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Tencent Expands Its Cloud-Computing Services in U.S. – Fox Business

Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings opened its first data center in Silicon Valley this week, expanding cloud computing services into the U.S. even as American companies complain they face growing restrictions when doing the same in China.

With Wednesday's statement, Tencent becomes the second Chinese company to open such a center in the U.S.'s technological heartland. Alibaba Group Holding, China's largest e-commerce company, already operates two data centers there and a third on the East Coast.

Alibaba and Tencent are boosting their cloud-computing businesses as they seek to tap the growth of Chinese companies and their demand for computing power overseas. Cloud platforms provide additional storage, computing, and networking resources to help firms grow at lower costs. Data is stored and accessed over the internet, reducing the need for on-site servers.

Tencent's statement comes a month after a group of U.S. lawmakers wrote a letter to China's Ambassador Cui Tiankai in Washington over China's restrictions on cloud computing for foreign companies.

Beijing already requires overseas cloud providers to form joint ventures to operate in the country. It has proposed requiring them to turn over essentially all ownership and operations to Chinese partners, the lawmakers argued in the letter viewed by The Wall Street Journal. This could result in the transfer of valuable U.S. intellectual property, according to the letter.

"The access for foreign cloud companies in the market today is much more restrictive than it has been in the past," said Jake Parker, the vice president for China operations at the U.S.-China Business Council, an organization that represents 200 U.S. multinational companies operating in the country.

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In November last year, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology put out a draft notice of an industry regulation that would potentially shift a lot of operational control to the Chinese partner, he said. The final version has yet to be released, Beijing-based Parker said. The MIIT wasn't immediately available for comment.

Further restrictions on access to the cloud industry would put more strain on relations between China and foreign tech companies, already terse as the world's second-largest economy has increased censorship and demanded more control over data and operations in recent years.

China's market for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) grew 68% to $1.47 billion in 2016, according to industry researcher IDC. Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. have to provide services in China through joint ventures with local partners, and lag Alibaba Cloud in the nation, despite strong market share elsewhere. Alibaba controls 40% of the market, while Microsoft, the biggest foreign cloud provider in the Asian nation, has 5%, IDC data shows.

Tencent, which runs WeChat, China's largest social messaging platform with 889 million monthly active users, said it is increasing the number of data centers world-wide as demand for cloud services from the online gaming, internet finance and other web-related industries grows. The Shenzhen-based company said it would also open four other centers in Frankfurt, Moscow, Mumbai and Seoul, and has plans to expand its Silicon Valley center.

As more information and personal data is stored in the cloud, there is a heightened concern among lawmakers about the security of that data.

Chinese cloud companies will increasingly face security concerns from governments when they seek to expand further overseas, said Daniel Liu, a research analyst at Canalys in Shanghai.

Companies like Tencent and Alibaba can ease those concerns in new markets through partnerships with local firms, he said, citing a tie-up between Alibaba and SoftBank Group Corp. in Japan. "Outside of China remains a challenged market for Chinese cloud players," he said.

Dan Strumpf contributed to this article

Write to Liza Lin at Liza.Lin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 26, 2017 07:29 ET (11:29 GMT)

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How the cloud wars are beginning to enter a new phase – Cloud Tech

Opinion Imagine a business where the product keeps getting better and better, like storage space and video quality, but the prices keep falling steadily as the product continues to improve. Its happening in cloud computing and this race to zero has people in the industry deeply worried.

The current leader, Amazon Web Services (AWS), slashed their prices an astounding 44 times in the past six years. Amazons strategy, it seems, is more of a low cost, high volume model. This strategy seems to be working according to research company Gartner, who reported that AWS stores twice as much customer data as the next seven leading public cloud companies. AWS profits in 2016 grew over 120% and sales grew over 60%, extinguishing any assumptions that AWS was a loss leader product for Amazon as a whole.

Amazon is betting at such a low cost, enterprise businesses will treat cloud services like you treat products at Walmart. With such low prices on products, youll keep adding more to your cart. The other leading cloud providers, like Microsoft and Google, are willing to keep up and match Amazons prices, with Gartner analyst Raj Bala describing it as aggressive, even punitive.

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, has predicted that storage will be free and unlimited in the future. If the current race to lower prices continues, it looks as if Levies prediction will soon come to pass. This means, however, that cloud companies have to build in other functionality besides storage alone. From security improvements to converged storage where data storage is combined with data computing, cloud companies are looking for related and integrated services they can charge for.

In the race to differentiate, Microsoft rolled out a hybrid cloud which integrates into its subscription based Office 365 program in April 2016. Satya Nadella, Microsofts CEO, explained how this integration works. If a certain calculation needs massive resources, the transaction can be handed off to its cloud products to provide a sort of turbo charge, he said. This strategy might be very successful, since many people already use Office at work and the ease of integration might be the incentive for companies to choose Azure over AWS.

Googles Cloud Platform has strengths with its big data analytics capability, but also has some restraints as it is unable to integrate with existing data platforms, making it more difficult for late adopters to convert to the service. As Kurt Marko explains, it can be a poor choice for cloud laggards and organisations looking for a place to offload legacy virtual infrastructure and applications.

In March this year, IBM announced it was rolling out more cloud offerings in an effort to compete with AWS and to make the point that storage is not the aspect of the cloud which enterprises really need. One study predicts 85% of enterprise businesses will move to multi-cloud architectures by 2018. IBMs new products utilise Watson to help clients manage and leverage data stored between multiple clouds.

One analyst, Rodney Nelson at Morningstar Inc., questioned how effective IBMs rollout would be, noting the major cloud vendors are flooding the market with new features on a consistent basisall have moderate to major leads on IBM in that regard. IBMs most competitive idea may be moving focus away from offering cloud services and moving towards offering services that will integrate with all cloud providers.

The intensely competitive cloud computing environment is volatile, with new companies throwing their proverbial hat in the ring, such as the Chinese company Alibaba. Its also pushing out current competitors, with telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T losing market share due to lack of expensive yet impactful infrastructure investment and innovations.

There are so many facets which will affect the final outcome of the cloud computing industry. From the businesses who are quickly trying to implement and then harness the clouds potential, there are CIOs who are actually choosing the cloud provider, business people who are learning how to use big data and cloud computing for business intelligence, to companies who are fighting for the biggest piece of the pie and are investing millions to stay competitive. Its impossible to predict what the final outcome will be.

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Top Public Cloud Providers – Datamation

According toIDCthe public cloud computing market is on pace to double over the next four years, climbing from around $70 billion in 2015 to more than $141 billion by 2019. That huge market offers a tremendous opportunity for those companies that establish themselves as leaders in the cloud computing space.

So clearly, the top cloud computing companies are addressing a large and growing market. In turn, they work in concert or actually provide a wide array of cloud-related products and services, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service solutions.

Given the enormity of the infrastructure needed, its no surprise that leadership in the public cloud market has coalesced in the hands of a few winners. To compete in the public cloud it takes an investment in the tens of billions of dollars, including the legions of tech talent to support that infrastructure.

Consequently, if a public cloud provider is not already in the race by 2017, its going to be a very steep uphill climb to be a player in the future. There are, to be sure, a few dark horses. Alibaba clearly has ambitions, and possibly some smaller players will merge and offer some kind of high service option a public cloud boutique, of sorts and be a contender. But its generally understood that leadership in the public cloud market is a closed club.

Some backstory: Amazon set up its Amazon Web Services division to be a public cloud provider in 2006 (though the division itself pre-dated that). For several years, legacy technology companies resisted the move to cloud. They had a vest investment in the classic model of packaged software a model that the cloud helped to disrupt.

As the enterprise transitioned to the cloud, there was a period where many thought private cloud would be the dominant model. This view worked in the favor VMware, whose virtualization software is a default choice for in-house data centers. But with time surely by 2010 or so most vendors realized the inevitability of public cloud computing. More and more businesses saw the advantage of renting out an external computing infrastructure. It was easier and offered fewer headaches.

Most important, as it developed, public cloud offered competitive tools that few businesses could afford to develop in-house. For instance, as of 2017, one of these competitive tools is artificial intelligence, delivered as a service though the cloud. Very few enterprises can develop the sophisticated AI tools that the public cloud vendors now offer as part of their tool set. So the public cloud has morphed from a way to offload your computing to a rich source of advanced competitive advantage. In short, if a business is not leveraging the public cloud, it is falling behind.

What all this means is that the public cloud providers you see listed below play a very vital role in shaping todays enterprise IT landscape. The way they develop new tools, the prices they post, the level of service they offer each of these factors influences the services that their many customers can in turn offer their customers.

Bottom line: the race for leadership among the leading public cloud companies is the race to dominate enterprise IT itself. There is no doubt it will be fought with the deepest investment possible in the years ahead.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)is the undisputed market leader in cloud computing. According to Amazon's most recentquarterly financial report, AWS generated $2.9 billion in revenue for the quarter ending June 30, 2016, up from $1.8 billion during the same quarter last year.

The company offers a complete range of IaaS and PaaS services. Among the best known are its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Beanstalk, Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Block Store (EBS), Glacier storage, Relational Database Service (RDS), and DynamoDB NoSQL database. It also offers cloud services related to networking, analytics and machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile services, development, cloud management, cloud security and more.

It's a little more difficult to figure out how much revenueMicrosoftgenerates from cloud computing. In itsfiscal 2016 Q4report, the company said that its "Intelligent Cloud" revenue increased 5 percent to reach $6.7 billion. That makes it seem like Microsoft does more cloud business than Amazon, except that Microsoft includes its very substantial server revenues along with its Azure cloud computing service in the Intelligent Cloud category. The company has previously said that its Azure business is on a $10 billion annual run rate, or around $2.5 billion in revenue per quarter. Most market analysts put it in the number two spot behind Amazon.

In addition to its Azure IaaS and PaaS offerings, Microsoft also has several SaaS offerings, including its Office 365 products, the online versions of its Dynamics line of enterprise software and its online developer tools.

Although it hasn't always been considered one of the "big three" cloud computing vendors,IBM'scloud business has been coming on strong. In its most recent quarterly report,IBM saidthat its "cloud-as-a-service revenue was up 50 percent," and had an annual run rate of $6.7 billion.

IBM's most visible cloud service is its Bluemix PaaS, which is aimed primarily at enterprise development teams. The company also a lot of enterprise software on a SaaS basis, and it sells cloud infrastructure, cloud management tools and cloud managed services.

Googledoesn't break out its cloud computing numbers, so it's very difficult to tell how much revenue its Cloud Platform generates. In a recent report,Synergyestimated that Google is fourth in the IaaS and PaaS market with a 4 percent share of the market. The report also noted that Google's cloud revenue is climbing rapidly, surging 108 percent year-over-year in 2015.

Like Amazon and Microsoft, Google offers a very full range of IaaS and PaaS services that span compute, storage, networking, big data, machine learning, developer tools and security. Some of its best-known cloud offerings include Compute Engine, App Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Storage and BigQuery.

Please be aware when looking at this comparison of the leading public cloud providers: few of the services truly line up in an apples-to-apples similar style. Whether its storage or container or analytic technologies the differences between the top public cloud vendors are distinct enough to not fit completely in a chart. Still, the chart below should help you get started.

AWS

Microsoft Azure

Google

IBM

Compute

EC2

Virtual Machines

Compute Engine

App Engine

Bare Metal Servers

Virtual Servers

Power8

Storage

S3

EBS

EFS

Glacier

Blob Storage

Queue Storage

File Storage

Disk Storage

Cloud Storage

Persistent Disk

Object Storage

Block Storage

File Storage

Mass Storage Servers

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Backup

Site Recovery

Backup

Database and Data warehouse

Aurora

RDS

DynamoDB

Redshift

Data Lake Store

SQL Database

DocumentDB

Table Storage

SQL Data Warehouse

Cloud SQL

Cloud Bigtable

Cloud Spanner

Cloud Datastore

Data Services

Big Data Hosting

MongoDB Hosting

Riak Hosting

In-Memory Technology

ElastiCache

Redis Cache

Containers

Container Registry

Container Service

Container Registry

Container Service

Container Engine

Container Registry

Container Builder

Containers

Serverless/FaaS

Lambda

Functions

Cloud Functions

OpenWhisk

Analytics

Athena

EMR

Kinesis

HDInsight

Stream Analytics

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Four nines and failure rates: Will the cloud ever cut it for transactional banking? – Cloud Tech

Banks looking to take their cloud plans to the next level are likely to have returned to the drawing board following the latest Amazon Web Services outage, which disrupted the online activities of major organizations from Apple to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. One estimate suggests US financial services companies alone lost $160 million in just four hours. Its been a timely reminder that any downtime is too much in an always-on digital economy, certainly for financial services.

The sobering point is that AWS was still delivering within the terms of its service-level agreement (SLA). This promises 99.99% service and data availability (otherwise known as four nines availability). This may be good enough for a lot of things, but it wont do for banking.

Over a year that 0.01% scope for unavailability equates to almost nine hours of unplanned outage and thats on top of any planned downtime for maintenance or updates. Combine the two and youre looking at more than a days worth of service loss across a 12-month period. Its hardly a recommendation for banks to move critical, live data into the cloud however compelling the business drivers.

Banks need five nines (99.999%) service and data availability the levels aimed for on their own premises. Thats a downtime tolerance of between 0.32 and three seconds per year. And public cloud services are not set up to match that. It would be uneconomical.

Moving real-time transactions into the cloud is the final frontier for traditional regulated financial institutions. And theres no question that they need, and want, to do this. Its vastly more cost-efficient, and its the only way they can hope to compete with nimble financial upstarts, whose agility owes everything to being able to crunch huge numbers at high-speed using someone elses top-of-the-range server farms.

Financial authorities such as the UKs Financial Conduct Authority have already accepted the cloud, which on the face of it gives banks the green light to be more ambitious. But not really, because the issued guidance doesnt bridge the reality gap traditional banks need to get across in other words, the inadequate service level for scenarios other than data archiving or disaster recovery.

In data archiving and backup applications, the clouds appeal hinges on its cost-efficiency, scalability and durability. But durability should not be confused with availability. Even if data is tightly safeguarded, and can be brought back online efficiently after a system crash or other crisis, this adds no value in a live-data scenario. If there is any chance that at some point access may be interrupted, the other merits of cloud dont matter in this context.

And thats why banks havent made the final leap to using cloud in a production environment because these otherwise very viable on-demand data centres cant offer them the very high availability assurances they need.

So banks are stuck. The inability to move core systems and live data into the cloud is costing them competitively in lost market opportunity.

If they could make the leap, it would pave the way foradvanced customer analytics, intelligent service automation, complex stock correlations, and predictive fraud detection: data-intensive applications that demand massive computer power at a scale that their proprietary data centres simply cant deliver.

But AWS and other mainstream cloud infrastructure providers have designed their services and service level agreements to meet the needs of the majority: where the risk of interrupting a mornings business, social feeds or even hedge fund activity, though costly, is at least partly offset by huge infrastructure savings.

Banks absolutely need to be more ambitious and creative in their use of the cloud. Their future differentiation depends on having access to the same computer power, speed and flexible resource as their more nimble, less risk-averse competitors. But they are not going to make the transition until the service levels they rely on for core systems can be delivered.

Inadequate service levels are a significant stumbling block, but lessons will be learnt each time a high-profile cloud service is compromised. In the meantime, barriers to what banks need to do can be overcome. Solving the data availability issue comes down to the way data is synchronized between sites (e.g. primary servers and secondary data centres), so that live data is always available in more than one place at the same time. It sounds impossible, but it isnt.

Achieve this (and at WANdisco we have) and the nines will take care of themselves.

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Taskworld Unveils Exclusive Enterprise Plan with Private Cloud … – IT Business Net

April 26, 2017 --

New York (PRWEB) April 26, 2017

Leading project management app, Taskworld, today announces the launch of new Enterprise plan with unlimited usage, private cloud servers and discounts for educational institutions and non-profits.The app consolidates all files, tasks, messages and analytics related to work in one secure place and now, businesses can access huge benefits from the new options.

1) NEW VIRTUAL PRIVATE CLOUD

In addition to savings and added value, the new Enterprise plan with unlimited usage now offers access to private cloud. With this plan, businesses may choose from 16 geographic regions worldwide including Los Angeles, New York (USA), Frankfurt (Germany), London (UK), Singapore, Seoul (Korea), Tokyo (Japan), Beijing (China) and So Paulo (Brazil). With these dedicated data centers, enterprises experience even faster speeds, and data is encrypted with the utmost security, backed up fully and continuously every hour. The Enterprise plan also includes personalized live demos and onboarding, with priority access to customer support.

"Agility and velocity are essential for businesses looking to scale their success. It's in that spirit that Taskworld offers its Enterprise plan," said Fred Mouawad, CEO of Taskworld. "It is the ultimate solution for enterprises, offering not only the tools for innovation, but added value and room to grow."

Taskworld's Enterprise Plan gives you the opportunity to use Taskworld like never before.

2) DISCOUNTS FOR EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND NON PROFITS

Taskworld's new pricing plans include generous discounts for educational institutions and non-profits.

Educational institutions can now subscribe to an unlimited package that allows schools and universities to add as many students, teachers and admin staff to a workspace for $399/month.

?I have tried many other project management systems, but I settled on Taskworld because of the user friendly interface, their features and their willingness to listen and improve." - Isa Dunaway, Web Administrator - Trinity Episcopal School

Non-profits can now receive a flat 30 percent off on all annual plans.

?Taskworld makes work seamless by allowing everyone to see what needs to be done, how, by whom and by when. I would definitely recommend Taskworld to other managers and non-profit organizations. It made our work life much more easier. We have gained efficiency by saving hours of work every day." - Sean Callaghan, Operations Director - 28TooMany.org

Taskworld's pricing starts at $8 per month for a single person after a 15-day free trial. Downloading the mobile app is free. The platform is available in English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Spanish, Standard Chinese, Bahasa and Thai. For more information about Taskworld, visit http://www.taskworld.com or follow the company on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

ABOUT TASKWORLD

Taskworld Inc., founded in New York in 2012 by serial entrepreneur Fred Mouawad, is a cloud-based task/project management software that is used by thousands of teams and solo users in more than 80 countries.

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/04/prweb14274698.htm.

Source:PRWEB.COM Newswire. All Rights Reserved

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UTC aims to move IT services and storage to cloud – Education Dive

Dive Brief:

Some educational institutions face issues when trying to upend their entire system, overhauling the storage and background systems and the interfaces students and staff use, which Davidson College CIO Raechelle Clemmons says can be a heavy financial load. In terms of expense, it may be an easier sell to universities to begin with cloud storage. Universities could also see cost savings keeping support and repair staff and systems off-site; for example, as the transition from campus cards to mobile apps takes shape, it becomes clear that contracting off-campus can sometimes reduce costs.

Still, there are legitimate concerns over how secure cloud storage can be; the potential pitfalls of a hacked server can be enormous, from malware, to theft of research or harassment of students on their private school accounts. Susan Grajek, the vice president of data, research and analytics at EDUCAUSE, noted last fall that there have been escalations in security breaches on cloud servers used by colleges, but that is likely because the number of colleges employing cloud storage is growing exponentially. She said that with the increase in focus on the cloud, there is also an increase in attention paid to securing that data.

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Galaxy Control Systems embracing the cloud – Security Systems News (blog)

At ISC West 2017 earlier this month, Galaxy Control Systems solidified its commitment to cloud-based solutions with the announcement of its new Cloud Concierge, a cloud-based access control and monitoring solution. Galaxy also just released a new whitepaper this week entitled, Understanding Cloud Services for Access Control, further exemplifying the companys commitment to its customers by providing education and awareness.

Galaxy Control Systems recognized early on that cloud services had the potential to deliver new flexibility and benefits for the security market, Lukas Le, director of Cloud Services, Galaxy Control Systems, told Security Systems News. Le said that Galaxy has been working with cloud and hosted solutions for years to develop a high level of experience and expertise so the company could provide leadership and strong support for its customers.

We have also been watching the market to gauge the increasing level of interest, knowledge and acceptance of this new approach, he explained. Today, we see that the current mature state of the necessary technologies will let us leverage the recent release of our mobile applications while delivering on a business model that is mutually beneficial for the integrator, end user and Galaxy alike.

Security professionalsboth channel and end usersare recognizing the operational and cost benefits of a hosted collaborative access control solution, Rick Caruthers, executive vice president, Galaxy Control Systems, said in the announcement. With Cloud Concierge, weve reduced the complexity to allow resellers to comfortably sell a cost-effective solution to their base without having to assume responsibilities associated with system monitoring and management.

He continued, By joining the Cloud Concierge program, integrators who specialize and excel in their specific areas can focus on what they do best rather than trying to provide an end-to-end solution themselves. Best of all, by working with trusted partners to deploy, administer and maintain systems, end users can devote their time and energy to their core business and operations.

Unlike a traditional access control system, where door locks and controllers are connected to on-premise access control servers that store the system settings, enrollees and rules, and run the access control software application, with the new Galaxy Control Systems cloud-based access control solution, the access control servers are located remotely.

Door locks and controllers communicate with the remote cloud servers through an encrypted Internet connection, said Le. This arrangement offers security and maintenance advantages, and lets system administrators and service staff access the system from anywhere they can reach the Internet using a standard browser, with no special software required on their devices.

Le said that there is an up-front cost savings for customers who are installing new systems, and for customers with existing systems the choice of timing might be dependent on the age of the on-premise hardware, availability of service and maintenance staff, and similar factors, he noted. Initially, we will focus our efforts on our current dealers, and we expect that continued education using webinars, workshops and similar hands-on methods will continue to increase adoption.

Although there are many customers who understand the cloud, cloud service adoption is primarily about educating our customers about the benefits. Le said. For those already familiar with the benefits of cloud services, its an easy discussionthese customers cant wait to move their access control into the cloud. For those that are less familiar or less comfortable with cloud services, they will need a bit more education to prepare them to make this move.

A good example of Galaxys ongoing commitment to educate and inform is the publishing if its new whitepaper, which provides insights into the growing realm of cloud-based services and how they are changing the way access control systems can be deployed and used. In the paper, readers will find an overview of cloud technology and learn how and where access control cloud services can be applied for maximum economic and security benefits to the organization. The whitepaper also touches on decision factors to assess when considering a move to cloud services, each of which helps inform the decision-making process.

We recognize that not everyone in the security industry has the time or resources to stay current with new technologies, Caruthers said in the whitepapers release. We developed our new whitepaper to provide information for our community, to help accelerate their understanding of the benefits of access control cloud services.

To access the full whitepaper, click here.

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IBM Opens Four New Cloud Data Centers in the United States to Support Growing Demand for Cognitive Capabilities – PR Newswire (press release)

ARMONK, N.Y., April 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the opening of four new IBM Cloud data centers in the United States to support growing enterprise demand for cloud infrastructure that can provide access to services like IoT, blockchain, quantum computing and cognitive.

IBM Cloud's global network includes cloud data centers in key local markets around the world so clients can run their data and applications locally to meet performance and regulatory needs. With data centers across 19 countries and six continents, enterprises can provision cloud infrastructure when and where they need. The new cloud data centers in the U.S. can provide clients with infrastructure to manage and gain insight from their data while also taking advantage of IBM's advanced cognitive services with Watson on the IBM Cloud.

The opening of two new facilities in Dallas, Texas, and two new facilities in Washington, D.C., is a key part of IBM's investment to expand its global cloud footprint in 2017.

As enterprises increasingly turn to AI to generate value from their data, demand for public and hybrid cloud infrastructure will continue to grow. According to IDC, worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure will reach $203.4 billion by 2020, a 21.5% compound annual growth rate nearly seven times the rate of overall IT spending growth. [1]

"IBM is making major investments to expand our global cloud data centers in 2017 and provide the infrastructure necessary for enterprises to run their cognitive, big data, blockchain and IoT workloads," said John Considine, general manager for cloud infrastructure, IBM. "IBM's growing global cloud footprint gives enterprises the flexibility and scale to run their most complex workloads when and where they need."

The new U.S. facilities can help enable companies to digitize business and operations and drive cognitive innovation through the IBM Cloud. Clients of all sizes are already taking advantage of the benefits of the IBM Cloud including Bitlyand Halliburton.

IBM's Expanding Global Cloud FootprintIBM now has more than 55 global cloud data centers in 19 countries spanning six continents to help enterprises manage and gain insight into their data no matter where it resides.The opening of additional facilities in Dallas, Texas, and Washington, D.C., marks 22 IBM data centers across the U.S.

The news reinforces IBM's commitment to expand its cloud presence around the world in 2017 and builds on strong global momentum from 2016. In 2016, IBM opened the industry's first cloud data center in the Nordics as well as a new cloud data center located outside of Seoul in South Korea. Additionally, IBM announced in November that it is tripling its cloud data center capacity in the U.K. with four new facilities.

Each of the four new facilities now open in the U.S. has the capacity for thousands of physical servers and offers a full range of cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services and networking. With services deployed on demand and full remote access and control, customers can create their ideal public, private or hybrid cloud environments.

IBM's cloud infrastructure is cognitive at the core and geared for big data workloads. IBM operates a large fleet of bare metal servers, which are ideal for high performance cloud applications. IBM also offers the latest NVIDIA GPU accelerators including the Tesla P100, Tesla K80 and the Tesla M60 to help enable enterprises to quickly and efficiently run compute-heavy workloads, such as AI, deep learning and high performance data analytics.

About IBM Cloud:

For more information, visit: http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing.

[1] IDC: Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide, February 20, 2017

Media Contact:Sarah Murphy IBM Media Relations 336-337-7584 srmurphy@us.ibm.com

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibm-opens-four-new-cloud-data-centers-in-the-united-states-to-support-growing-demand-for-cognitive-capabilities-300446207.html

SOURCE IBM

http://www.ibm.com

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Cloud QuickBooks: The Best Solution For Financial Management – HostReview.com (press release) (blog)

Cloud QuickBooks: The Best Solution For Financial Management

Accurate and timely management of business finances is one of the most crucial tasks for smooth operations of an organization. Cloud QuickBooks, in this context, has evolved as a brilliant and highly cost effective solution that not only allows busy CPAs, accountants and small business owners to accomplish their accounting operations with ease but also provides them more agility, security and freedom to work from anywhere, anytime.

The modern accounting industry has witnessed a lot of breathtaking advances in recent years, thanks to the ever-expanding landscape of the Cloud technology. Certainly, the evolution of the Cloud computing has opened the floodgates to never-before-seen possibilities and at present, organizations all round the globe are significantly adopting new solutions like cloud storage and application hosting to make the most of their core processes. For most of the small and medium businesses and accounting firms,cloud QuickBookshosting has become the hottest trend as it has been making their operationsmore economical and productive while rendering agility, accuracy, flexibility and freedom to the busy professionals.

QuickBooks: A Brief Introduction

QuickBooks is among the highest rated accounting application that has been around for the longest time. Developed and marketed by Intuit, QB is a cutting edge software suite that combines a whole host of accounting and bookkeeping functionalities into one interactive, user-friendly system to make most complex financial management processes easy, convenient and less time-consuming.

With reference to its core functions, it has been designed to the highest standards that help in precisely tracking income and expenses of a business while alleviating the use of multiple tracking sheets, tables and spreadsheets. To add more to the benefits, it keeps CPAs, accountants and business owners tax return ready all the time. Business users can import or manually enter the entire credit card transactions, banking transactions, and loan transactions in real time.

Cloud QuickBooks Solutions

Choosing Cloud QuickBooks hosting solutions is a very smart and effective way to add more strength to the already powerful accounting software. It gives users the opportunity to use most of the robust features of QuickBooks desktop version from anywhere at any point of time using any internet-connected device. Whether you are at home, office, travelling or holidaying, you can check your business finances and get the needed information with absolute ease. Given that hosted QB solutions is beneficial in more than just a few ways, more and more businesses around the world are switching to cloud.

The Impact of Moving to Moving to QuickBooks Cloud

As mentioned above, upgrading to cloud-based accounting offers myriad of advantages to the CPAs, accounting firms and businesCloud QuickBooksses of all shapes and sizes. Lets check out some of the most significant benefits ofhosting:

The first and foremost advantage of moving to the cloud is anywhere, anytime accessibility. Authorized users can seamlessly access their accounting applications and data irrespective of the geographical location using any kind of device like PC, laptop, tablet or Smartphone.

Businesses dont even need to setup or maintain a full-fledged IT department as hosting solutions gives them the freedom to store, access and use their software via cloud. It eventually saves a great deal of investments, and adds more to the overall profitability of the businesses.

Multiple user accessibility is another great feature that gives cloud QuickBooks hosting a competitive edge. It simply means a large number of users (who have been granted the permission) can access, edit, modify and use the data simultaneously irrespective of their locations. Multi-user feature boost team co-ordinance and productivity in a significant way.

Updates and maintenance are handled by the third party vendors so you need not to worry about anything related to it.

Last but not the least, you are provided unlimited technical support from experts to keep accounting application up and running all the time.

How important is to choose the right hosting service provider?

It is certainly the most important consideration as it can make or break your QB experience. As a professional CPA or business owner, it is extremely crucial for you to do a comprehensive research and evaluate the competency and professionalism of the hosting company depending on various parameters like pricing, services, experience, data security and technical support, among other factors. These all parameters are equally important to be checked so as to make a well-informed decision.

Moving your business to the cloud allows you to reap maximum benefits but at the same time you must be careful enough not to handover your sensitive business data in wrong hands as it can adversely affect the growth and reputation of your company. Thus, before jumping into the bandwagon you must find a reliable service provider that can provide you with the best cloud hosting experience within your estimated budget.

I am Gary Smith, working with SageNext Infotech LLC as a system Engineer SageNext leading QuickBooks Hosting provider. I am an eminent author of topics related to Access QuickBooks Remotely, Peachtree Accounting Online. My suggestion are sought after in cloud computing field.

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Cloud QuickBooks: The Best Solution For Financial Management - HostReview.com (press release) (blog)

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Hybrid the key to cloud benefits – iTWire

Australian enterprises are embracing the cloud and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) but the hybrid cloud (a mix of private and public) is the best route to gain the full benefits of cloud computing.

At a media/analyst briefing hosted by Rob Willis, Regional Managing Director for Oracle Australia and New Zealand, Telsytes senior analyst Rodney Gedda, and Michelle Rapport, Director, Marketing and Customer Experience, at CHOICE discussed the cloud journey from different perspectives.

According to TelsytesAustralian Infrastructure Cloud Market Study 2017 spending on cloud IaaS offerings will pass one billion dollars by 2020, up from $621 million in 2016. By that year, cloud IaaS is expected to be used by 99% of Australian enterprises.

Willis said, "Telsytes study shows strong growth and investment in infrastructure cloud services. While work remains to be done before Australian enterprises will achieve the full IaaS benefits we are seeing increasing numbers of customers powering ahead with transformation powered by the cloud. There is just so much more they can do in the cloud.

Gedda said 34% of Australian enterprises now have a cloud first policy and 49% of these indicated they plan to increase cloud spending demonstrating a determination to achieve the benefits the cloud can offer.

For the 69% remaining, 34% said they have a cloud strategy in the initial phase of deployment and 16% have reached the test and development stage. A further 11% use cloud hosting but lack any integration with on-premise systems and only 9% still have no strategic cloud use.

Hybrid cloud was high on the agenda with 72% either creating a hybrid cloud platform or were investigating the approach. This is an increase from 60% in 2014 and 56% in 2013.

Hybrid cloud aligns well with the preferences of IT leaders when it comes to application hosting. 57% intend to run most of their IT infrastructure in-house and augment it with selective cloud resources for different applications. This compares with 24% that said they intended to run most IaaS in the cloud while also retaining some on-premises infrastructure, said Gedda.

Hybrid allows organisations to be agile when choosing the mix of platforms and services that best meets their requirements, said Willis.

Rapport said that CHOICE, a not-for-profit, membership-funded, consumer advocate had a small IT department and a massive need for IT. After a request for proposal process in mid-2014 to begin its cloud journey it chose Oracle because of its end-to-end stack and data security. Having a small IT team meant that they engaged external consultants and the move took about five months hooking up its three core systems from NetSuite, Salesforce, and Sitecore.

Our aim was to facilitate greater levels of personalisation and communication between Choice and its members with the aim of increasing membership retention and offering more tailored services to them. It has enabled us to know our customers better, she said.

Gedda said, "When a business need arises, rather than having to go through the traditional process of acquiring and deploying new hardware, the services can be obtained rapidly and treated as an operational expense."

Willis said, This is a move we expect to see accelerate with our recent expansion of cloud infrastructure services delivered locally from within Australia. We have democratised the cloud for small to large business alike. We are the only vendor to offer Australian customers a full-stack Platform cloud service and a true hybrid offering with mirrored environments whether in-the-cloud or on-premise, giving customers unprecedented choice and flexibility in how they work.

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Hybrid the key to cloud benefits - iTWire

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