The benefits to the mobile industry of virtualization are clear, with a range of major advantages including cost reduction, scalability and the ability to offer a broad range of new services. Wireless Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is the evolving initiative to deploy the benefits of virtualization already sweeping the IT infrastructure world into wireless networks of all types. In general, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) (also known as virtual network function (VNF)) offers a new way to design, […]
Cloud
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 […]
Virtualization has become the key technology underpinning ‘cloud-era’ IT infrastructure because the ability to deploy virtual instances of servers, desktop PCs, storage devices and network resources allows existing hardware to be utilised efficiently, and makes for much better manageability, flexibility and scalability. The graphs below highlight adoption trends across various implementations and applications:
Cloud, mobility, and advanced analytics are transforming the way insurance companies offer value to their customers. As competitive pressures within the industry increase, insurance companies will turn to technology for assistance in this changed environment. To prosper in this new environment insurance companies can look to the cloud, in conjunction with other technologies, to help drive reinvention of their business model to offer new services and create direct, multi-channel relationships with customers. Real-time data collection […]
Today, most large enterprises, no matter what industry they serve, are software developers. The reason? The various ways through which employees and customers can, and want, to engage with businesses has grown exponentially; time, platform and frequency are no longer considerable barriers to achieving what you want to achieve. Applications that are used by either staff or customers are developed internally by the development team and/or with their development partners. For many organisations, their applications, […]
The use of technology is among one of the greatest challenges facing medium sized businesses. It also presents one of the biggest transformational opportunities to drive growth, promote innovation, reduce costs and ensure your business maintains a competitive edge. 1. Free up resources Most businesses today are concerned about the state of the economy. Moving in-house hardware and software to a highly secure data centre means it can be delivered back as a fully managed […]
Virtualization has “virtually” changed the IT world in which we all work and play. Why is virtualization so attractive to IT administrators? The answer is easy — there are many uses and benefits that we gain through virtualization. For starters, the thought of being able to have a single server’s physical footprint represent many servers on the network has been a boon to administrators looking to consolidate space and reduce operation costs. Having the ability […]
Biggest spending is going towards tablets, cloud and virtualization, according to a new study. Small and medium-sized businesses are spending more money on IT, including adopting tablets, cloud services and virtualization to a greater extent, according to Spiceworks’ State of SMB IT survey. IT budgets at companies with fewer than 1,000 employees grew 6 percent in the first half of 2012 from the second half of 2011, and 15 percent year-over-year, according to the survey. […]
Autodesk launched the company’s 2013 portfolio of design, engineering and entertainment software, including the latest design and creation suites. The suites provide expanded toolsets and new automated suites workflows for building, entertainment, engineering, construction, infrastructure, product, plant and factory design. The 2013 design suites connect the desktop to Autodesk 360, a cloud computing platform that enables customers to dramatically improve the way they work by providing the ability to store, edit and share their designs […]
The demand for desktop virtualization is being driven, at least in part, by the explosive growth in mobile work styles. That’s a key takeaway from a new global market study commissioned by virtual solutions provider Citrix, whose virtualization, networking and cloud solutions are delivered to more than 100 million corporate desktops daily. The survey found that 55 percent of responding companies will deploy new desktop virtualization for the first time by 2013. Of those surveyed, […]
As the second law of thermodynamics tells us, all things trend toward chaos and this is no less true with a virtual environment. Sprawl can have a real security impact, and it takes discipline and planning to control sprawl — discipline and planning that won’t occur without someone from the security team actively monitoring the problem and formulating strategies for how to address the issue. Virtualization has been one of the most rapidly and widely […]
We can shop on our phones and read magazines on our tablets. But playing high-end video games on a mobile device has been out of the question. That might be about to change. OnLive, a Silicon Valley start-up, on Thursday plans to release software that will let people play the richest, most graphically intense games on Apple’s iPhone and iPad, as well as on Amazon’s Kindle Fire and other devices based on Google’s Android software. […]
One of the main reasons for deploying desktop virtualization is the security advantages it can provide, such as keeping sensitive data off the endpoint, according to Citrix. And Citrix is practicing what it preaches at its Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., headquarters where employees, for example, use the Citrix virtualization product Citrix Receiver for smartphones and tablets. Citrix Receiver brings full-fledged desktop apps to smartphones and tablets “It’s required to access some systems such as SAP,” says […]
Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter encourage sharing of personal information. How does this change the nature of personal privacy? Trust is fundamental since it forms the basis upon which personal and commercial transactions take place. However trust and privacy are in conflict since knowing who you are dealing with is essential to trust. So how can identity, privacy and trust in the Cloud be reconciled? Privacy The internet and social networking sites like […]
So tell me, what’s a Hadoop when it’s at home? Some kind of dance? Not so much. Think of it as a file system for distributed computing and storage. Because that’s what it is. What’s a file system for distributed computing and storage when it’s at home? Let me take you back to big data. What’s big data? You know all that stuff you’ve got that fits in nice relational databases? Yes. Well, it’s that […]
Historically, business telecommunications has been a highly exclusive club of well-financed service providers who have been highly dependent upon business models that are pegged to over-subscription, product bundling and oligopolistic market control. Telecommunications infrastructure has been a world of very expensive, highly proprietary equipment and telecom applications such as voicemail, conferencing, three-way calling and caller ID have been developed exclusively within the doors of the large service providers who intended to put them in the […]
Over the past 24 months, the interest in cloud computing – a general term for software deployed through hosted, managed services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models – has continued to grow. As a result, the movement of more business applications into the cloud is becoming more prevalent. This popularity is made clear when you consider the recent report from ARC Advisory Group, which revealed the supply chain management market grew 7 per cent in the last […]
More and more enterprise IT shops – as they get comfortable with virtualization practices in their own private clouds – are considering a jump to the public cloud. But before making that leap, consider these pieces of advice from those that have already jumped. 1. Make sure your provider has VM-specific security “Hypervisors were never really designed to be running in a public environment,” says Beth Cohen, senior cloud architect for Cloud Technology Partners, a […]
Researchers from North Carolina State University and IBM have developed a new, experimental technique to better protect sensitive information in cloud computing – without significantly affecting the system’s overall performance. Under the cloud-computing paradigm, the computational power and storage of multiple computers is pooled, and can be shared by multiple users. Hypervisors are programs that create the virtual workspace that allows different operating systems to run in isolation from one another – even though each […]
In a new survey, access-management vendor Imprivata forecasts that health care will move ahead of other industries in the adoption of desktop virtualization. Imprivata, a provider of access-management tools, has released the results of a survey showing health care poised to take the lead in desktop virtualization adoption in the next 12 months. For the report called “2011 Virtualization Trends in Healthcare,” researchers interviewed 477 IT managers in multiple industries, including health care and financial […]
Autodesk is planning to take the bulk of its software onto cloud services in the next three years, beginning with AutoCAD WS. “The collaborative aspects of cloud working are going to revolutionize the design field,” Andrew Anagnost, vice president of suites, web services and subscription at Autodesk, told The Register. He explained that a properly configured platform could host design data and ensure that individual users would get the most relevant information, such as building […]
Small businesses and start-ups will push the use of cloud computing into the IT mainstream as security concerns continue to hinder take up among larger firms. Steve O’Donnell, a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ cloud technology division, explained that the needs of small companies are perfectly met by cloud technologies. “Start-ups need to be agile. They’re concerned about costs and speed of execution but not about risks, so they adopt cloud […]
Those IT organizations that move to cloud computing are moving to SOA (service-oriented architecture), whether they understand it or not. Hear me out: Private and public clouds often rely on APIs for their functionality, which are typically Web services that can be combined and recombined into solutions. The result: SOA, at its essence. The problem is that many of those who define and implement cloud computing don’t have a good grasp of SOA. Although they […]
Under pressure to move to cloud computing by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), yet harboring intractable concerns about protecting sensitive data, many federal agency managers are opting for private clouds, which they consider more secure than public cloud environments. At the U.S. Census Bureau, for example, officials are concentrating about 90% of their cloud efforts on establishing an internal private cloud, which is hosted at the bureau’s data computing center in Bowie, Md., […]
Cloud computing is a remarkable phenomenon, with analysts at IDC predicting public cloud computing services to be a $73 billion market by 2015. However, many CIOs are still puzzled by the term and may not yet be familiar with how appropriate ‘The Cloud’ is for certain business IT functions. Concerns over security, too, remain an issue for some. The wide availability of computing power, storage capacity and software over the internet, through ‘The Cloud’, presents […]
It looks like the end for the PC. Unlike the Dinosaurs the PC will not just vanish from the face of the Earth – they will just stop being replaced and gradually die out to be spotted on the desks of die-hard antiquarians and IT folk who like to tinker with the insides of anything that can be opened. I can even date when this process began. It was the day, the 18th August to […]
As enterprises adopt storage and server virtualization strategies, they are realizing that monitoring, reporting, and managing such an environment actually increases the complexities of storage management. This has been a challenge even in a physical environment as administrators try to understand the resources upon which business-critical applications depend. This assumes a higher degree of complexity in a virtual environment, wherein physical storage is now separated by two or more degrees from the application, making a […]
Cloud computing is certainly attracting headlines in the media. You might have noticed Microsoft’s Cloud Power advertising blitz, or seen Apple’s Steve Jobs talking excitedly about iCloud. The trouble is that, for most companies, it’s hard to work out whether any of this hype is relevant to their business. So is the cloud an option for you? As it happens, it is likely that your company already uses a cloud-based solution. If you subscribe to […]
People are only just starting to understand new technological trends such as virtualization and cloud computing, when along comes a phenomenon called “Big Data.” That trend doesn’t really focus on burgeoning content or data encouraged by all those cloud activities. Big Data is all about tools and processes that allow organizations to manage and analyze very large data sets that yield insights from which the business may profit. According to storage provider and cloud solution […]
According to a recent report on Cloud trends, analyst house Gartner recommends that network managers should test or emulate the performance of Cloud -based applications in all geographies where they plan to deploy. There is a need for organisations to adopt a Cloud computing service that addresses specific issues around latency such as distance, congestion and monitoring. Despite all the hype around the move to the Cloud over the past few years, latency remains the […]