Grazed from Datamation. Author: David Linthicum.

According to an IBM announcement, organizations that gain competitive advantages through cloud adoption reported almost double the revenue growth. The study claims these organizations have nearly 2.5 times higher gross profit growth than peer companies that are not as aggressive around the use of cloud computing. The survey was conducted with more than 800 business decision makers and users worldwide.

Thank you, “Captain Obvious.” Even if you think calling IBM a neutral third party is a bit laughable, the study rings true to me. It’s clear that the use of cloud computing has a positive benefit on the bottom line of most organizations who invest in this technology. The problem is, most organizations don’t, and, those that do, invest in the wrong places…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Cloud services providers (CSPs) involved in cloud system management have something new to be happy about. According to a report released by IT research firm TechNavio, the cloud system management market is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.51 percent.

Cloud management involves software and technologies designed for operating and delivering applications and computing services to enterprises and end-users. The report outlined several drivers impacting the market, including hybrid cloud computing and a shifting focus to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions among enterprises…

Grazed from FedTechMagazine. Author: Steve Zurier.

Cloud computing has become such a way of life at NASA over the past five or six years that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory IT team thinks of most cloud-based services as just another node on the network, say Tom Soderstrom and Jonathan Chiang, chief technology and innovation officer and IT chief engineer, respectively. In fact, Soderstrom says that whether it’s Amazon Web Services or Windows Azure, “we think that using the cloud applications can be even more secure than what we do internally.”

“Every service we sign on with has to be vetted by FedRAMP [the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program], so we know if they are on the list that they comply with the NIST 800-53 security specifications for federal installations,” Soderstrom explains. “And these vendors spend a lot of money on IT security; they are constantly patching.”…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Public cloud computing seems to be the end goal for various firms, according to a new survey by RightScale featured in CloudTimes; hybrid and multiclouds are also on the upswing. No matter which cloud route a firm chooses, the findings revealed that, as more organizations adopt cloud technology, they derive increasing value while the difficulties of adoption diminish.

Levels of Cloud

RightScale’s "2014 State of the Cloud Survey" aimed to understand how companies are adopting the cloud and what changes IT professionals are making within their IT management to do so. The survey tallied responses from enterprises and small and midsize firms with various levels of cloud experience, from those developing cloud strategies to those that are heavily reliant upon it…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Linda Tucci.

The IT press is rife with stories about how cloud computing spells the end of corporate IT departments, so for this issue of Modern Infrastructure: CIO Edition, we assigned writer Dina Gerdeman to investigate. In extensive interviews with IT leaders across a swath of industries, Gerdeman discovered that, contrary to the gloomy pronouncements, CIOs and their IT staffs are harnessing the power of cloud computing on two fronts.

They are handing over the hosting and maintenance of non-core business applications to cloud providers in order to free up staff to focus on strategic business projects. And, second, they are adapting the cloud’s most enticing features—its tremendous scalability, shorter time to market for new products, and lower costs—to improve their own internal IT operations. Oh yes, and they are doing so in a metrics-driven, analytical fashion, pushing ahead aggressively when the strategy pans out and recalibrating as they learn what doesn’t work…

Grazed from StateTechMagazine. Author: David Hutchins.

At every level of government, there’s an emphasis on collaboration and teamwork. Simultaneously, cloud computing has driven the continued consumerization of technology into the realm of personal storage and file sharing. There’s an obvious connection: Employees want to tap services they’re used to outside the office — cloud-based backup and storage services — to facilitate collaboration on the job.

Like most people, government workers often work from home or need to perform their jobs on the go, juggling multiple devices and shuttling files between them. As easy-to-use cloud services penetrate personal computing, users expect to enjoy the same conveniences they have at home in the office…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Bulter.

OpenStack releases a new version of its open source cloud computing code twice a year. And today is the day for Icehouse, the first release of 2014. OpenStack leaders say they are excited about how many of the changes in the Icehouse release have been influenced by end users of the platform.

"We’ve worked hard to build a community of developers and users, and they’re the ones driving the priorities of how the software evolves," says COO of the OpenStack Foundation Mark Collier. Large scale enterprise end users want improvements related to reliability, ease of use and upgradability…

Grazed from EnterpriseTech. Author: George Leopold.

IT executives laid out the challenges and opportunities created by cloud computing, open source, and other disruptive technologies during this week’s Red Hat summit in San Francisco. With the rise of mobility, social media, big data and cloud computing, “The reality today for the enterprise IT organization is it is a nightmare,” warned Steve Bandrowczak, Hewlett-Packard’s CIO for enterprise services.

Enterprise IT administrators must now hustle to meet the heightened expectations of workers who have grown accustomed to instantaneous access to data and video downloads along with two-second response times. The challenge, Bandrowczak added, is to “take that massive complexity and simplify it for our users and make it faster,” while adding “higher value and lower cost.”…

Grazed from Computing. Author: Editorial Staff.

The modern IT professional faces a pair of distinct challenges, which at first glance appear to require two distinct and opposite approaches to providing services. The first is a need to meet constantly evolving business challenges in order to remain competitive in the fast-moving and often cutthroat world of the enterprise.

The second concern involves driving the costs out of business, allowing more to be done with less. For many, remaining competitive while cutting costs at the same time sounds like a far-fetched goal, but that’s the promise of cloud computing, which is increasingly finding its way into the enterprise, and bringing efficiency and cost-saving benefits with it…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Tiffany Trader.

Nimbix, Inc., one of the original HPC cloud vendors, sought to usher in a new era of heterogeneous cloud computing with the unveiling of its JARVICE platform in November. The platform-as-a-service offering uses high performance cloud hardware to create Nimbix Application Environments (NAEs) for high throughput batch processing. Once the environments are created and deployed to JARVICE, runtimes can be executed in the Nimbix Accelerated Compute Cloud (NACC).

Nimbix has always emphasized heterogenous computing through acceleration hardware such as the latest NVIDIA GPUs, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, Texas Instruments DSPs, and FPGAs, and JARVICE puts this technology to work in cloud with the benefits of bare-metal performance…