Cloud computing offers a host of advantages to business enterprises, a few being – improved agility, reduced capital and operating expenditure and faster time to market. No wonder that a lot of organizations are looking at going the cloud computing way.

Cloud computing is also increasingly being seen by organizations as an integral part of their IT evolution; a crucial step that will equip them with greater agility and responsiveness to business demands along with  a much improved quality of service.

However, before organizations undertake the momentous journey towards cloud computing – whether a private cloud for internal stakeholders or a public cloud for external customers – they may want to take a closer look some of the important aspects of the subject…

UCC is set to become a leader in data science by pioneering the world’s first suite of degree courses in the emerging discipline — which is key to unlocking the benefits of cloud computing.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are always looking for automation and technologies to improve their business operation in the most cost effective way possible, especially to save operational cost. In house software solutions and network infrastructure historically have been one such solution to help them accomplish this.

However, these technologies were out of reach for SMEs due to cost constraints and necessary staffs required to monitor and administer these applications. That all changed with the advent of cloud based solutions and applications, which provide cost effective and easily accessible way to incorporate more powerful and more reliable hardware and software programs into their operations…

There are several enterprise trends converging that are of particular interest to me at the moment. The first is that the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend is accelerating cloud computing–specifically virtualization–for many corporations.  

IT departments are finding this to be quite convenient for them since they only have to manage the server side software and hardware while their key applications are virtualized and secured on any hardware employees bring in the front door…

Q&A talks cloud computing with CEO Jonathan Reeves, CEO of NextCloud. The California-based company is using an investment from Connecticut Innovations to open operations in Wallingford.

Q: First of all, welcome to Connecticut. Please explain what NextCloud is. How long have you been in business?

A: NextCloud was founded in 2010, and is an innovative provider of enterprise-class cloud computing services. The company’s solutions are designed to augment, or replace, the need for organizations to have their own computer server rooms and datacenters. The rate of technology change continues to accelerate, which can be very challenging for companies to keep pace and continue to innovate. For example, the widespread use of mobile devices has introduced a new set of issues and challenges to the IT staff at businesses of all sizes. Similarly, the amount of data to be stored is doubling every year and computing capacity and network requirements continue to expand at an unprecedented rate. NextCloud’s approach is to provide an enterprise-class datacenter and IT infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go basis. Rather than having to own and operate a dedicated set of computer servers and information systems, it is possible to pay for these services on a monthly basis…

As cloud management tools and platforms evolve to better handle metering and chargeback, IT shops are still struggling with the practice–both from the standpoint of financial management challenges and ongoing pushback from business users.

Implementing chargeback has been a longstanding problem for IT, which traditionally has either avoided the practice or employed simple math to apportion costs based on headcount or some other broad metric. Yet in a cloud environment, where effective metering and chargeback are a core tenet of the service model, those types of stopgap measures are no longer viable…

The history of computing can be defined by the movement of bottleneck around the data center. Every time a bottleneck appears a massive opportunity emerges for the channel. The next great bottleneck is going to be the networking layer in the cloud.

A recent survey of 1,300 IT professionals conducted by Cisco finds that the one of biggest inhibitors to cloud computing adoption is the readiness of the network  According to Inbar Lasser-Raab, senior marketing director for the Cisco Services Routing Technology Group, a majority of organizations that intend to make use of cloud computing on any serious level are probably going to wind up upgrading their networks, which given the number of IT professionals that said they would be making more significant use of the cloud in 2012 may be happening sooner than later…

Last time, we covered the network benefits of WAN Virtualization. Here, we look at how WAN Virtualization delivers benefits “beyond the WAN” to the security and computing sides of the enterprise IT shop.

While the benefits of WAN Virtualization for the Enterprise WAN itself – far greater bandwidth, far lower monthly costs, greater reliability and application performance predictability, sacrifice-free centralization of network complexity and reduced troubleshooting costs – are quite substantial on their own, and in the shorter term alone justify its deployment, when combined with colocation and the other key technologies of the Next-generation Enterprise WAN (NEW) architecture, the benefits for security and computing are ultimately potentially even greater, if for no other reason than that most every enterprise IT shop spends far more on computing plus security than it does on the network itself…