Cloud Computing News & Articles

This week, after announcing its release in March, SAP has put BusinessObjects 10 GRC on general release, Google gets some more security certification, BMC offers cloud Lifecycle Management to mitigate the risks associated with cloud computing outages, and Hostway offers email encryption.

After everything that has happened around the OpenOffice fork last year, the Document Foundation has announced the release of a version that is suitable for enterprises, Google Docs got a makeover, Kofax and Atalasoft have released an imaging SDK, Metalogix offers archiving for Exchange and Marex releases Filebound Express.

The runup to the release of IBM’s (news, site) LotusLive Symphony has been a long one and we’re still no closer to being offered a release date other than sometime in the second half of 2011. However, Big Blue has been working on the project, and has now released its third technical preview of the product.

Users of cloud-based Google Apps and Google App Engine can sleep a little more soundly at night knowing that their data is safe and secure with Google. Google (news, site) announced that they have completed SSAE-16 Type II and ISAE 3402 Type II security audits.

For the second time this week, there have been releases in the document imaging space. Earlier in the week, Nuance announced the release of PaperPort Professional 14. This time it’s the turn of Kofax (news, site), which released Atalasoft DotImage 10.

GRC just keeps ticking away. By far the biggest thing this week was the release of this year’s Gartner’s GRC Magic Quadrant, while Symantec finally kept good on its earlier promise and released Enterprise Vault 10. Android security was also under the microscope by Lockout, while Lockpath and Network Frontiers released a badly needed dictionary of compliance. We also looked at process and policy in e-Discovery.

The Law of the Instrument states "...if the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything as if it were a nail."

When you examine the content management world's zeitgeist, the tool that has all the buzz is the shiny hammer of SharePoint. Yes, SharePoint, a fascinating "free product" that supports an $8 billion a year -- and growing -- ecosystem. By fully embracing Microsoft enterprise site licenses, IT administrators have used SharePoint to justify stable budgets for IT and doubled down their bets on on-premise software. I admit, there is some appeal in having a single vendor to work with, a single price to pay and being able to physically hug your server, should you so choose. But given the benefits of cloud computing like redundancy, cost savings and speed of deployment, is it worth the trade off? Is SharePoint really the only strategy you need?

It may be the holiday season, but there’s still activity in the document management software space. This week Nuance connects scanning to over 20 different clouds, Workshare upgrades its document exchange abilities, Kofax took a look at document capture in the enterprise, while AnyDocs got healthy. We also took a look at what exactly business process management is.

IBM (news, site) is looking to build on its recent acquisitions. In recent weeks, we’ve seen it announce the release of products built around Coremetrics and Unica on one hand, and Netezza on the other. It has now announced a new services lab that will enable clients to expand their real-time analytics and software automation products.

This week PaperThin (news, site) announced the release of CommonSpot CloudTM, a SaaS version of its Web content management system. The new platform was designed to enable marketers to create and deploy Web experiences with a quickness independent of IT. 

In a financial reporting season that can’t have disappointed anyone, Autonomy has been no exception. The British infrastructure software company reported revenues of US$ 256 million for the second quarter of 2011, up 16% from the same quarter in the previous year.

It may be the summer, but there’s still life in the document management space. Fujitsu has announced it is taking its SaaS document services to Japan, CNG offers financial people an easier way to keep their documents compliant, Google Docs increases storage space, Box.net offers LincDoc and Wolfram has produced a new doc format.

With the release of Office 365 and all Microsoft’s talk about the cloud and its potential, it was striking that many of the cloud migration tools for MS cloud products recently have been from third-party vendors. However, Microsoft has announced the release of Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 6.0 that appears to be redressing that balance.

In information management at the moment, two of the real buzzwords are cloud computing and Big Data. In both areas, IBM (news, site) is a contender for top spot, with two simultaneous, separate, but related developments. One is the launch of cloud-based collaboration services for government, the other is that it has upped the speed at which Big Data can be managed.

You knew it was coming, they blogged about it. DotNetNuke (news, site) has announced the official release of DNN 6.0. The first thing that will catch your eye -- the new interface.