Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.

Disaster recovery used to be the province of the rich and famous: Only the most deep-pocketed organizations could afford the equipment, effort and expertise needed to put together a comprehensive DR plan. In the past decade, though, virtualization has lowered the bar to disaster recovery. By running a hypervisor at a remote site, organizations can eliminate the need for exact hardware replicas at the DR site, greatly reducing costs and overhead.

Now, the public cloud has pushed DR one step further, using cloud computing advantages to remove the need for a dedicated remote location and hardware altogether. Further, the cloud’s pay-for-use model reduces monthly charges, prompting organizations to pay for protection only when they need it. Soup-to-nuts cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings, meanwhile, can also reduce the amount of on-staff expertise needed to pull off a DR initiative…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Butler.

Cloud computing was an estimated $47.4 billion industry in 2013 and is expected to more than double to $107 billion by 2017, research firm IDC predicts. The cloud’s 23.5% compound annual growth rate is five times faster than that of the broader technology market, IDC Vice President of data center and cloud Rick Villars said during the IDC Directions conference on Wednesday in Boston.

Cloud’s adoption has been driven by three major factors: scale, complexity and speed, Villars said. The cloud offers scale that regular businesses do not have, which allows them to deliver more complex services faster. The explosion of mobile devices was one of the first megatrends that significantly ramped up the need for cloud computing services…

Grazed from BusinessCloudNews. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

Research commissioned by Microsoft and published Wednesday suggests nearly half of organisations using cloud services have moved beyond initial pilot phases, and 32 per cent of enterprises articulating and implementing clear cloud computing strategies within their organisations despite concerns around data protection and security. But the findings also suggest that pervasive concerns around security, while certainly a challenge for cloud service providers and enterprises, may also be a boon for other players.

The research, which includes interviews and survey responses of over 2,000 IT decision-makers working in business of all sizes in eleven countries reveals that over 45 per cent of those that participated claim to be well beyond the pilot phase of implementing cloud services within their organisations…

Grazed from CircleID. Author: Peter JH Van Eijk.

The number one concern cited for avoiding cloud computing is security. And there is a reason for that. Cloud providers have demonstrated some spectacular failures in the past, including Amazon’s near total shutdown of an entire region, Dropbox’s authentication snafu, and innumerous cloud providers that go belly-up.

However, in the long run, cloud computing is destined to become more secure than in-house IT. I will briefly describe two dynamics in the industry that point in that direction, with substantiating evidence. First, good cloud providers are getting better, as they have more staff available to do security, and bigger economies of scale, allowing them to sustain more security processes…

Grazed from Syncplicity. Author: PR Announcement.

Syncplicity announced a new release of its Syncplicity Business Edition that now offers full and seamless support for Google Docs™. With this latest release, Google Apps™ customers can now synchronize any desktop file such as Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Adobe Acrobat PDF, JPEG, ZIP, CAD and other files with Google Docs.

Syncplicity’s unique seamless synchronization means users can now have the choice to create and edit their files in their favorite application, such as grammar checking a file in Microsoft Word and then collaborating on that same file in Google Docs. In addition, through Syncplicity, users with files in Google Docs benefit from centralized management and backups, instantaneous synchronization across multiple computers, policy-controlled sharing and collaboration, and offline, anywhere access…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Gilad Parann-Nissany.

In 2008, the size of the cloud computing industry was $46 Billion. That is more than the GDP of Costa Rica! Think it’s a lot? Ready to jump on the cloud security bandwagon? That was 2008! In 2014, the size of the cloud computing industry has more than tripled to $150 Billion – almost the GDP of New Zealand. NOW are you ready?

Besides the fact that everyone else is doing it, migrating to the cloud just makes good business sense. Whether you select a private cloud, a public cloud, or some hybrid of the two, cloud computing is just more powerful than traditional datacenters. There are several reasons for this. First, the reduced capital costs of IT infrastructure – no need for hardware, software, and manpower (and training) to manage them. Also, there is the improved accessibility, effectiveness, flexibility and scalability of the cloud…

Grazed from Peak10. Author: Ken Donoghue.

There is strong evidence that cloud computing and cloud storage will experience big growth spurts this year. The cloud has more to offer than ever before, and competition among providers for mindshare is producing highly differentiated products with real appeal to businesses of all sizes and types, particularly in the mid-market.

Three contributors stand out. The cloud offerings have matured mightily over the past few years, particularly in the area of security and compliance, making the cloud more attractive all around. Maturity in the cloud storage arena has been accompanied by a massive expansion in data generation and data analytics; it all has to go somewhere…

Grazed from Computing. Author: Graeme Burton.

A shortage of appropriately skilled staff is holding back organisations’ cloud computing initiatives, according to panellists at Computing’s IT Leaders’ Forum. Potential staff with the right mix of skills, or who can fit into the new categories of skills required to keep organisations’ cloud initiatives running smoothly – including the ability to challenge suppliers in terms of their offerings, architecture and cost – will be in high demand for the foreseeable future.

Rocco Labellarte, CIO at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, described it as "bloody hard" to get the right people in. The borough is in the process of shifting some 350 organisational applications to the cloud and, therefore, the kinds of skills required of its IT department is changing…

Grazed from IBTimes. Author: David Gilbert.

It may sound like an oxymoron, but small computing is getting big and big computing is getting small. And it is going to be the combination of these two "mega-trends" which will be key to the success of wearable technology and lead to everything and anything around us becoming connected.

The continued miniaturisation of computing will allow us to turn anything into a computer while being able to connect directly to a vast cloud computing infrastructure will make these devices more powerful than ever before. Intel’s chief futurist Steve Brown believes that technology – and computing specifically – becoming smaller and smaller is "the key thing that is now allowing us now to think about computers becoming wearable."…

Grazed from Lifehacker. Author: Editorial Staff.

Last week a new set of privacy principles regarding the handling of personal information came into effect. The changes relate to how businesses handle, use and store personal information. While there are significant changes with a number of benefits for individuals, there have been some misconceptions in the industry with regards to privacy in the cloud that I’d like to address. Here are the top 5 myths that I’ve seen about privacy in the cloud.

1. Use of cloud computing is the biggest privacy risk factor

The notion that the use of cloud computing is the biggest Privacy risk factor that Australian businesses need to worry about is simply untrue. Ponemon Institute’s Survey on Data Security Breaches revealed that 69 per cent of serious data leaks were due to employee activities or errors. So a lack of internal policies and controls, direct marketing activities, poorly trained staff, stolen laptops and offshore call centres are all bigger risks than cloud computing. While Australian companies need to be wary of the new legislation and how it affects their IT infrastructure, the direct business benefits of cloud far outweigh these alleged risks…