Grazed from Telepprise.  Author: Marko Spremo.

Transitioning to cloud computing, applications, storage, and infrastructure makes IT management’s job infinitely easier. While many business leaders focus on the cloud’s low cost or on its flexibility, IT managers know its real benefit: The cloud eliminates most of the hardest parts of their jobs.

High Stability Rates

A rate of 99.9 percent reliability may sound like an excellent real-world goal for a corporate network, but a network that spends one entire business day per year down is actually more than 99.9 percent reliable. IT leaders live in fear of downtime, especially during business hours. Even well-managed corporate IT departments frequently lack the staff, the equipment, or the scale to properly prepare for disasters or handle system utilization spikes…

Grazed from Genesis10.  Author: Joe Sclafani.

Ask most information technology (IT) specialists and they’ll tell you that choosing to include “cloud computing” services is more about finance than technology.  Imagine that you acquired an apartment building or an office tower and you rented the entire thing to one tenant.  Their rent would have to cover all of your costs including debt service, maintenance, operations, insurance, and a reasonable profit for you.

If the building contained, say, 70 rentable units you could split that cost 70 ways and charge each 1/70^th of those costs.  Simple.  The exact same analysis can be applied to cloud servers.  Originally when a company purchased a “server” it was to run one operation that all employees could share.  There was a server that enabled users to share files, another to share communications, another to share email, others to share specific software applications…

Grazed from Qubole.  Author: Moran Altarac.

Scalability of cloud databases and the potential of big data cloud computing is the most challenging aspect when designing an elastic data architecture. It is technically complex to scale data storage and computing. At the same time premature optimisation for potentially superfluous scalability carries a sizeable economic risk and opportunity cost. 

Today, technology firms and departments contemplating scalable database architectures have numerous database management systems and options of running them. Specifically NoSQL systems with flexible, de-normalized data schema have gained increasing market share with the rise of big data. Cloud and virtual computing resources and particularly Hadoop as a service are a paradigm shift. They introduced flexible architectures with managed technology and they transformed capital expenditure to operational one. Together NoSQL and cloud computing promise to bridge the gap between cheap and scalable data architectures…

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author:  Zeeshan Naseh.

Enterprises today are reeling from unprecedented disruption to their business models and effects of globalization that inflict new competitive and pricing pressures. These dynamics have put CIOs under the gun to meet twin goals that would seem to form a paradox:

• To construct and operate an agile IT infrastructure capable of scaling quickly and securely to meet evolving business demands.
• To reduce IT operating costs and total cost of ownership.

In response to these competing demands, CIOs are turning from old computing resources – resource-intensive on-premises data centers that often are duplicated, siloed and underutilized – to the Cloud. Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service models can help achieve some goals, especially related to cost…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Joe Panettieri.

When a Hosted Exchange cloud service provider (CSP) suffers an outage, a lot of channel partners and customers can get left in the dark. It’s painful. And there’s nothing you can do until the cloud service is restored. Right? Absolutely wrong.

Rich Forsen, president of Network Depot and one of the minds behind Virtual Administrator, walked Talkin’ Cloud through one potential solution that could keep channel partners — and their customers — productive even if a cloud email service like Hosted Exchange suffers an extended email outage…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Cloud computing is being adopted at a faster rate among growing firms that need to do more with less. The cloud is an on-demand solution that offers the increased productivity they seek. Nonetheless, according to industry professionals, adoption of the cloud is not always voluntary.

Pushed to the Cloud

As reported in CRN, solution providers are finding that more midsize firms are indeed moving their applications and data to the cloud but that the switch is being prompted by pressure from industry as well as business partners and enterprise customers who prefer cloud technology to run their businesses. The cloud providers addressed the trend at a recent VAR Roundtable. According to one vendor, 75 percent of financial companies are focused on making cloud computing a foundational component of their business model. CRN’s report says this trend can be seen in other industries such as healthcare where smaller practices must be in the cloud to work with larger hospitals and clinics…

Grazed from Cloud Security Alliance.  Author: Event Announcement.

The CSA Congress, to be held on December 04-05, 2013, is the industry’s premier gathering for IT security professionals and executives who must further educate themselves on the rapidly evolving subject of cloud security. In addition to offering best practices and practical solutions for remaining secure in the cloud, CSA Congress will focus on emerging areas of growth and concern in cloud security, including standardization, transparency of controls, mobile computing, Big Data in the cloud and innovation.

Building on the success of the 2012 event, this year’s Congress is not to be missed! Six dynamic tracks, featuring some of the most distinguished experts in cloud security and privacy will offer attendees valuable and practical information on the most critical aspects of cloud computing:…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Hyoun Park.

The best way to look at the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a Software as a Service application is to consider the costs of the software, hardware, labor, consulting and training associated with the existing process compared to the SaaS application.

However, although SaaS applications typically have a lower TCO than on-premises applications due to the lack of hardware, maintenance and upgrade costs and to improved alignment between the application and the use case in question, chief financial officers (CFOs) should not use the TCO of a SaaS application as the key metric…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

As cloud computing continues to evolve, it’s becoming pretty clear that IT organizations need to start acting a lot more like service providers. Of course, what any service provider will tell you is that the quality of the service being provided is only as good as the network that supports it. Within the enterprise today, there is already a mix of wide area networking technologies in place that provide various levels of network bandwidth. Most of those networking transport options are being steadily replaced by Ethernet. But for the time being, IT organizations are still going to have to contend with multiple types of WANs to deliver services that in the era of the cloud are more distributed than ever.

At the recent ITEXPO West conference, Adtran announced the Total Access 900e Gen 3 series of Ethernet and Multi-T1 IP Business Gateways that, in addition to being able to support voice services, provide 100 Mbps along with a Gigabit Ethernet interface. In addition, Adtran followed up this week with a new NetVanta 6250 IP Business Gateway that makes it easier to transition from a T1 network to Ethernet…

CloudCow Contributed Article.  Author: Sergio Galindo, head of Global Product Management at GFI Software.

Stress is a feeling that IT administrators, especially at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), know all too well. In fact, an independent survey conducted by Opinion Matters on behalf of GFI Software earlier this year, which polled 207 IT administrators in U.S. organizations with more than 10 employees, found that 57 percent of respondents admit they’ve considered leaving their job due to workplace stress.

The reality is that IT admins are often challenged with supporting their company’s IT efforts with limited resources and budget. And they are forced to wear many different hats each day. They are tasked with keeping network infrastructure operational and secure, battling unauthorized access and intruders, and defining and enforcing corporate policies, among a laundry list of other critical tasks. On top of that, they shoulder the responsibility of supporting the needs of end users who sometimes seem to go out of their way to create the most bizarre IT issues imaginable…