Grazed from ITWire. Author: Stephen Withers.

Founded almost a year ago by Macquarie Telecom, Fujitsu, InfoPlex and VMware, OzHub has the stated goal of building local consumer and business confidence in cloud computing. The latest companies to join the organisation are Alcatel-Lucent Australia and F5.

"Cloud is very real but there are also real concerns to address, such as the ability for emerging services to meet the performance and trust expectations of users," said Alcatel-Lucent Australia president and managing director, Sean O’Halloran. "We have a strong role to play and we’re thrilled to be supporting OzHub to put Australia forward as a leading cloud market."…

Grazed from Networking. Author: John Dix.

According to pundits a good percentage of IT spending is already out of IT’s control and the trend calls for it to keep tipping away.

As we enter budget season, that raises interesting questions about the future of IT spending and, more importantly, questions about corporate IT responsibility and accountability. Regarding the latter, there are many hidden perils that will likely get ugly in the coming years.

In its "Raising Your Digital IQ" survey of 500 large U.S. companies, PwC concludes that 15% to 30% of IT spending already occurs outside the IT consolidated budget (see "Does ‘shadow IT’ lurk in your company?"). And Gartner says that within three years that number will reach 35%. Ten years ago it was less than 10% (see "The upside of shadow IT")…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Walter Bailey.

Many small businesses are heading to the cloud. This is a fact, considering cloud computing companies are some of the fastest growing in the tech world now. Cloud computing offers promise for lower costs, heightened IT efficiency and security. Truth be told, even though the mentioned benefits are valid, cloud computing is not as glamorous as you might think. As a small business, all factors remaining constant, you must understand the ideal way to manage the benefits for optimal performance. Lower costs don’t necessarily mean efficiency. The following tips should get you there the smart way.

Keep your bandwidth efficient

Cloud computing technology runs on the internet. Speed matters. The bandwidth that is offered for whatever product or function your business adds on the cloud should be the most important factor when you select a provider. For example, when you have a small bandwidth yet your small business website is huge, the overall product will be extremely slow…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Carlene Masker.

In the current global economic climate, companies and enterprises are required to migrate to cloud-based deployment models in order reduce costs and become self-sustainable. Post the dot-com bubble, the development of advanced web and storage technologies has been on the ascension. One such revolutionary technology developed post the dot-com era is cloud Computing, which focuses on the deliverance of computing services over the Internet. The highlight characteristic of cloud computing technologies is that they bring about system independence, multi-tenancy, scalability, virtualization, and more. Due to these benefits, companies and organizations are keen on migrating to cloud computing platforms.

Security is a prime area of concern for businesses when planning to migrate to cloud based services, along with other concerns such as reliability and integrating capability with existing IT infrastructure. There are already numerous assertions made by major technology companies regarding the rise of cloud-based deployments. In a recent conference, Cisco stated that it will be a tedious task to monitor data transferred to and from the cloud. On the flip side, renowned cloud service providers like Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services state that the fears regarding security risks in cloud-based models are sort of overblown…