As cloud computing continues to take the IT industry by storm, it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between a good cloud partner and a “me, too” provider. Reminiscent of the dot com days, companies are popping up everywhere claiming to be cloud computing experts. In this environment, it is more important than ever to do your homework and sort out good, reliable companies from those that just want to cash in on […]
Cloud Computing
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Just a few years ago, the small business tech catch phrase was Voice over IP (VoIP). By now VoIP is the standard in telephony. A Computer Economics study shows that by 2009, nearly 60 percent of organizations had adopted VoIP and more than half are investing in VoIP. The initial draw for small businesses to make the switch to VoIP related to cost savings — namely, there are no toll charges or long distance fees […]
While some concerns remain about data security and application uptime, there’s significant movement within the retail industry toward cloud-based solutions that can be delivered on an on-demand basis, and it’s easy to see why. Unlike many other technologies that retailers have had to adapt to meet their business needs, it’s as if cloud computing was designed specifically with the cost-conscious, data-deluged retail enterprise in mind. For retail CIOs seeking a quick ROI payback from any […]
Botnets and their masters can communicate with each other by calling into the same VoIP conference call and swapping data using touch tones, researchers demonstrated at Defcon. This gives the botmasters, whose top goals include remaining anonymous, the ability to issue orders from random payphones and disposable wireless handsets, said researchers Itzik Kotler and Iftach Ian Amit of security and risk assessment firm Security Art. Using phones and the public phone networks eliminates one of […]
Cloud computing seems simple in concept, and indeed simplicity of operation, deployment and licensing are its most appealing assets. But when it comes to questions of compliance, once you scratch the surface you’ll find more questions than you asked in the first place, and more to think about than ever before. Compliance covers a lot of ground, from government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the European Union Data Protection Act, to industry regulations such as […]
Police across the UK are considering a major move to cloud computing, dumping on-premise IT in an aggressive bid to cut costs. In a move likely to be seen as controversial given the sensitivity of police data, the Metropolitan Police is planning how to run a variety of front-end systems “for managing patrols, operations, incidents and investigations, managing evidence and forensics, and collating information” in the cloud. It is understood that if the project goes […]
Next month – all being well – the UK Cabinet Office will lift the lid on what form the UK public sector Cloud Computing strategy will take. Notably absent from the national ICT strategy announced back in April, Cloud has not been forgotten, but the grandiose plans for an over-arching G-Cloud that were being formulated under the New Labour administration have been scaled down. Exactly what form the revised Cloud thinking will take remains to […]
Businesses can finally replace their old phone systems and get a far more flexible phone solution for a fraction of the cost. But it’s not just replacing one phone system for another. With Hosted voice, you get the benefits of a fully managed phone system, which means you’ll need fewer resident experts to handle things. What’s more, Hosted voice expands communications and productivity by providing a range of advanced features and functionality. And it does […]
If you came here for the article with the title, “How Cloud Computing Will Change IT”, unfortunately, it has been removed at the request of the publisher of the website from which it was obtained. Asking me to remove it was within their rights, but I believe it was a shortsighted decision based on old media ideas about the copyright “protection” of assets and the imagined potential loss of ad revenue. I am not competing […]
H&R Block’s virtualization project is putting thin clients in the tax preparer’s thousands of retail stores in an effort to simplify its operating environment and cut expenses. The change should also help it to better compete with chains such as Jackson Hewitt, as well as with independent tax preparers and software-only rivals such as TurboTax and Intuit (INTU). “Typical of any mature company, the competitive landscape is tough. You’re continually looking at ways to optimize,” […]