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. […]