Grazed from InsuranceTech. Author: Kathy Burger.

Is cloud computing most valuable to insurers as a tactic for reducing infrastructure costs, or can it help them be more competitive and innovative? The answer probably is both. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that using cloud, virtualization and as-a-service models strictly for efficiency underestimates the potential of this disruptive force. Insurance & Technology has examined the ways carriers are enhancing their abilities to get to market faster with unique and profitable products, services and processes via the cloud and other hosted computing models.

One thing is clear: Cloud computing can no longer be considered an emerging technology or unproven platform. According to Gartner, this year the public cloud services market will grow 19.6% to total $109 billion worldwide. Business-process services and business-process-as-a-service are the largest segment, accounting for 77% of the total market, while infrastructure-a-a-service is the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud-services market and is expected to grow 45.4% in 2012, Gartner reports…

Grazed from RedOrbit. Author: Peter Suciu.

Every cloud may have a silver lining the saying goes, but there will likely be no such silver lining for the future of cloud computing, which tops the list of serious computer security threats for 2013. On Wednesday, the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) released the Georgia Tech Emerging Cyber Threats Report for 2013 at the Georgia Tech Cyber Security Summit, a gathering of industry and academic leaders in the field of cyber security.

According to the findings of the report, there are several specific threats to follow over the next year. Among the most ominous is the use of cloud computing for malicious purposes. As this emerging technology offers flexible provisioning capabilities that allow legitimate businesses to quickly add or subtract computing power, it could also be used to instantly create a powerful network of so-called zombie machines for use in nefarious purposes…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Florence de Borja.

In a research by Bain & Company in the Middle East, it revealed that cloud computing revenues can reach almost $150 billion in 2020, which accounts to 8% of the total technology expenditures. The research, titled “The Five Faces of the Cloud”, believes that the Middle East has to strengthen its network if the region wants to harness all of the benefits of cloud computing.

A common path which companies take when they shift their operations to the clouds is to use infrastructure applications or Software as a Service. Then, these firms move to a more open architecture with management tools and APIs. When companies take this path, they can organize their private datacenters in such a way that they can take advantage of different datacenters for easy deployment of applications and better workload mobility. This will also allow for the efficient and effective network to run…

Grazed from ITBusiness.net. Author: Yasuhiro Tai.

Online applications such as Facebook and Twitter, paired with smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices have given us everywhere access to our content and content sharing capabilities. They have also enabled wonderfully convenient solutions to help us communicate and stay connected whenever and wherever we decide. But they have simultaneously created a multitude of nightmarish issues for the IT managers that are responsible for the care and feeding of these data monsters.

Because of appealing characteristics such as low cost/GB and anytime/anywhere access, the internet is being used more and more to store data and run applications, replacing traditional tangible servers with private, hybrid and public cloud computing. As a result of this trend, Gartner has predicted that more than one-third of global digital content will ultimately be stored in the cloud by 2016…

Grazed from FirstClearing. Author: Dorothy Hinchcliff.

Junxure, a Raleigh, N.C.-based technology firm founded by a financial advisor that now has 10,000 users of its products, is launching a new cloud-based client relationship management platform for advisory firms. How are cloud-based systems different from other platforms? “Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities,” says an article on InfoWorld’s Web site.

Attendees at Charles Schwab’s Impact 2012 conference, currently underway, can watch a demo of Junxure Cloud. Meanwhile, today Chicago-based Envestnet Inc., which provides wealth management services for investment advisors, announced that it has agreed to integrate with Junxure Cloud…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

In many ways, the weakest link in cloud computing is the network. No matter how powerful your cloud hardware and software are, they’re useless without a secure and flexible network to hold the different pieces of the cloud together. That’s why it’s unsurprising to see cloud vendors such as Skytap, which has introduced new multi-VPN functionality for its hybrid cloud services, working on next-generation networking solutions for the cloud.

Skytap, which was founded in 2006 (and adopted its current name in 2008), counts about 225 enterprise customers ranging in size from Fortune 500 organizations to smaller companies of a few hundred employees each. They also represent a wide swath of different types of businesses, according to to Brett Goodwin, Skytap’s vice president of Marketing & Business Development…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Rachel King.

Cloud computing has been one of the premier buzz topics in both consumer and enterprise technology, especially over the last two years. But how much of it is real and how much is just a bunch of hype? Some technology journalists would argue it’s a little bit of both.

"Like with any other buzz word, there is some hype around it, but I do think it’s very real," said Michal Lev-Ram, a writer at Fortune during a panel discussion at Egnyte Firestorm on Wednesday afternoon. She acknowledged that some companies are slower to embrace while others do with caution, but Lev-Ram pointed towards recent acquisitions made by larger enterprise players as well as some big IPOs as evidence for the growth in this space…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Why do some cloud projects succeed and others fail? That’s a question undoubtedly on the minds of many IT admins and business executives. And it’s also the focus of a recent IT Process Institute (ITPI) report. I recently chatted with ITPI Managing Director Kurt Milne, who helped prepare the report, to get his views on how to deploy cloud computing effectively in the business environment. Here’s what he had to say.

Milne, who has 20 years’ experience in the IT industry and co-authored a book on building private clouds, knows this subject well. Meanwhile, the ITPI, founded in 2005, is also well-established as a consulting resource for the IT community, counting VMware (NYSE: VMW), Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) among its customers…

Email Reporting in the Cloud

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Saroj Kar.

Cloud computing is changing how accountants do their business. It is a fairly simple and straightforward model of how technology continues to find solutions to improve business functions. Cloud computing providers have already provided a lot of services to meet the needs of accounting firms and accountants. Most of these services against internal company applications and accounting solutions that accountant can work with their clients.

According to the 2012 CCH Technology Survey, an independent nationwide survey of more than 400 accounting professionals, conducted by ORC International for CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business, found that cloud and mobile top the lists of emerging technologies benefiting the tax and accounting profession in productivity and the value they can deliver to clients…