The Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Bessemer Venture Partners, meets with over a thousand cloud companies each year and keeps close tabs on its dozens of investments in the cloud market. Just to round things out, Bessemer also researches 78 cloud companies that have already gone public, keeping tabs on their performance so as to better advise their still-private investments. All of this data comes together in the firm’s annual State of the Cloud report. Here […]
cloud computing
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”) […]
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 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, […]
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 […]
There can be a tendency to think too simplistically about the benefits of moving applications to the cloud. Traditional logic centres around the cost savings that companies can make out of the shift from on-premise deployments but there is another, more important element of the cloud that should be given more credence – speed. The need for speed amongst enterprise organisations is critical, and, with growing understanding and competence, enterprise organisations are harnessing the potential […]
Improvements in hardware, software, and networking have combined with the secular trend toward outsourcing to usher in the era of cloud computing. The economies of scale offered by remote data centers managed by third parties allow enterprises to offload or outsource some or all of their computing and storage workloads. Cloud adoption is particularly cost-effective for smaller and midsize users that lack the capital, manpower, or expertise to build and maintain their own data centers. […]
1. Business and financial skills The intersection of business and technology is always an overarching concern, but it is especially so when it comes to cloud-based computing. 2. Technical skills With the cloud, organizations can streamline their IT resources, offloading much of day-to-day systems and application management. But that doesn’t mean IT abdicates all responsibility. There’s a need for language skills to build applications that can run quickly on the Internet. 3. Enterprise architecture and […]
The “cloudification of services” means that IT has become the backbone for every other part of the enterprise, and the department needs to evolve in order to keep up with the pace of change. That’s what Frank Slootman, president and CEO of ServiceNow, told the audience during his keynote at the platform-as-as-service IT solution provider’s Knowledge 14 conference, taking place at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco. “We really think IT needs to start thinking […]
It’s a fact: more data is added via the Internet every second than the Internet had in its entirety twenty years ago. This accumulation of “Big Data” comes from many sources, including consumer and business files — including photos and images, spreadsheets, mobile application data, and more. In the past, much of this data was stored in the memory of computers and mobile devices. Now, data is increasingly being stored “in the Cloud,” which allows […]
Here are some key cloud computing statistics that highlight the growth and adoption trends of this strategic technology: Cloud spending By 2015, end-user spending on cloud services could be more than $180 billion By 2014, businesses in the United States will spend more than $13 billion on cloud computing and managed hosting services It is predicted the global market for cloud equipment will reach $79.1 billion by 2018 59 percent of all new spending on […]
For a concept that seems so surreal, cloud computing is surprisingly ubiquitous. It is almost impossible to surf the internet without interacting with it in one form or another. Webmail services such as Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail are a well-known example of cloud computing at work, as are streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube. You’ve probably bumped into the concept at your workplace in the form of Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google Apps. […]
What’s the next big IT trend? Businesses want to know how they can leverage these trends, as well as how they can address any challenges. These trends, including the explosion of data, cloud computing and the multitude of personal devices on the corporate network, are fast changing the way organizations traditionally manage their business. The challenges and opportunities are more apparent than ever before, and look set to drive IT and business decisions in the […]
The use of public cloud platforms as a deployment option for applications is often talked about in black and white terms such as ‘do we deploy to the cloud or keep the application on-premise?’ This is misleading, as many businesses assess the suitability of public cloud only for the most appropriate use cases and often this will be for supplementary resources. The cloud journey will take them to a pragmatic balance between the use of […]
Cloud computing services are becoming the norm in business and the total size of the industry has more than tripled in the last five years. In 2008, it was estimated at a value of about $46 Billion, and by 2014 it is estimated to be worth more than $150 Billion. The following Cloud Computing Infographic illustrates the growth of cloud services:
The use of cloud computing is growing, and by 2016 this growth will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend, according to Gartner. 2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017. “Overall, there are very real trends toward cloud platforms, and also toward massively scalable processing. Virtualization, […]
Rule 1: The cloud rides on the network, so the network must be able to keep up Companies that move applications and data to cloud, or perhaps build new systems on cloud-based platforms, often don’t consider the network infrastructure. When relying on systems that are connected via the network, the network is everything. Slow networks mean slow systems and poor performance. Rule 2: Applications not optimized for cloud-based platforms rarely perform well Many enterprise IT […]
Businesses will have to redesign their networks from the ground up if they hope to protect their data from next-generation hackers, according to McAfee president Michael DeCesare. DeCesare said business and high-tech companies will have to use a by-design strategy if they wish to remain ahead of the threats they face. He was speaking during a keynote at the McAfee Focus conference. “We have to figure out how to integrate security into [networks] from the […]
Cloud computing is the use of computing resources that are delivered as a service over a network such as the internet, removing the need for physical storage and applications. From my experience working with academies, shared cloud services are the new de facto standard for federations or groups of schools working together, and this is being mirrored more widely across the UK education sector. Future-proof IT For schools wondering what level of cloud computing would […]
Cloud computing offers businesses the opportunity to outsource their IT services, reducing both time and cost efficiently. This is highly attractive, as businesses do not need to understand the devices they are using, but do companies really understand the implications of outsourcing their business services to a cloud computing service? Cloud computing is the next stage in the Internet’s evolution, providing the means through which everything can be delivered as a service, wherever and whenever […]
In my last post, I talked about the IT side of the “shadow IT” problem that cloud computing has created for companies all over the world. Cloud computing has enabled end-users to remove IT departments from the decision process when hiring solutions, especially software solutions, and also to keep these same IT departments out of the loop by using cloud-based applications that can be accessed through the browser, without any kind of installation or IT […]
The hidden costs were explored in a new survey of 468 CIOs, conducted by Research In Action and underwritten by Compuware Corporation. There’s no question a lot of money is going into cloud projects — two-thirds of the respondents say that cloud is their top investment area for 2013. Many have crunched the numbers for the up-front costs of cloud computing, which typically include subscription fees, combined with some level of staff time required for set-up, user […]
The World Wide Web has come a long way since 400 Arpanet users received the first spam message in May 1978. Journey back to 1969, when the U.S. military-funded research network Arpanet connected four computers, to take a look at the Internet, then and now. Renamed “the Internet” in 1984, the service reached a milestone moment when it linked 1,000 hosts at university and corporate labs. Almost 15 years later, the Web began making commercial […]
Just as virtualisation has transformed data centre operations, the emergence of cloud computing represents a significant shift in the way IT operates applications today. Up until now, IT ops teams have been driven by a server-centric operations model, where the application itself played a secondary role. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is an application-centric operations model. As applications get more distributed, virtualised and pushed into the cloud, application developers and architects are faced with […]
Cloud technology is the future for the business-world. According to KPMG, it’s now used by most organisations. However, with this new technology come new risks for company information security, and it is important for HR teams to ensure that they update company IT policies to adequately protect business interests. What’s different about cloud computing? Cloud systems are often different from the traditional IT infrastructure set up by a company itself because they are normally provided […]
The many benefits of cloud computing include helping enterprises become more efficient, agile, innovative and flexible, but achieving those benefits depends on a number of factors, including the involvement of the board of directors. ISACA, a nonprofit, independent association of more than 100,000 governance, risk, security and assurance professionals worldwide, has issued new guidance outlining key questions for boards of directors to ask to ensure their enterprise’s cloud initiative is in line with business objectives […]
SMBs that embrace Cloud computing and business websites are much more likely to enjoy rising revenue than others, according to accounting software provider, MYOB. The company’s March 2013 MYOB Business Monitor study, which was conducted by research firm Colmar Brunton and surveyed more than 1000 SMBs, found that the businesses that adopted Cloud technologies were twice as likely to see an earnings uplift in the past year. However, only 16 per cent indicated to use […]
The word ‘cloud’ has been literally hanging over executives’ heads for the past two years — in the form of massive banners hanging from the ceilings of almost every hub airport they travel through. To date, the focus of cloud has been on the delivery of IT-related capabilities from IT-related providers, largely for things that the IT department is responsible for managing. Cloud computing is expected to grow to 20% or more of the total […]