended up being maintained. Right now, businesses cannot afford a down time necessary to recover some sort of copy so they really might use a tautology hosts inside several locations to maintain data obtainable whole time. Additionally flames suppression programs, bodily Information Center Colocation Services, plus all-natural disaster safeguards, in addition to all of the sudden business a continual turns into extremely expensive whenever monitored in house with an organization. If the group demands substantial levels of organization a continual, leverage independently managed Cloud Hosting is really an intelligent expense, frequently containing a better with regard to financial constraints. As a secure, cost effective alternative businesses are checking out outdoors information center colocation providers to deliver the company continuity services they want.

Cloud Hosting signifies a new firmrrrs web server as well as other tools is present in an offsite location monitored by the workforce of about the clock experts. Data center colocation makes use of establishments connected with scale to produce pricey investment funds more affordable. Must be Information Center Colocation Services items strength, security and safety as well as continuity expert services to a lot of clientele, they could release high end shielding devices a lot more cost efficiently, as compared to every single customer might do by themselves. Your provided expenditure allows the businesses sectors to access a level of basic safety as well as stableness which will well be in financial terms impossible. Cloud Hosting is becoming the guideline instead of the exemption, and even developments demonstrate client expectations will become even more requiring later on. Employing Data Center Colocation Services makes certain a company is obviously online. Each and every moment in time a business’s solutions will be unavailable ‘s time they may be dropping company, sacrificing revenue, along with Data Center Colocation Services standing.

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The Future of Dedicated Server Hosting Delivery: The Managed Cloud

Article by Lorenzo Modesto

Find More Hosting Articles

Cloud Servers

Cloud servers

Cloud server technology, computing power increased management demands effective and easy server cloud. Cloud computing is an Internet infrastructure to demand self-service where users pay as and when, and use only what they need. It is controlled by a browser application or API. With the technology of the clouds, all server instances fully scalable and continuous monitoring. Within minutes you can get more disk space, bandwidth, memory, and there will be no impact on your operating environment. Virtualization software that comes with the cloud provides an easy management and mobility. Just like a standard server dedicated servers clouds root access, memory, files, processes, configuration files, IP addresses, system libraries and programs.

simple and effective management of the cloud is the result of cloud environments, for easy navigation. Users have all the information and the control of a single panel allows for easy deployment and management of cloud environments. No matter how large or complex deployment, users, manage and monitor their servers for many service providers from a single dashboard. Both the hardware and servers virtualized multi-tenant, the instrument panel makes the management of this hybrid infrastructure, very easy.

When the cloud of management, users manage systems, not individual servers. When the effective management, users can perform a simple tracking script, so you can keep track of what they want. Cloud-platform provider of management for users superb control and transparency, and can solve problems, verify, manage and maintain applications throughout the life cycle of deployment. In addition, users can create and manage access rights and rights of access through multi-level production systems. They can also set user IDs to monitor the use and cost of the project reviews, and department.

cloud servers allows you to resize horizontally by balancing load across multiple web interfaces. They have a management function of the template makes it easy to balance the load. You can also identify new servers clouds identical for tests without sacrificing your original cloud. A dedicated server includes the construction of a new server, installing the software, then copy data to new hardware. It can be expensive because you have to employ redundant hardware in months or years.

Cloud hosting services provide all the necessary tools to manage their servers. It is easy to perform tasks such as browsers of your backup, restore, firewall, monitoring, scale and private network. With dedicated servers, hosting services can be very expensive because you have to pay each payment, such as leasing a PBX. In addition, with each rental, you will have a monthly contract or annual contract. When it comes to choosing a server for your business web site, you should check the value of the servers in the cloud, since they are highly profitable and high-performance servers that can meet the demands of the enterprise server. Furthermore, the quality of hosting services that are determined to ensure that all needs are met server.

Cloud storage is a system of online storage where data is stored on virtual servers rather than dedicated servers. Hosting companies have large data centers and people are saved and people are often also a storage space in the lease as well. Storage resources in the cloud is also virtualized data center operators based on customer needs and pool storage resources, clients can use resources according to their needs.

Often, a gateway to cloud storage can be used for offices and the customer, which makes the device to operate at a normal storage device. The gateway servers are translated into standard cloud hosting API-based storage protocol data block or file-based storage protocol.

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Numecent, a stealth startup building a patented “cloudpaging” technology, just raised $2 million in Series A funding from undisclosed corporate investors. The $2 million tranche is a part of a larger $10 million funding round, and is in addition to the $7.5 million in seed funding the company has already raised from private investors. Exact details as to what Numecent is developing are not known, beyond a general description of what “cloudpaging” means, as provided by the company.

The term “cloudpaging,” says Numecent, refers to a specific (and patented) “push-pull” paging technology which allows software instructions and data to be demand-paged from the cloud in real-time. The company claims that cloudpaging will allow any software, app or game to pull this data on-demand to any connected device in a secure, metered and virtualized fashion. The company is even positioning cloudpaging as the successor to streaming, and holds 10 patents for application streaming and virtualization through its subsidiary, Endeavours Technologies. It’s also worth mentioning that Endeavors Technologies was spun out of a think tank for a DARPA project.

Numecent is also now claiming to have high-profile testers who have begun to deploy its hybrid-cloud solution in mission-critical environments. The company plans to exit stealth in March, at which time the company will reveal more details about the cloudpaging technology itself and how it’s being used.

Alongside the funding news, Numecent also announced that Osman Kent, previously the co-founder of 3Dlabs, has joined the company as the new CEO.

Earlier this month, Numecent launched an “application jukebox” for Red Hat, which allows traditional Windows applications to be delivered to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization-hosted desktops.

One of the fastest growing enterprise software companies is Sydney-based Atlassian, which makes product management software for software development (including JIRA and Confluence). CEO Scott Farquhar and president Jay Simons were in New York City last week talking to investment bankers exploring an eventual IPO and dropped by the TCTV studio.

Revenues for calendar year 2011 (which is different than its fiscal year) were $102 million, up 35 percent, Farquhar tells me in the video. And the company has been profitable for years. The company employs 450 people worldwide, mostly in Sydney and San Francisco, where it just opened cavernous new offices. But none of them are in sales. “We have no sales people,” says Farquhar.

Atlassian was bootstrapped for 8 years before it took a huge $60 million dollop of venture capital from Accel in 2010. The company boasts 17,000 paying enterprise customers with between 5 million and 10 million daily active users.

In October, Atlassian dramatically reduced its entry-level pricing from $150 a month for 10 users to $10 a month for 10 users. Watch the video to learn more.

Cloud storage platform Box (which you no longer have to refer to as Box.net as it now owns Box.com!), has seen incredible growth over the past year, both on the consumer and on enterprise side. Much of the growth has been driven by mobile, with the company seeing a 140% increase in mobile customer implementations each month in 2011, leading the total number of new mobile users to jump up by 171% monthly.

By year end 2011, Box’s total mobile user count reached 1.9 million, up 9 times over 2010. But nowhere has mobile’s impact been more felt than in the enterprise, where iOS and Android especially have driven business adoption of not just mobile apps, but the cloud in general.

In terms of mobile platform adoption, there were more than 1.2 million iOS app downloads in 2011, 462,000 on Android, 200,000 webOS downloads and 51,000 on PlayBook. (Yes, PlayBook!) These numbers include both consumer and enterprise growth combined, however.

But when Box tracks its enterprise sales, it tracks the reason for buying, and this past year, the company found there was a 30x increase in the number of enterprise deployments that were mobile-driven. So while mobile user growth may be up 9x, the sheer need for mobile connectivity is what’s driving its business. The mobile needs of the enterprise is affecting the company’s bottom line with Box seeing 3x revenue growth over the past year, as large organizations, like Procter & Gamble, McAfeee and AAA for example, signed up for the service. The enterprise customer base, meanwhile, grew by 2x and now includes 82% of the Fortune 500.

In the enterprise, iOS (iPhone, iPad) saw the most adoption, with 5 times year-over-year growth from 2010. Interestingly, Android is growing at a faster rate: 7 times year-over-year growth, even though it isn’t the largest mobile platform Box supports (iOS is, and more so the iPad).

Specific industry verticals are adopting Box at a faster rate than others, too, with the biggest jump coming from the Food and Beverage industry (up 7x), where Box counts Red Bull, Dole, PBR and others as customers. Because of the workflow-based nature of many of the industry’s tasks – like tracking product from the field to processing – this group was also big on the building custom applications on top of Box’s platform. Box now has over 130 apps integrated with its service and 5,000 developers.

Meanwhile, more traditional use cases involving knowledge worker and document sharing led to greater adoption in Financial Services (up 3.5x) and Health Care (up 3x) in 2011.

What’s interesting about these mobile adoption trends is the impact they’re having on cloud adoption. Says Box’s VP of Mobile, Matthew Self, “one of the big drivers we see for mobile adoption – and one of the big reasons why mobile deployment growth was actually higher than the user growth – has to do with the fact that enterprises are adopting cloud services because of mobile.”

“Mobile adoption is actually driving cloud adoption,” he says, “which isn’t totally obvious. But when you get to mobile, it isn’t about Microsoft anymore. Less than half of the computing endpoints in the world are Microsoft now…They’ve forced CIO’s to defect from Microsoft’s own entrenched postion, which is sort of bizarre. But it’s not like a CIO can say, ‘oh, I’ll just wait a year or two on mobile.’”

Ouch! (But totally right).

This exit from the Microsoft era is all the more evident in smaller to medium-sized businesses, which by their very nature, have had to be scrappy, turning to low-cost, easy-to-manage cloud services as an alternative to a traditional I.T. infrastructure. But the tide is turning. More enterprises are arriving at Box, which often represents their first or second toe dipped into the water of cloud computing. Maybe they use Salesforce, or some small cloud service on the side, but many are still Microsoft-based organizations running Exchange and Office.

Box then slides into place as a supplement to traditional systems like SharePoint then becomes the system of choice, leaving businesses to wonder why they still need the old system at all. In 2012, Box plans to help those folks cut the cord even more by implementing a new feature that will allow mobile users the ability to not only access, but also edit and comment on documents via the Box mobile app without needing another app supporting that file type installed on their mobile device. (For example, edit a spreadsheet on iOS with Apple’s Numbers app).

Self says Box’s move here is reflective of the move to more “cloud-augmented” apps, which he points out is already a big trend in consumer’s mobile computing behavior.

“These are apps where the bulk of the interesting work is happening in the cloud, not the mobile device at all,” he explains. For example, Apple’s Siri, where the voice recognition and processing work is happening in the cloud, and the iPhone is just recording what you say then playing back the results. Or Amazon’s Silk browser, which runs in the cloud, where only the UI (the presentation) is taking place on the mobile device. This too, mirrors Box’s plan for mobile: use HTML5 and web services for the business logic, while the UI/presentation layer renders through native code.

Combined with an increasing acceptance of using secure mobile apps (versus securing the whole mobile platform, e.g. RIM/BlackBerry Server solutions), it’s going to be easier than ever for enterprise customers to cut legacy connections altogether.

turing0 writes "As a former bioinformatics researcher and CTO I have some sad news to start 2012 with. Though I am sure not a surprise to the Slashdot crowd, it appears we — or our demographic — made up more than 75% of the Google Health userbase. Today marks the end of Google Health. (Also see this post for the official Google announcement and lame excuse for the reasoning behind this myopic decision.) The decision of Google to end this excellent service is a fantastic example of what can represent the downside of cloud services for individuals and enterprises. The cloud is great when and while your desired application is present — assuming it's secure and robust — but you are at the mercy of the provider for longevity." (Read more, below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With so much personal data being kept on the cloud, including government and health records or your source code, do you have any concerns about it falling into the wrong hands? Do you think the cloud's benefits are outweighed by continuing security issues?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.