As a result of two rulings, each effective July 1, 2015, the city of Chicago will attempt to tax the “Cloud” more directly and comprehensibly than any other U.S. jurisdiction. On June 9, 2015, the Chicago Department of Finance (the “Department”) issued rulings regarding (1) the application of the city’s Personal Property Lease Transaction Tax (the “Lease Transaction Tax”) to nonpossessory computer leases and (2) the application of the city’s Amusement Tax (the “Amusement Tax”) […]
Cloud Computing
Cloud storage is a solution that users are driving IT organizations to use whether we want to or not. Just ask a sales person what they use. They will tell you how great it is and how they use it. As IT organizations, we need to take notice and understand the impact to our process and the effect to the data stored outside of our organization. Here are five things commonly misunderstood about cloud storage: […]
According to a new report by cloud security company CipherCloud, compliance is the single biggest concern for large organizations looking at cloud adoption. The company surveyed its 100-plus large global customers and found that, for 64 percent, compliance was their top cloud security obstacle, followed by unprotected data for 32 percent. Of those concerned most about compliance, 58 percent said that cloud services violated data protection laws in their country, 31 percent said they violated […]
A recent survey by communications and enterprise IT service provider Tata Communications found that enterprise organizations with more than 500 employees saw tangible benefits to their cloud computing efforts. The survey results included 85 percent of the respondents saying that the cloud had lived up to the industry hype, while 23 percent said it had exceeded their expectations. According to the global survey, 83 percent of the enterprises felt they had experienced benefits they didn’t […]
Cloud computing predictions for 2015 via SingleHop includes ours on desktop virtualization:
As bank executives continue to debate, hesitate and worry over the security issues related to using applications that connect to the cloud, their employees are using cloud-based apps by the hundreds — often without banks’ knowledge. The average bank had 844 cloud services in use throughout its network in the third quarter of this year, according to an analysis conducted by Skyhigh Networks, far higher than bank IT departments estimated. “If you did a survey […]
Cloud computing is no longer just the realm of experimenters. Research suggests about 86 per cent of Australian companies now use a cloud service of some type, while the rest are more than likely to deploy a service in the coming years. Companies are finding cloud services provide the agility, flexibility and scalability they need to reduce the cost of doing business, or even completely changing the way they do it. Although cloud services are […]
Technical things go wrong. So what should businesses think about to ensure reliable and consistent operations with an added layer of complexity? The first step is recognizing that things will go wrong. Whether operations are in an in-house data center, an external commercial collocation data center, or in a hybrid cloud arrangement with workload split between in-house and cloud, the principles are the same. Cloud Isn’t New No matter what marketing would have us believe, […]
The entire architecture around the modern endpoint has changed. This is truly become evident within the healthcare field. Associates, doctors and administrators are all processing healthcare information in completely new ways. IT consumerization and mobility have certainly played a big part through all of this. The evolution of the healthcare environment, however, is never truly complete unless we take a look at security considerations. How has the endpoint evolved to simplify security? How are we […]
A survey of 401 global small and midsize businesses (SMBs) conducted by IDC on behalf of data protection specialist Acronis found that IT organizations are struggling with backup and recovery, thanks to the rise of virtualization and cloud computing. Backup and recovery becomes more problematic with each new platform added. Most IT organizations now routinely run multiple types of hypervisors in and out of the cloud, but these platforms are increasing the cost and complexity […]