Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

The cloud may not be delivering everything being promised, but it is nonetheless a disruptive force to which enterprises, service providers and vendors alike ignore at their peril.

That’s one of the takeways from a panel I had the opportunity to join at this week’s CompTIA Breakaway conference, addressing ways to cut through the fog of cloud computing, led by Bob Dirkes of TechImage.

As Bob roved the audience Oprah style, he put a question out there that surely is on the mind of every seasoned IT veteran with at least a decade or more experience: we hear about all this business transformation that’s now going to take place thanks to cloud computing. But the phrase "business transformation" gets uttered every time vendors and analysts are pushing some new paradigm, be it PCs or client/server or Web computing or whatever…

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Cloud services promise low cost-of-entry and rapid return on investment, but those advantages make it easy to overlook associated investments. To find out the true return on investment (ROI) of cloud computing enterprises have to dig deeper, according to a white paper from industry organization Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA).

Calculating the total cost of an IT service against its potential return is always a challenge for IT staff, and that holds even truer for cloud computing, according to ISACA. A thorough analysis of cloud computing benefits must include short-, medium- and long-term views as well as termination costs, it said.

Hidden costs that enterprises may fail to anticipate when moving quickly to cloud-based services include the cost of bringing services back in-house due to regulatory change; unexpected expenses involved in the initial migration of systems; and lock-in with a specific provider or proprietary service model, according to ISACA…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Tracey Burrows.

IT capacity management maturity has taken several steps backwards, thanks to the arrival of virtualisation and cloud computing. So says Paul Diepenbroek, practice manager, consulting services and operations management, at Dimension Data.

Diepenbroek says capacity management, which by 2009 was relatively mature, has lost a great deal of ground, because the toolsets that were adequate three years ago no longer suit the needs of business and IT today.

“Capacity management – ensuring that the IT infrastructure and services have the capacity to accommodate business demands now and into the future – is becoming increasingly important,” he says. Where some years ago, an IT failure was an inconvenience to business, now business relies so heavily on its IT that a systems failure or lack of capacity has potential impacts on service operations, which lead to revenue loss.”…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Kyle Torpey.

While companies such as Google and Amazon have been putting tons of resources into the world of cloud computing over the last few years, it is becoming more and more obvious that private cloud hosting is going to be the way to go. The two basic groups of cloud services are public and private, and it seems like everyone has their own opinion regarding which is the right one to use for a serious business. While public clouds can definitely be used for some projects that do not require a lot of confidentiality, you are going to want to host the bulk of your business data on a private cloud.

You may already be using cloud services such as Dropbox and Google Docs right now, and these services are great when you are simply sharing information with your clients or trying to get something done quickly. The only problem that you could encounter when you are not using private cloud hosting services is that public services tend to be less secure. The private cloud should always be used when you are discussing sensitive information that needs to stay within the company at all costs…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Caitlan White.

As technologies change, so must IT admins. There is a massive shift going on in enterprises. Instead of building out on-premises infrastructure, they are shifting to the cloud or building highly automated private or hybrid clouds, and IT teams must learn to shift in response. Chief technology officers, chief information officers and IT pros have to capitalize on this sea change and fight to stay relevant in new cloud environments.

Eze Castle Integration Inc. provides strategic IT and cloud services, focusing on the financial space — an industry perhaps uniquely positioned to reap the benefits of cloud computing if it can overcome its security fears. Steve Schoener, its vice president of technology, provides technology consulting for a range of companies, and he has seen the whirlwind that cloud has brought his clients. SearchCloudComputing.com sat down with Schoener to discuss the roles in IT departments that are changing as a result of the cloud.

SearchCloudComputing.com: When a company decides to adopt cloud computing, who drives that decision? How has this changed over the past five or 10 years?…

Grazed from Manufacturing Business Technology. Author: Bob Vormittag.

Those who make the investment in BI and the cloud will realize improved cost and operational efficiencies, expanded real-time collaboration with customers, vendors and partners as well as faster and more personalized customer relationships. But how do you get there?

New advances in business intelligence (BI) and mobile cloud technology are transforming ERP as we know it. Bolstered by new innovation, ERP has become an even stronger business asset, and this is changing how mid-market customers define successful ERP implementations.

Key mid-market industries – such as manufacturing, retail, distribution, food, and services – are eager to harness the power of cloud computing to implement cost-efficient IT solutions that ultimately drive improved bottom-line benefits to their organizations…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

“Is Cloud Computing really cheaper?” Of all the questions asked at a recent event, this particular one was the most difficult to answer. Earlier this week I was at the New Jersey Institute of Technology as the host of CloudCamp, a “un-conference” created to inform and educate on various cloud computing topics. Since the launch of the unconventional series of events more than four years ago, it has grown to more than 300 cities around the globe. Over that time a lot of things have changed in the tech world. The discussion has shifted from a question of what is or isn’t cloud computing, to one of what can be done with cloud computing?

I set out to attempt to get an answer. Many of the people I spoke to have described cloud costing as a “Dark Art”, a surprise at the end of the month. The most common response was “it depends.” Not satisfied, I continue on with my mission. I set forth asking as many people as I could “Is Cloud Computing really cheaper?”…