The U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released for public comment a draft “roadmap” that is designed to foster federal agencies’ adoption of cloud computing, support the private sector, improve the information available to decision makers and facilitate the continued development of the cloud computing model. n February 2011, the government issued the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy* that describes cloud computing as a “profound economic and technical shift (with) great […]
interoperability
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – the organisation that creates technology standards for the federal government – has this week released a new Cloud Computing roadmap and reference architecture to provide guidance for public sector ICT procurers and implementors. The NIST says: “This solution will create a level playing field for industry to discuss and compare their cloud offerings with the US Government (USG). The resulting reference architecture and taxonomy for cloud […]
H&R Block’s virtualization project is putting thin clients in the tax preparer’s thousands of retail stores in an effort to simplify its operating environment and cut expenses. The change should also help it to better compete with chains such as Jackson Hewitt, as well as with independent tax preparers and software-only rivals such as TurboTax and Intuit (INTU). “Typical of any mature company, the competitive landscape is tough. You’re continually looking at ways to optimize,” […]
It’s hard to avoid reading about cloud, whether you are travelling through an airport, surfing web news services or watching the TV. Everyone in the IT industry has something to say on the topic. I guess the question is why now and what’s so different today from what the IT industry has been doing over the past years. There is simple and singular reason for this – the cloud represents a sweeping change not only […]
IT decision makers from a range of public and private sector organisations ranked loss of control of data and where data is held as the top security concern. Despite economic pressure for business to cut costs and fervent assurances from cloud computing technology suppliers, security remains a top barrier to cloud adoption, research by the UK’s National Computing Centre (NCC) has revealed. Interest in cloud computing is high and many organisations say they are planning […]
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 […]