Grazed from Wireld. Author: Joshua McKenty.

The Discovery Center in Times Square has a fascinating exhibit of sculptures built out of Legos. Human figures of various sorts emerge from the blocks, providing a similar feeling to the exhibition of partially finished sculptures of Michelangelo, which are in the same gallery in Florence that houses his famous statue of David. Looking at these sculptures and thinking about Michelangelo led me to consider building a replica of David out of Legos (note to self: it’s been done).

In the computing business, we have a new sort of Legos: those created by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Because they are exciting and new and can solve many different computing problems, people often get the idea that you can and should build everything out of them. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. What are the signs that AWS is not a good fit for an application?…

Grazed from ABA Banking Journal. Author: John Ginovsky.

By now those freaky acronyms SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS shouldn’t need to be spelled out for those in the IT know. (For all the rest, they stand for, respectively, software, platform, and infrastructure as a service.) They are subsets of what’s become known as the cloud, which previously was known as virtualization or hosted services, which previously were known as the internet, which once was capitalized as The Internet before it became commoditized.

Without further belaboring the terminology history, what’s important here is to know that businesses, and especially banks, are tearing ownership of the cloud away from the IT gurus. The other Cs beside the CIO—CEO, COO, and CFO—are waking up to the fact that cloud systems offer the potential for increased efficiency, lower costs, higher security, regulatory compliance, and world peace…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Rod Johnson.

After going live on its own Oracle Sales Cloud application one year ago, Oracle now relies on a single global deployment of its SaaS CRM tool to support its global sales operations—from opportunities to accounts to territories in 145 countries around the world.

Each minute of every day, Oracle’s extensive global network of sales professionals in Key Accounts, Field Sales, Inside Sales, and Channels depend on Oracle Sales Cloud as the strategic backbone that supports the $37 billion in annual revenue the company reported in June…

Grazed from NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Constellation Research, Inc. the research and advisory firm focused how disruptive technologies transform business models announced today the publication of "SaaS Adoption Trends and Customer Experience” by Constellation Vice President and Principal Analyst, Frank Scavo. Based on survey results from Computer Economics, this report documents the increasing adoption levels and investment rates for SaaS applications across all categories and recommends best practices for buyers in evaluating and contracting with SaaS providers.

This new report is report reveals:

– The percentage of organizations investing in 10 categories of SaaS applications, along with and extensive list of vendors in each category.
Analysis of 11 key benefits of SaaS along with 10 concerns, ranking by importance in the minds of buyers.
– Customer preference for multi-tenant versus single tenant applications…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service spending is expected to exceed $7.2B, and 71 percent of financial service executives will invest more in cloud computing in 2013. At the same time, cloud computing remains one of the highest perceived threats to protecting regulated data. Nonetheless, most businesses have the cloud as part of their strategic IT plan.

Online Tech made no compromise in the new architecture of its encrypted, enterprise-class cloud infrastructure that keeps the compliant data center operator at the forefront of safe and secure data hosting. Nearly six months of labor and $1 million went into the creation of Online Tech’s next-generation cloud. With EMC’s VMAX SAN, VMWare’s fault tolerant hosts, and Dell blade server chassis, cloud clients don’t have to trade protection for performance or scalability. Online Tech’s encrypted clouds do not burden clients with key management, third party software, or custom programming…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: David Amerland.

In the world of cloud computing, your IT department needs to be agile. CIOs must become responsive to the needs of the business. The alternative is disruption—the bad kind. David Amerland explains… Even relatively small changes can have a significant impact on the way your enterprise works. But transitioning to the cloud is far from a small change: Its impact is considerable and disruptive, but in a good way. Disruption is good—at least, home-grown disruption is. The challenge requires adaptation, which plays to our Darwinistic notions of how businesses evolve, strive to survive, and come out stronger.

More Knowledgeable, Skilled, Responsive Staff

As an enterprise transitions from a traditional business model to an agile cloud-based corporation, the most obvious change involves the part IT plays. Traditionally limited to a very specific role within the organization, IT was the department that would be forgotten about until a problem cropped up…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

The migration of services delivered through cloud-based resources is causing tectonic shifts across the IT vendor landscape and one area of the market that’s been unsure about what it means has been channel resellers. But the channel is finally finding its groove in the cloud, according to a new study.

IT industry trade group CompTIA annually surveys its members asking how channel vendors are embracing the cloud computing trend. Four years ago, only four in 10 surveyed said they were involved in cloud computing services. Last year, that number jumped to 85%. This year, all 400 vendors said they offer cloud computing services…

Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Christina Larson.

There are few $100 billion industries in China that foreign investors and service providers aren’t rushing to compete for a slice of. But a new report by the Washington-based Center for Research Intelligence and Analysis (CRIA) highlights how China’s fast-expanding cloud-computing sector could contain land mines.

Cloud computing is growing quickly in China, thanks to heavy government support. The country’s overall cloud-computing value chain is expected to be worth at least $122 billion by 2015, according to the China Software Industry Association. The same benefits driving the adoption of cloud computing in the U.S. and elsewhere—including easy data storage and low maintenance costs—are behind its gradual adoption in China, especially in select government agencies and finance, petrochemicals, and health-care sectors. There’s still a lot of room for expansion, though. China has the world’s largest population of Internet users, and by the end of the year there will be 500 million smartphones, which utilize software and applications based in the cloud, online in China…

Grazed from UBMTech.  Author: Event Announcement.

Join thousands of IT professionals at New York’s largest IT event, INTEROP New York 2013, to be held at The Javits Center on September 30 – October 04, 2013.   Discover the most important innovations and strategies to drive your organization’s success, including: BYOD security, the latest cloud and virtualization technologies, SDN, the Internet of Things, Apple in the enterprise & more.

Interop Conference sessions help you find the actionable solutions to your current IT headaches and plan for future developments. Three days of sessions highlight the latest advancements in networking, virtualization, cloud computing, mobility, data centers and more…

Grazed from SiliconRepublic. Author: Editorial Staff.

More and more businesses are adopting cloud computing as part of their IT infrastructure, according to a new infographic that provides a snapshot of cloud computing usage. The infographic published by livehive on Visual.ly reveals the most used cloud platforms, the average number of cloud services companies use, and the top 3 software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.

Also noted is that security concerns surrounding cloud computing have decreased nearly 10pc in one year: from 55pc of businesses worried about cloud security in 2012 to 46pc of businesses concerned about the security of cloud in 2013…