IBM, HP, and other established vendors entering cloud computing are often already outsourcing partners to the firms that are now frequently looking for an infrastructure service provider. But that doesn’t mean they have an inside track on the business. They do not. Established vendors are going to face stiff competition for outsourcing business from the new infrastructure providers: Amazon, Rackspace, and others, according to a report by Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Traditionally, IT works in a break-fix […]
clouds
Cloud computing will become the dominate architecture for IT, according to a Colt study. The survey of 500 CIOs across UK, France, Germany, Spain and Benelux highlights that, while few businesses in Europe have company-wide implementations of cloud computing to date (16%), many believe the cloud will be their most significant IT operating method by 2014 (60%). The biggest challenge adopting cloud computing is ease of transition (58%). Quality assurance (55%), cost justification (55%) and […]
Notable trends in virtualization: 1. Hybrid clouds mature. The nature of hybrid clouds – meaning parts of your infrastructure are running in both public and private data centers – is getting more mature and sophisticated. New providers are springing up frequently, which make evaluating them all that much harder. Some are traditional hosting providers, other offer more virtualization expertise and some have built their own management tools around their services. One example: Terremark’s VMware-based computing […]
As with any new exciting technology, companies commonly look towards creating a “strategy” around the movement in order to ensure their investments achieve the greatest ROI. In the 1990s, it was all about how companies needed a “Linux” strategy; the last decade has been dominated with companies needing a “virtualization” strategy; and the trend I’m seeing today is everyone talking about needing a “cloud computing” strategy. While this new saying is good news for large […]
Color could be the type of mobile-meets-social-meets-local application Google and Apple have been searching for. Unless Facebook gets there first. Color, the mobile picture-sharing application that launched with the controversial financial backing of $41 million last week, might have some usability issues in the early going but it’s the type of cutting-edge company Facebook, Google and Apple love to acquire. Similar to startups such as Path or Instagram, Color lets users take photos or video […]
When we first heard about cloud computing, public clouds got most of the attention. But as IT managers looked at the security risks of having data outside the corporate firewall, they turned their attention to private clouds, which analysts and various surveys suggest will get more enterprise investment in the next few years. But private clouds have their share of challenges too. There are management issues and operational processes to figure out. And, of course, […]
Cloud computing is coming of age in large enterprises, according to a new study of North American and European IT professionals conducted by Management Insight on behalf of CA Technologies. The group surveyed IT professionals in organizations with 1,000 to 10,000-plus employees, revealing that enterprises are active in the cloud, and their virtualization efforts are contributing to broader interest in cloud computing. The results also indicate a shift toward approaching IT using “cloud thinking,” accelerating […]
Cloud computing could be over hyped today, but more than half of large enterprises will rely on public clouds by 2015. According to Gartner, the industry analysts, cloud computing is currently still at the “peak of inflated expectations”, with users’ belief in the technology outstripping its ability to deliver. But within the next five years, half of the world’s 1000 largest enterprises will be using external cloud services for their “top 10 revenue generating processes,” […]