Grazed from The Globe and Mail. Author: Editorial Staff.

Most Canadians know something about cloud computing – our Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail accounts are all sitting on a virtual server somewhere – but businesses have been slow to adopt this technology. A 2012 Bank of Montreal report found that half of all business owners weren’t familiar with cloud computing, while only 10 per cent of companies planned to use it.

Wayne Ingram, managing director of technology for Accenture Canada, says it’s only a matter of time until those numbers tick upward. Storing information on a virtual server, rather than on servers stored in the office basement, is cheaper and more efficient. And with people working on multiple devices and from disparate locations, logging on to a network with a VPN key, or encryption key, isn’t practical any more. Mr. Ingram told us how companies can adopt cloud-based software, what’s holding people back and where this technology will go in the future…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

Seeing skeptical CIOs agree to cloud-based pilots of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other applications is evidence of how cloud computing is slowly winning the trust war. Further evidence can be seen from how skeptical many of these CIOs initially were, and how successful pilots led to their gradual trust.

This trust hasn’t come cheap however. Every one of these CIOs spoken with, across a range of manufacturing companies, learned that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) aren’t sufficient to manage the areas of security, privacy and confidentiality on their own. Cloud computing vendors have used SLAs as a means to imply security standards are met; one CIO told me he had an audit done to see if the SLA targets promised were realistic. They weren’t and he moved on to another vendor…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: C J Arlotta.

Cloud management platform OpDemand recently announced support for maintaining, deploying and monitoring Heroku cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) inside the OpDemand console. Heroku now can be implemented into a larger cloud management strategy that provides centralized configuration management, monitoring, and auditing of all changes to Heroku applications. The solution spans infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and PaaS.

Heroku applications can consume a wide range of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services EC2-powered databases, caches and other backing services, providing users with the ability swap out expensive or inflexible add-ons for new custom add-ons built to exact specifications. Both EC2 add-ons and Heroku applications are managed from a unified console. Any changes made to a Heroku application is automatically logged into OnDemand’s event feed, allowing administrators to follow any modifications…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

The next generation of master data management is in the cloud, it seems. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) has launched Dell Boomi Master Data Management (MDM), a cloud-managed product that provides a set of features for simplifying data management, data integration and data quality assurance.

Aimed at midsize businesses, Dell Boomi MDM is being positioned as having a set of features comparable with on-premise systems but at a fraction of the cost. Not exactly an out-of-the-ordinary way for promoting and marketing cloud services, of course. Through the new product, Dell is offering customers multi-domain support, near real-time synchronization, bi-directional data flow and web service calls that support "enriching and validating data."…

Grazed from IDG. Author: Brandon Butler.

It’s one of the fundamental questions of cloud computing: Is it less expensive to run workloads in a public cloud than in an on-premises IT environment? The answer, says Charlie Burns, a researcher at boutique advisory firm Saugatuck Technology, is "a definitive maybe." The answer varies depending on individual customers and use cases. But, Burns found some general rules of thumb. "It comes down to the basic question of, ‘How good are you at running your in-house environment?’" he says.

Large enterprises with highly optimized IT shops tailored to their business’ needs may find cloud computing to be more expensive. But, if a company has workloads that ebb and flow in their use of compute power, then the cloud can yield substantial savings, Burns found…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Gary Flood.

When Direct Line Group, a U.K. headquartered insurance firm, was spun off from its parent company, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), last year it had a mere five months to completely overhaul a key internal IT system. Mark Martin, Direct Line Group’s HR director, said that the viability of its HR system was a big factor in how seriously the market would see its October 2012 IPO on the London Stock Exchange. "We needed to build a separate system, and very quickly," Martin told Information Week. "We had all our HR based on a group system that we would no longer be able to use."

Compounding his task: the new company was going to be a highly complex beast, with 16,000 staff working in different companies with a range of different tasks — from people repairing motor vehicles to actuaries to call center operatives — with a complex set of contracts, pension arrangements and operating terms and conditions that would also need to be rationalized as part of Direct Line’s separation from RBS…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Newvem, the Israeli and San Francisco cloud-monitoring startup, has brought a graphic way of viewing workloads in the Amazon cloud into quick focus. Its recently released Utilization Heat Map service can show utilization levels of an individual server, a group of servers or aggregated workloads in a color-coded map.

Amazon Web Services’ CloudWatch service also shows utilization levels, particularly if a customer plugs certain data from Amazon’s own monitoring system into the CloudWatch dashboard or chooses to chart parts of it. But Newvem has organized the flow of data on a server’s operation into a Cloud Capacity Utilization Heat Map that analyzes it and comes up with a projection of what servers, or group of servers, are being heavily, moderately or lightly utilized…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Walter Bailey.

With an increasing number of people getting involved in the world of technology, there are significant security issues that need to be considered as well. The involvement of different departments in this is thought to change the overall trend of the entire marketplace. The way these virtual techniques are replacing the traditional hardware is something that might grow of concern to the governments of countries as they strive to maintain high levels of security.

What Are Some Of The Issues To consider In 2013 Regarding Cloud Computing?

There are a number of predictions that have been made about cloud computing for the year 2013, which include:

Cloud computing structures would become something of national importance in the years to come. This would mean that the governments would have to include considerations for these structures in their level of operations because of the negative impacts that cloud computing might have. There can be numerous disruptions within the cloud computing initiatives such as attacks on the service providers of the cloud computing managers…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Rachel Dines.

What do cloud gateways, emergency communications tools, and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) all have in common? All are changing the way businesses run their continuity programs. The products that make up the business technology resiliency market landscape historically have been fragmented and ill-defined, despite the fact that the products share a common mission: improving uptime. Although no organization is bullet proof, understanding the business value of these technologies and where they fit into your environment is key to enabling the always-on, always-available extended enterprise.

To help you develop your strategy for business technology resiliency for the next few years, Forrester has identified eight disruptive technologies that infrastructure & operations (I&O) professionals must keep on their watch list for 2013 and beyond. They are file sync and mobile access, cloud-to-cloud backup, cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) services, cloud gateways and connectors, continuity automation, hypervisor replication, virtualized continuity tools, and automated communication and notification tools. Consider how each of these might factor into your plans:…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

TribeHR, the social HR pioneer, today announced the new TribeHR SuiteApp, built using NetSuite’s SuiteCloud Computing Platform. The new SuiteApp is the first social human resources management software for use with NetSuite, enabling customers to manage the entire employee lifecycle through a powerful core human resource information system (HRIS). This system tracks time off and work history, and offers advanced talent management with 360-degree feedback and public recognition, and a social applicant tracking system (ATS) with integrations to LinkedIn and Facebook. With NetSuite and the TribeHR SuiteApp, businesses can now manage their entire business from one integrated cloud solution: finance, sales, service, fulfillment, and now for the first time, human resources.

"We’re excited to be a NetSuite SuiteCloud Developer Network partner and to develop the first end-to-end HR solution designed specifically for NetSuite customers," said Joseph Fung, CEO of TribeHR. "The TribeHR SuiteApp brings a whole new set of capabilities to NetSuite customers, allowing them to not only gain greater insight into their organization, but giving them the critical tools needed to motivate, retain and engage one of their most valuable assets – their employees."…