As more organizations turn to the cloud, the need for an effective set of industry standards is becoming ever more pressing. There is a clear divide between those who argue for implementation of cloud standards and those who argue against. At the heart of this debate is a clear need to balance the benefits of having a standard with the call for a sustained pace of innovation. The argument against cloud computing standards relies on […]
Cloud Computing
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The “cloud” is where we’ve been sharing our lives and storing our files for awhile now, but with so many cloud services there’s much more you can do that may not have crossed your mind. Here are our top ten ideas. 10. Write in Public Without a Blog Everyone and their mother has a blog nowadays, but how often is it really updated? And even then, how often are people saying anything worthwhile? That said, […]
Thanks to innovations in virtualization and the cloud, the IT storage landscape has morphed wildly over the past few years. Organizations now have the power and flexibility to store data to suit not only their budgets and equipment, but also the mobility of their employees and customers. These technologies and others made great headway over the past year and should continue to transform technology in 2011, according to experts. “The virtualization of more and more […]
The new year is here, and many experts in the SQL Server universe see some big developments ahead. Predictions for the SQL Server market range from fiercer competition for Microsoft in the cloud, as more companies are moving from premises-based servers, to widespread adoption of virtualization technology and the growing popularity of self-service business intelligence (BI) tools. “First and foremost, I think we are going to see continued increase in vendors such as Microsoft, Amazon, […]
Teradici and Red Seal, developers of secure desktop virtualization technology and continuous security infrastructure monitoring, respectively, have formed investment and development agreements with In-Q-Tel, the CIA-based investment firm. The Central Intelligence Agency has made new investments in companies that provide desktop virtualization and continuous monitoring technology to support the work of the U.S. intelligence community. In-Q-Tel, the CIA-based investment firm that identifies technology for use by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, has formed investment […]
Security takes precedence over financial return Companies are still wary about the security aspect of cloud computing and want more reassurance before investing in the technology. That’s according to new research from SunGard which found that only 15 percent of chief financial officers (CFOs) would be happy to entrust their company’s data to cloud providers. To no great surprise, financial accounting systems were the applications that CFOs were most reluctant to see despatched to the […]
One of the issues we focus on in conversations with companies evaluating moving to cloud computing is the importance — and challenge — of capacity planning in a cloud environment. The bottom line is that cloud computing is going to make capacity planning much more difficult for CIOs who intend to maintain all or most of their company’s computing in internal data centers. Moreover, utilization becomes a highly risk-associated topic as utilization risk is shifted […]
Cloud computing may be defined as location independent computing whereby shared servers — for the purposes of this article, external to the enterprise — provide resources, software, and data to computers and other devices on demand. Cloud computing may have started out as an emerging trend that only IT professionals could get excited about (or fear), but it has quickly become one of the most important paradigm shifts in business today. C-suite executives on both […]
For much of its existence, Woodward Governor Co. has been building fuel nozzles and other parts for jet aircraft engines the old-fashioned way — carefully designing them, building physical prototypes out of raw materials, conducting tests and finally creating production parts. Typically, it took the Fort Collins, Colo., company weeks to produce workable plans for specialized new nozzle designs. Now, that time frame has been trimmed down to several hours by cutting out the steps […]
The market downturn gave impetus to cloud computing by forcing organizations to find new ways to press forward with IT innovation despite their constrained resources—so they could continue to improve their competitive position, boost productivity and gain actionable market insight. In other words, after years of talk about aligning IT and business, alignment has quickly become life and death. If IT can’t reduce costs while keeping a step ahead of an increasingly dynamic business climate, […]
Contract negotiation skills are one of the top three required abilities for information security professionals dealing with cloud computing, according to new research. This is one finding highlighted in early survey results from the 2011 (ISC)2 Global Information Security Workforce Study (GISWS) conducted by industry analysts Frost & Sullivan and covering more than 100 countries. According to the survey, 73 per cent of the more than 7,500 (ISC)2 certified professionals, participating in the study, said […]
Microsoft today named some of the country’s top “cloud-friendly” U.S. cities. The rankings are based on the results of an extensive survey in which 2,000 IT decision makers nationwide discussed how they are adopting and using cloud computing. The forecast for cloud computing across key U.S. cities calls for new lines of business, more need for IT services, and potential job growth, according to a new survey released today by Microsoft. Microsoft released the results […]
Moving a company’s server room and local applications to the cloud can eliminate hassles and reduce expenses if you proceed with a good strategy. Cloud computing enables small businesses to offload all sorts of heavy tech lifting to a third party, freeing you to focus your efforts (and local storage space) on core services and clients. Cloud computing can mean many things, but in essence it describes IT tools delivered through Internet-based services. A growing […]
The dominant desktop paradigm will finally wither and a thousand new personal computing models will bloom. Everyone knows the Windows desktop monolith is breaking into pieces. Yes, Microsoft is still making money, mainly from the big rollover to Windows 7 — but where does Redmond go from here? And which alternatives are truly viable? This is the year when we’ll start to find out. New, overlapping client computing paradigms are popping up all over the […]
Every year or two, we face a new unstoppable IT trend that threatens the way we handle network security . Think instant messaging, USB keys, social media sites, and mobile computing. There are more on the way, as I wrote about last week, including Web 2.0 and cloud computing. Tracking these new computing trends is important for IT admins: They represent a potential swath of new opportunities for attackers to breach systems, steal data, and […]
When server virtualization was still in its infancy, servers were primarily using block-based SANs for network disk storage, and that was sufficient at the time. Then things began to change. The underlying SAN infrastructure began to feel the strain. SAN has inherent limitations in virtual server environments, while NAS has inherent strengths. Virtual machines (VMs) have dramatically transformed the way IT organizations approach the computing architecture. Initially employed to provide greater efficiency, server virtualization has […]
The cloud will be discussed everywhere in 2011, but how much money actually is there in the cloud business? In a live webcast event this week, analyst firm IDC’s Research Vice-President Cindy Borovick forecast a $1.6 billion cloud market in 2011. Borovick’s forecast is not for the entire cloud services ecosystem, but rather is a subset of IDC’s data center and networking forecast. The $1.6 billion figure is IDC’s projection for network equipment revenues used […]
Cloud computing has been a buzzworthy topic for some time, as more and more enterprises move their computing infrastructure and software to cloud-based solutions. While the cloud continues to be a smart option for them, it’s also arguably even more beneficial for small businesses, whose resources can be miniscule. First of all, what exactly is cloud computing? To take a broad definition, Focus Research describes it as “the ability for organizations to share critical computing […]
Cloud computing and business process outsourcing (BPO) will become increasingly popular with government IT departments during 2011 as funding cuts start to bite, according to analyst firm Ovum. In a report entitled 2011 Trends to Watch: Government Technology, analyst Jessica Hawkins predicts that consumption-based technologies that are delivered through the cloud will grow in use due to the cost-savings they can offer. “Because cloud delivery means a lot of infrastructure is owned and operated by […]
If the deployment rate of server virtualization continues at 2010’s pace, virtual systems administrators are certainly going to have their hands full this year, many IT industry executives believe. The reason is obvious: As the size and scope of the virtual environment grows, the more complex it becomes and the more difficult to manage and optimize. This situation has made virtual stall a reality, says Bryan Semple, chief marketing officer at VKernel, an early virtualization […]
For the past few years, cloud computing has been hailed as the ‘silver bullet’ that will transform the way organizations manage their local and global IT applications. By placing data and software in ‘the cloud’, there is the promise of consistent, up-to-date information delivered to every user, combined with potentially huge cost savings through economies of scale. Cloud has a particular appeal to Finance Directors, with vendors selling the vision of lower cost “commodity pricing”, […]
Now is the time for virtual desktops. There are a lot of people in the industry saying that you should wait. We ask why? There are serious savings in support and energy costs to be garnered along with significant other factors that will increase agility and lower TCO. Don’t wait. If you follow the advice and steps outlined below, and build a solid business case, you will be successful. Virtual desktops are the hottest virtualization […]
SMBs looking at cloud computing – don’t overlook hosted and managed services Almost every child has looked at a cloud and said, “That cloud looks like a _____.” The filled-in blank often becomes the point of highly subjective argument. In much the same way, IT professionals continuously seek to fill in the blank with an understanding of “cloud computing” and we’ve learned that what you see in your cloud has a lot to do with […]
Cloud computing vendors may be popping the bubbly well into the new year, as a handful of promising cloud computing startups have started off 2011 with sizeable financial injections to get the ball rolling. And the early influx of cash to kick off 2011 comes on the heels of many more cloud computing up-and-comers that closed out 2010 with late-year funding to help them dig their claws deeper into the channel. The windfall of cash […]
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The Gartner Magic Quadrant isn’t an entirely accurate, or even objective, measure of who’s who in any given IT field. If you haven’t heard, the analyst firm’s ranking system has been called out as being everything from merely subjective (as opposed, I guess, to being only partially subjective like every other list of industry leaders) to rewarding vendors that have paid Gartner the most money for its […]
The Economic Model for Enterprise IT can be thought of as the Business & IT linkage of demand and supply. In particular, it is the interactive dynamics of consumption of IT resources by the business and the fulfillment behavior of processing by IT. An economic model blueprint for Enterprise IT must orientate service delivery (people, process and technology) as a digital supply chain. This supply chain must adhere and be managed against the IT economic […]
Cloud computing has long been touted as a way to help entrepreneurs conduct businesses by housing data and computer hardware over the Internet. While using the cloud is pretty straightforward, getting a cloud infrastructure in place can take some time and work. Thankfully, there are many cloud computing services companies that can help build the right infrastructure for your business to migrate data, hardware and software to the cloud. “The last thing small businesses want […]
Many companies are considering updating or replacing their current telephone systems in order to move to IP telephony or to have access to other modern features, such as UC (unified communications). As is true with other IT-enabled functions, a significant percentage of these companies are exploring or considering remotely hosted alternatives to premises-based PBXes. Several Focus community members have experiences and insights into hosted PBXes that can help decision-makers at these companies to make more […]
The Motorola Atrix smartphone introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the first of what may soon prove to be a broad generation of handsets that can double as a laptop computer. The phone has a hypervisor embedded in it that can receive and run the presentation of a Windows application on a large screen. In that sense Atrix is more than a smartphone. It’s a device intelligent enough to sub as a PC […]
A lack of proper understanding appears to be dissuading many small businesses from investing in cloud computing, it has been reported. According to Clodagh Murphy, director at Eclipse, it is not so much cost issues which put off such enterprises – rather the apparent complexity of the technology. She said that cloud computing must be explained to business owners in plain English which they can fully understand. Ms Murphy added that when embracing the cloud, […]