The Storage Wars: Microsoft Hops Onto The Price-shed Bandwagon Last week’s wrap-up of the on-going cloud storage price wars between Google and Amazon ended off with a humble suggestion for Microsoft: wait for nothing and plunge straight into the cloud storage price-drop showdown. It turns out that the software giant actually did make up its mind to join the party real soon, responding to the soaring market competition in style. Microsoft made a pronounced entry into the ballroom by announcing price sheds for its Windows Azure Storage, and that as well, as much as a hefty 28 percent (how’s that for a stunner). “Reducing prices
Microsoft
The Storage Wars: Google and Amazon Battle It Out, Microsoft Turns Turtle The past week witnessed Google and Amazon slashing the price tag associated with their respective cloud storage services one after the other. Interestingly, the price lowering spree from both the giants seems more like an immediate business reflex rather than a thoroughly chalked out pricing plan. Google started the sequel by introducing to the world a novel storage form, the Durable Reduced Availability, priced at a mere $ 0.7 per gigabyte per month. This translated to a price reduction as significant as 20 percent on Google’s storage solutions, setting off shockwaves at the Amazon
Could Google Become The New Microsoft Of Cloud IT? For the past 15 years, Microsoft has been the unquestionable king of business IT. As the market leader in both workstation and server operating systems, Microsoft set the standard and controlled the experience for a generation of both IT professionals and general computer users. Today, even with explosive growth of tech companies like Apple, Citrix, Red Hat, IBM, and VMware, Microsoft maintains a ridiculously large share of the worldwide PC OS market (92%), approximately four fifths of the enterprise office productivity market, and a healthy plurality of server OS sales (48%). No other company has ever
Whitepaper: Microsoft SharePoint On The AWS Cloud – Learn How! Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a complete set of services and tools for deploying Windows® workloads, including Microsoft® SharePoint® Server, on its highly reliable and secure cloud infrastructure platform. This white paper discusses general concepts regarding how to use these services and provides detailed technical guidance on how to configure, deploy, and run a SharePoint Server farm on AWS. It illustrates reference architecture for common SharePoint Server deployment scenarios and discusses their network, security, and deployment configurations so you can run SharePoint Server workloads in the cloud with confidence. This white paper
Is the Office 365 University Suite Really Necessary? We are all used to doing things a certain way and sometimes even the smallest digression from that pattern means that we will not feel comfortable with the new situation. In the case of the Microsoft Office suite the simplest thing like the continuous word count in the lower left corner that MS Word displays or the way Excel has a specific style of formatting the cells, can be the reason why many people have not moved to the free alternate program Open Office. And, even though the day when MS Office
Is The Xbox Music Project Dead On Arrival? Microsoft has recently come up with a service that allows you to handle all your music collection with one single app across as many platforms as you have that are working under the Microsoft license. The program, called Xbox Music, is a bundle of two services, the Xbox Music Pass and the Xbox Music Store. The latter is pretty self-explanatory and the only relevant thing to add about it is that it allows you to pay with money and not Microsoft points. The Xbox Music pass has both a free version and
Cloud Infographic: The Modern Office Freedom from the office and the promise of working from anywhere has been an illusion for many years. However, this illusion now seems to be closer to reality than ever before. Automattic, the hosting company for WordPress.com servers, knows the future is now. They have 123 people that operate like self-employed workers, taking advantage of cloud and mobile apps to communicate across 26 countries and 94 cities. Everyone works from home. The global slowdown has put pressure on all aspects of our society and the IT department is no exception. Company-provided mobile devices are also
What Small Businesses Need To Consider When They Go Cloud Many small businesses are heading to the cloud. This is a fact, considering cloud computing companies are some of the fastest growing in the tech world now. Cloud computing offers promise for lower costs, heightened IT efficiency and security. Truth be told, even though the mentioned benefits are valid, cloud computing is not as glamorous as you might think. As a small business, all factors remaining constant, you must understand the ideal way to manage the benefits for optimal performance. Lower costs don’t necessarily mean efficiency. The following tips should
