Grazed from CloudCruiser. Author: Editorial Staff.

Over the past few years, the cloud has morphed from a relatively obscure entity into something that’s become pervasive as companies look to control costs and increase functionality. The technology’s popularity is evidenced by the fact that 75 percent of companies recently indicated that they’ve deployed at least one cloud computing platform. But before a business decides to move into the cloud, it’s important to perform thorough IT financial analytics to determine whether the move makes sense from a monetary perspective. With that in mind, one of the key areas that cannot be overlooked is support functions.

When IT functions are kept on-premises, businesses need to spend time hiring, training and certifying staff to manage and oversee the equipment that powers that infrastructure. That equipment also has to be purchased, maintained and stored, and staff members need to be compensated and offered benefits…

Grazed from Identacor. Author: Editorial Staff.

Enterprise cloud computing has grown into a bigger and extensive term which is now the center of organizational development programs, be it infrastructure, marketing, communication or other functions. It offers organizations with the flexibility to augment capacity and introduce new capabilities on the go, with no substantial cost, deliberate learning curve or dedicated resource allocation.

For the most part, current business infrastructure must plug into individual cloud based applications or services to perform business operations in an effective manner. Whether it is about building a new infrastructure or scaling an existing network, CIOs are challenged to determine the best possible solution to store massive amount of data in a secure environment – enabling a user-friendly interface and at a reasonable cost…

Grazed from PCQuest. Author: Abhay Y. Ghate.

With increasing business complexities, hybrid cloud computing has gained huge popularity these days. It is a model of IT management, wherein a user decides to manage some of their critical information resources in-house and host others on the cloud. Following are some of the scenarios wherein businesses may opt for a hybrid cloud solution:

• Data is extremely sensitive and the management cannot risk hosting it on public infrastructure, but at the same time, wants to leverage scalability in the cloud
• The business is not confident of entrusting data to a third party, especially when it does not know where on the cloud the data is hosted
• Local and national laws prohibit data from leaving the country the company is domiciled in…

"We’re eager for the AWS community to leverage this opportunity to migrate high-performance computing applications to the AWS Sydney area with our SAN like capabilities on board."

Grazed from Wired. Author: Ryan Koop.

The race to $0 is heating up in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space:

• March 25th – Google fires the first salvo in the pricing wars at their Google Cloud Platform Live event by reducing GCE by 32% across all sizes, regions, and classes.
• March 26th – AWS quickly responds by reducing EC2, S3, RDS, ElastiCache, and Elastic MapReduce pricing effective April 1st.
• March 31st – Microsoft wants to play too and after renaming Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure, they are cutting prices on compute by up to 35% and storage by up to 65%.

Bingo. Bango. Bongo… Hey Rackspace, where you at? And this isn’t the start of the price wars either. Things started in 2012 and continued through 2013 (see RightScale’s solid cloud price analysis for 2013). The above is just the most reactive back-and-forth we’ve seen yet…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Barry Levine.

This week IBM is celebrating the 50th anniversary of System/360 mainframes by announcing new cloud services for businesses. The new services include the first System z-based integrated system for the cloud, called the Enterprise Cloud System. The System/360 mainframe, first shown on April 7, 1964 — when Lyndon B. Johnson was president — was the first system whose processors could be upgraded while keeping the same software and peripherals.

The term "main frame" came from older equipment where extras were added to frames, as well as from the main frame telephone exchange that housed incoming lines. The announcements also include a pricing model where service providers can pay for mainframe cloud infrastructure based on computing load consumed…

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Rick Robinson.

Cloud computing has become the norm; and as the cloud skyscape matures and firms balance specific requirements with the advantages of flexibility, the trend is moving toward hybrid cloud dominance. Another result of cloud maturation is the growing prospect of self-service IT, particularly for developers. These cloud-centric trends are reshaping the IT environment at midsize firms. As traditional in-house IT fades among midsize firms, the new midsize IT is taking shape as a broker and manager of multiple and varied cloud resources.

The State of the Cloud Is Strong and Dynamic

As Serdar Yegulalp reports at InfoWorld, software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider RightScale has released its 2014 State of the Cloud Report. The report’s headline finding should surprise no one by this point: The cloud has gone mainstream. The survey of more than a thousand IT professionals from firms of all sizes, both tech-oriented and otherwise, finds that most of them — 94 percent — have moved beyond the "Cloud Watcher" stage and have launched at least their first cloud operations…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nermin Bajric.

IBM has won a five-year contract to manage Coca Cola Amatil’s (CCA) mission-critical SAP infrastructure on its private Cloud hosted in its Sydney datacentre. The project is expected to "drive significant operational costs" out of CCA’s South Pacific business. The company operates in Australia, NZ, Indonesia, PNG, Fiji, and Samoa.

CCA’s Australian and Indonesian branches will be the first to move onto IBM’s Cloud. A statement from IBM claims the platform will optimise and streamline CCA’s order management and distribution processes, increase operational efficiencies, and deliver a consistent customer experience…

Grazed from GuruFocus. Author: Editorial Staff.

The cloud and the cloud computing technologies are witnessing a major boom, and the market is predicted to continue growth. The growth of this market is due to the fact of more and more businesses are now moving into the cloud environment as the cloud matures. It won’t be a myth to say that various IT organizations are into a metamorphosis by adopting cloud technologies in their product portfolio. One such company is NetApp (NTAP), which is focused on delivering ground-breaking solutions to broaden its customer base and to influence its top and bottom line. NetApp is now primarily focusing the storage and cloud computing technologies and is striving to acquire a wider market.

Financials

The company recently released its third quarter 2014 results. It recorded a sequential quarterly growth by 4% for total revenue of $1.61 billion. But on a year-over-year basis it was down by 1%. The revenue even missed the consensus estimate of $1.64 billion but was in the range of management’s estimate of $1.575 billion to $1.675 billion. The year-over-year decline was mainly due to a decline of 22.3% from the OEM revenues. This was partly offset by an increase of 1.8% branded revenue. On a year-over-year basis, earnings improved 14.5%…