Grazed from EvolvingSol. Author: Editorial Staff.

Jack Woods of Silicon Angle pulled together a number of key stats every CIO should know when they are thinking about cloud computing. Let’s check out what he has to share:

• By 2015, end-user spending on cloud services could be more than $180 billion
• By the end of 2014, U.S. businesses are projected to spend more than 13 billion on cloud computing and managed hosting services
• Global spend is predicted to reach $79.1 billion by 2018
• 82% of companies reportedly saved money by moving to the cloud

You must have been out of the picture of life for so long if you have not joined the wagon of cloud computing. For enterprise holders, the cloud can be a fairly crafty entity that lays bear several benefits. In the simplest case, it is a big thing for the IT fraternity since it means massive portable drives.

Cloud computing is the industry darling, which allows organizations to run all of its applications with a traditional corporate center of data. Targeted to improve system, making storage and access to data far easier, and ultimately cutting down costs, the cloud has expanded from a simple, promising concept all the way to being one of the rapidly growing portions of the new face of the IT industry.

Grazed from CXOToday. Author: Editorial Staff.

Corporate spending on cloud computing is expected to triple from 2011 to 2017, according to IHS Technology (IHS) report, which predicts that enterprise spending on cloud computing will amount to nearly $235.1 billion, triple the $78.2 billion spent in 2011. This year, global business spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will reach an estimated $174.2 billion, up 20% from the amount spent in 2013, says the study.

“Cloud services, applications, security and data analytics will account for an ever-growing portion of total information technology spending by enterprises, valued at about $2 trillion at present,” IHS analyst Jagdish Rebello says in a statement. He adds that the robust growth will come as an increasing number of large and small enterprises move more of their applications to the cloud, while also looking at data analytics to drive new insights into consumer behavior…

Grazed from Fool. Author: Anders Bylund.

"2014 is going to be a defining year for the technology industry," says Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. "This will be the year when cloud architectures go from experimentation to deployment, where big data goes from promise to production, and when we get our first glimpse at how these innovations could potentially change our world." Sounds like a big idea to me. So I hopped on the phone with Whitehurst to discuss this game-changing trend.

"For the last couple of years, we’ve been talking about the cloud," he said. "But realistically, it’s only been about customers starting to toy around with it. You’re finally seeing these things go into production. So now, when I talk to CIOs of large companies, they are seriously talking about using Amazon.com to run applications. Not just running development and testing, but truly moving to production in the cloud."…

Grazed from GovHealthIT. Author: Tom Sullivan.

A majority of government organizations are planning to institute technology uber-trends within the next three years. The only thing is: A hefty percentage of them lack the infrastructure to actually do so. That’s according to a survey conducted by MeriTalk and, while the self-described government IT network polled state and local officials spanning the array of departments, its findings are particularly applicable to healthcare. MeriTalk lists the Big Five of IT as big data, cloud computing, data center consolidation, mobility, and security.

"Public health departments have perhaps the most to gain from Big Five initiatives,” said Steve O’Keeffe, founder, MeriTalk. “Mobile health drives community engagement, big data delivers better understanding of population health drivers, security keeps private information private.” That said, will state and local health departments follow through on intentions to adopt those technologies?…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Daniel Price.

Everyone knows what the cloud is, but does everybody know where the cloud is? We try to answer that as we look at some of the most unusual data centre locations in the world.

Under the Eyes of a Deity

Deep beneath the famous Uspenski Cathedral in the heart of Helsinki lies a converted World War II bomb shelter, which sees an unlikely fusion of data storage and green technology. Estimates suggest that in a typical data centre only 40 percent of energy use is for computing, with the remainder being used for cooling down the servers. The problem is so serious that data centres account for as much as 30 percent of a corporation’s energy bills and 1 percent of energy usage worldwide…

Grazed from Alavara. Author: PR Announcement.

Avalara Inc., (http://www.Avalara.com), a leading provider of sales tax and compliance automation services in the cloud, today announced it has been named as one of the top 100 Coolest Cloud Vendors of 2014 by CRN. The annual list recognizes the most innovative cloud vendors and solutions tailored to address the channel industry’s unique needs. Avalara was honored for its SaaS-based end-to-end compliance platform, AvaTax.

Each year, CRN honors the 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors in an effort to help solution providers navigate the growing cloud marketplace and identify the best solutions to support the IT channel. Winners are named across five major cloud categories including platforms and tools, infrastructure, storage, security and software, based on data and information gathered from both solution provider nominations and the CRN editorial team. Within the 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors list, Avalara was named to the 20 Coolest Cloud Software Vendors category…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Vladimir Jirasek.

Companies are increasingly using clouds to reach for business agility, lowering costs and putting pressure on internal IT teams to improve. The question of whether a company should use public or private cloud service cannot be answered without some definitions first. Fortunately, the Cloud Security Alliance has done a tremendous amount of good work by publishing a comprehensive guidance on cloud computing.

In the guidance, a public cloud is defined as such where multiple customers, who are not related to each other, share the service. Consequently, a private cloud is the opposite of public, but with a twist. There are two types of private clouds defined: on-premise and off-premise. As the names suggest, the former is in the customers datacentre, most likely operated by the IT team, while the latter are services provided to customers with infrastructure, platform or software, while ensuring that the service is not shared with other customers…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.

Organizations fully utilizing cloud computing save on average more than 15 percent in IT spending, whether measured as a percentage of revenue or on a per-user basis, according to a report from Computer Economics. A more detailed analysis of respondents’ IT spending mix shows that the savings come not only from a reduction in data center spending but also in IT personnel costs.

The cloud user organizations that participated in the study include two manufacturing companies, a life sciences organization, a wholesale distributor, a systems integrator and an online content provider. The full study provides a description of the survey respondents, including their industries, sizes and cloud system portfolios…

Grazed from AFR. Author: Trevor Clarke.

For all intents and purposes the Australian cloud computing market appears to be thriving. But while the pundits continue to claim it’s the way of the future, tech infrastructure run on businesses’ premises is far from dead. Analyst firms like IDC say the domestic cloud-computing market has become a billion-dollar industry and is likely to break through the $2.5 billion mark in 2017.

Over 80 per cent of the firm’s survey respondents say they are using one form or another of cloud computing. These are promising numbers. Anecdotal evidence in the form of enterprise chief information officers publicly espousing their support for using the cloud, including public cloud services, abounds. And, egged on by true believers, there is a steady stream of “we now have a cloud-first policy” emanating from government policymakers across Australia…