This time last year I took the rather brazen step of optimistically suggesting that IT spend would recover from its annus horribilis in the new year. But even with a record number of costly tech disasters around data loss and security, lessons still are not being turned into budget realities. It is apparent to me that, for a great number of organisations, recession may have technically left the building but in the world of IT […]
Brian
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Cloud computing is a transformative delivery model that is changing the way technology vendors, distributors, resellers, and consumers think about, approach, and implement IT systems. What exactly “the cloud” is remains a matter of debate, because there are more than two dozen definitions for cloud computing. Further, how the cloud is applied to the conventional IT channel is relatively uncharted and may ultimately prove difficult to pin down. Escaping the cloud is almost impossible. Cloud […]
Perhaps the most prominent trend this year in outsourced backup was the explosion in the number of managed service providers (MSPs) promoting cloud backup solutions or online backup services. Lauren Whitehouse, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, recalled tracking approximately 250 MSPs two years ago. Today, cloud backup MSPs number in the thousands, from major vendors to regional providers, she noted. “There’s a lot more evangelism going on,” Whitehouse said. “People are demonstrating cost […]
One would think that for something with so much activity around it and so talked about that there would be a concrete definition of what cloud computing is. Instead, depending on who you ask, everyone seems to have their own definition of what cloud computing means. CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA ) vice-president and country manager for Canada, Jimmy Fulton, summed it up best by saying “there hasn’t been a more ambiguous term in the IT […]
The industry reached a “virtual” tipping point in 2009 when, according to IDC, the number of newly installed virtual machines surpassed the number of newly installed physical servers. This inflection point is having a profound impact on how we manage, secure and provision IT resources. No doubt the network will look completely different in just a few years too, but here are five predictions for how virtualisation will change networking in 2011. 1. VLAN technology […]
Many companies may have e-mail, virus scanning or CRM running as a service over the internet, but most organizations are only just starting out when it comes to cloud computing, according to Microsoft. The software giant’s lists ways the nascent cloud market will change in the next few years. Cloud-centric hardware Servers, microprocessors and client devices will evolve as purpose-built systems to address the new paradigm of cloud computing. For example, diskless laptops that store […]
Cloud computing is coming of age in large enterprises, according to a new study of North American and European IT professionals conducted by Management Insight on behalf of CA Technologies. The group surveyed IT professionals in organizations with 1,000 to 10,000-plus employees, revealing that enterprises are active in the cloud, and their virtualization efforts are contributing to broader interest in cloud computing. The results also indicate a shift toward approaching IT using “cloud thinking,” accelerating […]
Technological advances enabling companies to significantly cut costs have led to strong global growth in start-up activity, an American venture capital pioneer told Reuters. “In 40 years in the business, I’ve never seen such a vibrant start-up environment,” Alan Patricof, founder and managing director of Greycroft, told Reuters on a visit to Israel. He added that, in spite of the global financial crisis of the last two years, “there’s a lot of money around and […]
It’s pretty commonly understood that corporate computing has gone through three principal phases: centralized computing first, then the PC Era, then the age of the network. We could easily fit Enterprise 2.0, cloud computing, and lots of other recent developments into the network phase, but I think we’d be missing something if we did so. It became clear to me as I watched the digital economy in 2010 that we had passed a tipping point […]
Cloud computing is all the rage. “It’s become the phrase du jour,” says Gartner senior analyst Ben Pring, echoing many of his peers. The problem is that (as with Web 2.0) everyone seems to have a different definition. As a metaphor for the Internet, “the cloud” is a familiar cliché, but when combined with “computing,” the meaning gets bigger and fuzzier. Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility […]