In a sluggish economy, businesses, particularly small and mid-size companies, are doing all they can to trim costs. And one big cost savings many are making is to switch from costly landline phone service to the less expensive Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Although VoIP is ridiculously cheap, (think Vonage, Ooma, etc.), it comes with its own set of problems – particularly when it comes to security. The number of hacker attacks against VoIP systems […]
Cloud Computing
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I got a press release this morning from VMware that was touting the adoption of of vSphere as the virtualization technology of choice for the SMB user. Included in the press release, as usual, were a few brief customer stories and the expected quotes from VMware executives and their business partners. The purpose of the release, I’m sure, was to raise my awareness of the success of vSphere in the SMB space, but what it […]
Survey confirms companies are still trying to sort out cloud. A new survey asked companies about their average spend on cloud computing resources, and the results are surprising, in a low-spend way. That is, the average company spent just over $6,300 in 2010. This spending is expected to ramp up at least 10% during 2011. The survey of 100 IT executives, conducted by Osterman Research for Electric Cloud finds that among organizations that have implemented […]
The Consumable Technology Era from meshIP, LLC View more presentations from brianfbyrne.
For years, enterprise IT departments could be fuzzy about the costs of individual IT services and applications, but tight budgets and the relative clarity of cloud computing costs have forced CIOs into sharp focus. This need for specifics on IT costs has fueled a market for IT financial management software, which helps CIOs figure out how to budget for and assign dollar figures to services that span hardware, software and personnel. While the economy has […]
High-performance computing (HPC) is no longer exclusive to large companies and governments with substantial scientific budgets. Why? The economics of HPC cloud computing bring these capabilities within reach of nearly any business. However, infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals must realise that the level of ROI varies based on application design, behaviour and use case. Cloud economics let companies pay for capacity when and only when it is utilised, without requiring any upfront investment – essentially […]
Investing in private clouds is a top priority for IT organizations in 2011, according to two recent online polls, Unisys said on Jan. 26. The two polls were conducted on the Unisys Web site. The first poll, in December 2010, asked visitors about their cloud computing implementation plans. The second poll, asking visitors to name their organization’s biggest investment priority in 2011, was conducted a month later and completed on Jan. 24. In the January […]
Cloud computing security is an incredibly broad (and deep) topic, so I can only scratch the surface in a short article. Even so, let’s try to get the basics under control. The first order of business is making sure we’re talking about the same thing. Some cloud vendors try to blur the lines between security, reliability, and disaster recovery/business continuity. While all these are important attributes, it just confuses the conversation. So let’s stick with […]
Internal departments buying their own IT may force the hand of the CIO into making an early move to the cloud. But that shift will alter the traditional role of the CIO forever, says Steven Salmon. Over the next few years, cloud computing is set to transform the way CIOs operate. More organisations will turn to cloud products such as software as a service (SaaS), which will continue to mature. Driving the increased uptake is […]
Ciaran Treanor, technology director, DANU Technologies, outlines why SMEs, specifically start-ups, can significantly reduce IT spend by accessing IT resources on demand via the cloud. Treanor was one of the speakers at last week’s cloud computing event hosted by The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) (Ireland) at Trinity College Dublin, which aimed to inform people what the cloud has to offer start-ups and small enterprises, especially those in the non-IT space that may be […]