Decision making in business is often a slow, sometimes laborious process. Working in IT, the decision being made is just the start. Traditionally you then had to buy the kit, deploy and finally roll it out to the community of users. Months (or more) could pass before a chosen strategy came to fruition. I imagine a number of you are already grimacing in frustration at the thought… This is one of the major incentives of […]
Cloud
144 posts
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 […]
Three-fourths of respondents said that they have virtualized their cloud servers, the survey found. A survey of cloud decision makers at large enterprises in North America found that 52 percent of those polled said that internal change and learning was the leading roadblock to cloud project success, pointing to possible pent-up demand for advisory services, as users struggle with the change brought on by the cloud. According to the study, conducted by TheInfo Pro, a […]
In the contact center space today, the cloud is having a significant impact. Not only does this deployment model offer lower cost and greater functionality, it can also open up a broader reach for those operating in nearly every industry. In a recent Contactual white paper, the company took a broader look at the two biggest affects of the cloud on the traditional contact center. Cost Benefits of the Virtual Call Center With the integration […]
Cloud computing is a reality, and it’s a force that I believe IT professionals need to come to terms with quickly. The economic motivation for cloud is high; business need for speed and agility is like never before, and the technology has reached a level where it makes prudent investments in cloud services not only possible but fast and easy. The cloud is here and it won’t go away, but what is it really, why […]
Zynga was created in 2007 with the idea that “play — like search, share and shop — would become one of the core activities on the internet.” Just 5 years later, the company has about 150 million monthly unique users in 166 countries, and has just filed for what could become one of the most important IPOs of 2011. There’s little doubt that Zynga is one of the fastest and most interesting growth stories on […]
After a delay due to a complicated vendor-authorization process, the General Services Administration (GSA) is finally offering cloud computing services via its Apps.gov website. Federal agencies now can order from a menu of three Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings–cloud storage, virtual machines and Web hosting–from service providers that have received GSA authorities to operate (ATOs) to offer them. It was the process of acquiring ATOs that delayed the GSA’s plans to offer IaaS on […]
According to a survey carried out by hosted IT service provider Rise, 91 per cent of businesses strongly feel more needs to be done to educate end-users about the business benefits of adopting a Cloud infrastructure. The survey, conducted at a recent IT industry event, also identified that when it came to Cloud uptake the biggest concern for firms is where their data is being stored, with 64 per cent of surveyed participants identifying this […]
I can’t help but take notice of the recent string of cloud failures we’ve been hearing about this year. Blogger went down for about 20 hours last month and Microsoft’s BPOS hosted bundle also reported a significant amount of downtime. Perhaps the most notable was when Amazon’s cloud was overloaded with Lady Gaga fans clamoring to get her album for 99 cents. All of this talk of cloud failure has once again called into question […]
One of the few sure things in the online world is Amazon.com. The site never seems to go down, despite the fact that it’s serving millions of customers every day. Yet even the mighty Amazon — or, more accurately, its cloud services unit, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud — collapsed in April for about 24 hours, taking with it customers like Reddit, foursquare, Hootsuite and hundreds of other websites, some of them run by small businesses. […]
Enterprise-level business and IT executives and decision-makers may now have a greater understanding of the benefits of private and hybrid cloud computing environments, but a new study has found that there is still a large gap between expectations and the reality of what cloud computing and virtualization offer. Symantec’s “2011 Virtualization and Journey to the Cloud Survey” surveyed 3,700 executives and decision-makers from 35 countries about their perspectives on the adoption and deployment of private […]
Business analytics is the top technology priority for CIOs at midmarket companies and organizations through the next five years, according to the results of an IBM survey of 3,000 chief information officers around the globe. The survey also found a 50 percent increase in the number of midsize organizations that plan to invest in cloud computing, compared to a similar study IBM did in 2009, and a big jump in the number of companies investing […]
Avanade, a business technology services provider, recently released the results of a global survey which clearly reveals the rapid growth in the use of public cloud services. Now that cloud services are becoming more mainstream, it is causing growing pains for many companies. One in five executives surveyed admitted that it is close to impossible to manage the disparate cloud services within their organization. Close to 60 percent surveyed said that they are concerned about […]
Ever since 2009 when NIST published its first definition of cloud computing there has been a promise of community clouds, and now we finally have a second one in the financial services market, thanks to NYSE Technologies. The IT arm of NYSE Euronext announced beta of Capital Markets Community Platform, its cloud computing offering this week, and the effort, on the surface, is a good example for other vertical markets to follow. For years, financial […]
Crummy cloud computing SLAs, assuming cloud computing is bad and you’ll lose all control in moving to the cloud, are among the mistakes companies should avoid making in cloud security, a security consultant said Wednesday at Cornerstones of Trust 2011. Eugene Schultz, chief technology officer at Emagined Security, a consulting firm based in San Carlos, Calif., ticked off a list of cloud mistakes at the one-day security conference held in Foster City, Calif. The annual […]
Nearly one in 10 organizations in the U.S. estimated they store more than $10 million worth of data in the cloud. Semiconductor manufacturer AMD announced the results of a global research study on adoption, attitudes and approaches to cloud computing, surveying IT decision makers in public and private sector organizations across the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The findings revealed global and regional trends in cloud computing adoption and usage, highlighting the importance of both […]
The research arm of the Department of Defense (DOD) is seeking to develop cloud-computing-based infrastructure that builds resiliency directly into the network to more effectively support military missions. Through a project called the Mission-oriented Resilient Clouds (MRC) program, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aims to build a cloud-based network that will preserve “mission effectiveness” even in the event of a cyber attack, according to an announcement of a Proposer’s Day for the project […]
A new IBM study of more than 3,000 global CIOs shows that 60 per cent of organisations are ready to embrace cloud computing over the next five years as a means of growing their businesses and achieving competitive advantage. That’s nearly double the number of CIOs who said they would utilise cloud in IBM’s 2009 CIO study. As demand for ever-growing amounts of information continues to increase, companies are seeking simple and direct access to […]
Ask anyone in IT what the biggest barrier to adopting cloud computing services is and the most likely answer is security. As Shirief Nosseir, EMEA security product marketing director at CA Technologies, explains securing the cloud isn’t rocket science; cloud is just another environment in which security should be seen as an enabler rather than a barrier. Many organisations perceive the adoption of any form of cloud computing to change a company’s risk profile, but […]
A cloud computing service is like an airliner – even though it can experience devastating crashes that affect many people, like Amazon’s crash last month, it’s still safer than driving your own car … or IT infrastructure. That’s the rationale provided by Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix, during a panel discussion on cloud computing during a keynote address at Interop 2011. Also on the panel were Randy Rowland, senior vice-president of product development at Terremark; […]
What is cloud computing? The goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and ICT services without having to own and manage assets like servers yourself. Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted ICT services over the internet, and as such a consumer of these services needs nothing but a personal computer and internet access. They are usually described as being Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) […]
Cloud computing is an on-demand, integrated, configured, ready-to-use combination of compute, storage, network, platform and application software available as a standardized set of service offerings on a pay-as-you-use pricing model. Cloud computing is altering the IT service delivery by providing rapid service delivery – provisioning resources takes few minutes instead several weeks, on demand scaling – businesses can scale up or scale down resources based on needs instead of provisioning for peak demand, consolidation of […]
Cloud computing, defined as a subscription-based or pay-per-use service that in real time, and over the Internet, extends existing capabilities of Information Technology, remains at an early stage of conceptual development. Services do range from full scale applications such as accounting and storage to niche services such as spam filtering. Proponents of cloud computing contend that it erodes the requirements for major capital expenditures on IT infrastructure to customer applications. However, will cloud computing replace […]
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded $4.9M to Galois, Inc., as research integrator for the PROCEED program (Programming Computation on Encrypted Data) whose goal is to make it feasible to execute programs on encrypted data without having to decrypt the data first. “If we are successful with PROCEED, it fundamentally changes the calculus for computations in untrusted environments… on computer systems of unknown provenance. The potential implications for the cybersecurity of cloud […]
In a troubled economy, cloud computing seems like a great cost saving alternative and it is. Whether in good times or bad, any pragmatic cost saving measure is a ‘good’ measure. Google, Microsoft, IBM and all other known and unknown cloud providers offer today’s CIO an array of major cost saving alternatives to the traditional data center and IT department. The temptation to put things on/in the cloud and sit back can be extremely compelling. […]
Software as a service (SaaS) is the oldest and most mature of all the cloud computing options and its adoption is continuing apace – in some areas of the business at least. According to analyst firm Gartner, the global SaaS sector grew by 14.1 per cent last year to $8.5bn. This higher than average growth rate in an otherwise difficult market meant penetration levels rose to a total of 10 per cent across all enterprise […]
An electronic, cloud-based approach to sharing radiology files with other medical institutions is expediting the care of UC San Diego Health System trauma patients. The method is currently being used to speed the diagnosis and treatment of patients sent to UC San Diego Medical Center-Hillcrest from remote area hospitals. “The efficiency and reliability of cloud computing is excellent,” said Dr. Jeanne Lee, trauma surgeon at UC San Diego Health System. “It is an advance in […]
As companies glom onto cloud computing, stateless computing is likely to emerge as a core tenant within the cloud and one that can deliver cost savings, predicted the chief technology architect for Merrill Lynch. LinuxWorld But to get to the state of stateless computing, companies will need to change the way they view their hardware needs and how they store and access the information, said Jeffrey Birnbaum of Merrill Lynch, who served as a keynote […]
The expansion of cloud computing has led to significant growth in the virtualisation market, according to a report by IDC. In the latest Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualisation Tracker, IDC discovered that 19.4 per cent of all new servers shipped in the last quarter of 2010 were virtualised, up from 18.4 per cent for the same quarter a year ago. Some 398,617 virtualised servers were shipped in the final three months of 2010, with much of […]
In organizations’ mad rush to virtualize their IT infrastructure, some are running into unforeseen obstacles that cause them to put the brakes on virtualization deployments, sometimes indefinitely. This phenomenon, known as “virtualization stall,” has more to do with psychology than technology, but it could potentially erode confidence in virtualization and slow growth of cloud computing. According to solution providers, virtualization stall has several root causes: Some companies are unwilling or afraid to virtualize their tier […]