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9 posts

Tangled electrical wires on a utility pole, illustrating security after virtualization

Post-Virtualization Security

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 […]

A toy shopping cart, illustrating buying cloud services

How To Buy The Cloud

Next month – all being well – the UK Cabinet Office will lift the lid on what form the UK public sector Cloud Computing strategy will take. Notably absent from the national ICT strategy announced back in April, Cloud has not been forgotten, but the grandiose plans for an over-arching G-Cloud that were being formulated under the New Labour administration have been scaled down. Exactly what form the revised Cloud thinking will take remains to […]

Black truck on road during daytime, illustrating how hard moving to the cloud is

Moving to the Cloud: How Hard is it Really?

Cloud computing has long been touted as a way to help entrepreneurs conduct businesses by housing data and computer hardware over the Internet. While using the cloud is pretty straightforward, getting a cloud infrastructure in place can take some time and work. Thankfully, there are many cloud computing services companies that can help build the right infrastructure for your business to migrate data, hardware and software to the cloud. “The last thing small businesses want […]

River beside forest under bright sky, illustrating local cloud support in Alaska

Tech Hopes to Get Companies on ‘Cloud Computing’

Even a business operating in the clouds needs someone on the ground. In Alaska, Nate Gates is aiming to be what he called that “local throat to choke.” Gates founded Cloud 49 in July after four years as chief information officer for Chenga Corp., an Alaska Native village corporation, and his preliminary expectations have been exceeded as state companies explore and embrace cloud computing technology. “We thought it would be a slow road the first […]

Clear glass bottle with water, illustrating clarity about cloud migration

Be Clear about the Cloud

As the dominant IT paradigm continues to shift, companies need to manage critical components of the migration. Companies still face plenty of questions regarding cloud computing. Increasingly, however, the dominant question is not whether to do it, but how intensely. In fact, given the pace at which companies are offloading at least part of their IT infrastructure to public clouds (generally defined as third-party services that host computing workloads in multi-tenant data centers), those that […]

Two people waiting in an office lobby, illustrating how the cloud changes corporate IT

In Corporate IT, The Cloud Changes Everything

A few weeks back, I was on a panel of media pundits asked to make predictions about what might happen in the technology business in 2011. One prominent member of our group, seeking to stake out a bold, contrarian position, asserted that 2011 would be the year that “cloud computing” would be revealed to be a big nothing, an over-hyped concept that in the end is more about marketing than actual technology. He’s so, so […]

A row of newspapers sitting on top of a shelf, illustrating cloud computing as newsmaker of the year

Newsmaker of the Year: Cloud Computing

One would think that for something with so much activity around it and so talked about that there would be a concrete definition of what cloud computing is. Instead, depending on who you ask, everyone seems to have their own definition of what cloud computing means. CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA ) vice-president and country manager for Canada, Jimmy Fulton, summed it up best by saying “there hasn’t been a more ambiguous term in the IT […]

A green line graph showing stock market trends on a digital screen, illustrating Gartner's SaaS market forecast

Gartner Predicts $10.7B Market for SAAS Applications

Gartner forecasts double-digit strong growth in revenue for the enterprise SAAS applications market in 2010 and 2011. Software-as-a-service worldwide revenues for enterprise applications will reach $10.7 billion in 2011, said Gartner on Dec. 14. The market generated worldwide revenues of $7.9 billion in 2009, and is forecast to reach $9.2 billion for 2010, according to the analyst firm. While growth was strong for 2010, with a 15.7 percent jump over 2009 revenues, “the market is […]

Dream Big text, illustrating the size of the cloud computing opportunity

How Big is The Opportunity for Cloud Computing?

More cloud stats, this time from here: By 2011 Merrill Lynch says the cloud computing market will reach $160 billion. The number of physical servers in the World today: 50 million. By 2013, approximately 60 percent of server workloads will be virtualized By 2013 10 percent of the total number of physical servers sold will be virtualized with an average of 10 VM’s per physical server sold. At 10 VM’s per physical host that means […]