The many benefits of cloud computing include helping enterprises become more efficient, agile, innovative and flexible, but achieving those benefits depends on a number of factors, including the involvement of the board of directors. ISACA, a nonprofit, independent association of more than 100,000 governance, risk, security and assurance professionals worldwide, has issued new guidance outlining key questions for boards of directors to ask to ensure their enterprise’s cloud initiative is in line with business objectives […]
planning
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Today’s Cloud Computing marketplace exhibits a surprising bifurcation. Public Cloud providers like Amazon.com are all the rage among small companies, startups, and individual developers. Enterprises, however, are largely investing in Private Clouds. Public Clouds are too risky, so the story goes, or perhaps enterprise decision makers are only willing to dip their toe in the Public Cloud water. We find this trend surprising, because in many ways the Public Cloud value proposition is stronger than […]
Two recent events reminded us this spring that cloud computing infrastructures are vulnerable to the same genetic IT flaw that plagues traditional data center operations: everything fails, sooner or later. The failure modes of cloud vs. traditional data center architectures may differ in nature and frequency, but the threat is the same – outages, downtime, lost revenues and damaged customer trust. Ironically, these same recent events also highlight how cloud infrastructures, when managed correctly, actually […]
While smaller companies may adopt virtual machines in greater numbers in 2011, they may not necessarily adapt their backup plans to match the changes in their environments. That’s a problem, says backup and recovery vendor Acronis, which recently took a deeper dive into the data from its January study on small and midsize business (SMB) disaster preparedness. The report found that SMBs will increase their deployments of virtual servers in 2011, with adoption jumping from […]
Key factors that organisations must consider before moving across to a cloud computing model. The hype surrounding cloud computing is expected to reach unprecedented levels over the next few years. According to recent research by analyst Gartner, CIOs view the cloud as their top technology priority for 2011 and it expects the number of organisations using on-demand computing to rise to 43% within four years. Despite being lured by the prospect of achieving significant cost […]
Microsoft today named some of the country’s top “cloud-friendly” U.S. cities. The rankings are based on the results of an extensive survey in which 2,000 IT decision makers nationwide discussed how they are adopting and using cloud computing. The forecast for cloud computing across key U.S. cities calls for new lines of business, more need for IT services, and potential job growth, according to a new survey released today by Microsoft. Microsoft released the results […]
Moving a company’s server room and local applications to the cloud can eliminate hassles and reduce expenses if you proceed with a good strategy. Cloud computing enables small businesses to offload all sorts of heavy tech lifting to a third party, freeing you to focus your efforts (and local storage space) on core services and clients. Cloud computing can mean many things, but in essence it describes IT tools delivered through Internet-based services. A growing […]