Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

To know whether cloud computing can give your organization a competitive advantage, it helps to look at the success of other businesses which have turned to the cloud. An in-depth look will help quell some of the apprehensions of executives in many companies. Schumacher Group, a healthcare company focused on improving patient care in Texas and Louisiana, recently moved to a software-as-a-service model. Even CEO William “Kip” Schumacher admits that the IT staff is better equipped to work on innovations driving its mission.

Schumacher Group now works with thousands of health care providers, meaning it is involved in the treatment over four million patients a year. The company has, according to Schumacher, established a plan to buy up 80% of the infrastructures available. By customizing the remaining 20%, it has given IT the ability to drive essential innovations seen as the competitive advantage the cloud is providing the organization…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

People have actually been using cloud services for years. When they’ve needed to conference with each other, they go through third-party providers such as WebEx or On24. Apple iTunes has been popular for years. Now, people use cloud for many other personal needs. When they need to store files, they use Dropbox or Amazon — or move everything into Apple iCloud. And who doesn’t have a Gmail account?

The bottom line is people have become comfortable with cloud, and this level of comfort is percolating into corporate policy. In adopting their own personal cloud computing-based applications, employees are now driving their organizations to cloud as well. Who says companies don’t listen to their employees?…

Grazed from BizTechMagazine. Author: Steve Zurier.

For mobile solutions developer Mobiquity, running a business in the cloud makes perfect sense. As a startup, Mobiquity made the fiscal decision to leverage cloud-based infrastructure versus building out costly on-premises services. In the beginning, it used Google Apps and cloud-based storage. That was then.

As demand soared for enterprise ­mobile solutions, applications and websites, Mobiquity, too, grew exponentially, says Infrastructure Architect Tim Harney. The Boston-area company launched in April 2011 with just a handful of employees. By the end of 2012, it had 160 full-time people. And the company — whose clients include Weight Watchers, Fidelity and the New York Post — expects that in 2013 it will employ nearly 300 people. That doesn’t mean it’s outgrown the cloud. “As the company grew, we found that in Google Apps, there was no real sync tool to integrate Microsoft Outlook on a Mac,” Harney says. “I got some feedback from people wondering why we couldn’t use Microsoft Exchange.”…

Grazed from Smallbusiness.co.uk. Author: Mark Seemann.

It’s no surprise that cloud computing services are so enticing to businesses: the minimal upfront costs, pay-as-you-go cost structure, flexible access to software and data, and the promise that the cloud vendor will handle the awkward, costly parts of IT.

Cloud services can make applications that were once the preserve of only the largest organisations, like CRM, sales management, contact centre software, call recording – available to any company, from a two-person business to a £20 million turnover organisation. It puts what were once the big kids’ toys in the hands of any business, irrespective of size. However, using the cloud can still be perceived as a leap of faith. Some businesses are concerned about exactly how to choose the right cloud applications, how to get the best use from them, and if their data will be secure when it’s up there. To help dispel these doubts, here are the key questions you should ask a cloud service provider before committing.

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Saroj Kar.

Study of cloud computing among 1,300 U.S. and U.K. executives, conducted by Rackspace Hosting with support from Manchester Business School in the U.K., found that cloud technologies enable significant budgetary savings.

The objective of this study was to determine whether to allow companies to reduce the cloud computing technology budgets, and determine where they will then invest the savings. Overall, the researchers were able to count the reduction of the IT budget by 26% of respondents in U.S. companies. The vast majority of all respondents (94%) stated that cloud computing somehow helped them save money…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Evernote and its 50 million-user population are having a bad week. The productivity software-as-a-service issued a systemwide password reset for all of its users on Saturday after a hacker or group of hackers broke into its user database and swiped various bits of user information, including usernames, emails and passwords.

It’s another weapon in the arsenal of cloud skeptics, who tend to point at breaches like this as proof the cloud is not secure. Of course, that’s ridiculous, as these breaches are less common than attacks or theft within the four walls of a business. Still, Evernote is coming under fire—and rightfully so—for allowing this breach to happen. According to the company’s blog, its operations and security team discovered and blocked "suspicious activity" on its network. The blog post, written by Dave Engberg, called it a "coordinated attempt to access secure areas" of Evernote’s service…

Grazed from Governing. Author: Tod Newcombe.

In a sign of government’s growing confidence in cloud computing, Texas has announced plans to move 100,000 state workers onto Microsoft’s cloud. The deal is the “largest statewide cloud deployment” in the U.S., according to Microsoft. The contract will give workers access to Office 365, which includes email and collaboration tools and is in compliance with the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services as well as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act security standards.

The program’s ability to meet stringent standards was one of the main reasons Texas chose Microsoft’s cloud computing service, according to Todd Kimbriel, director of e-government for the Texas Department of Information Resources. Another reason Texas is embracing cloud computing is to hold down technology costs. “We’re paying about a 75 percent discount now compared to what we were paying a competitor four years ago,” Kimbriel said…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Darrell Etherington.

Today Appcore, a company that offers complete cloud computing infrastructure (read: hardware and software) to clients including mobile network providers, data centers, and enterprises, has announced a $6 million Series B round today. The company, which is headquartered in Des Moines but has offices in Hong Kong, Manila and Singapore, says it will use the funding to fuel additional R&D, and to help continue its rapid expansion in fast-growing Asian markets.

The company is sort of like an Apple for the cloud computing sector, according to Appcore CEO Brian Donaghy. In an interview about the news, he said that if you think about Apple’s approach to consumer electronics, which includes a holistic approach that involves creating hardware and software perfectly tailored for each other, that’s what Appcore is doing with local cloud infrastructure…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Ever since the Amazon cloud and its competitors took shape beginning in 2006, it has been an open question: Would the enterprise’s use of cloud technology grow up from inside the data center, then proceed to a similar environment outside? Or would the public cloud architecture prevail and be imposed on commercial data centers?

These two models originated in different places. Google and Amazon offered the clearest examples of what scale-out architecture could look like. Compared to the typical enterprise, the Amazon model looked simple, uniform, highly automated and highly elastic — more virtual servers could be added on command for a given workload, or physical servers could be added to the cloud’s cluster itself, as needed. The fact that search and online retailing consisted of a few high-powered applications, designed to scale out, helped. They posed a completely different set of requirements than needed by the typical mixed-use enterprise…

Grazed from The Guardian. Author: Dan Gillmor.

Google recently launched its high-end Chromebook Pixel, and like previous Chromebooks this notebook computer makes a distinctly 21st Century assumption: that users’ data, work and play belong mostly online, not on their own computers. Google isn’t alone in pushing this notion, but it’s the most powerful evangelist for the shift to what tech people call the "cloud" and away from "local" storage. Call me unconvinced. Deeply unconvinced.

The cloud evangelists have an alluring pitch. First, they say, we can now count on being connected as much of the time as necessary. Second, these computing and data services becoming a utility like electricity – easier and safer to run from remote servers than on our local systems…