The CIO and the CFO are often cast as in opposition – the finance brain versus the techie.

But cloud computing is about to bridge that gulf according to David Goulden, CFO at storage and cloud infrastructure provider EMC, by providing them with a common language to discuss business issues.

As organisations shift to accessing the majority of services from the hybrid cloud, a mixture of private and public cloud, CFOs are gaining insight into IT spending they never had before, argues Goulden…

Today, taking advantage of computing power has moved toward the subscription model away from the self-management and acquisition model. Through the subscription model, a business enterprise needs to tap into the skills of third-party managers in order to take advantage of the latest tools. The continuous evolution of cloud computing has provided many benefits to business, but it has also affected some of the present tax rules. Through cloud computing, accountants can access information and software anywhere, but location is an important consideration as regards taxation. Thus, there are challenges faced by cloud computing when it comes to tax regulations.

Cloud computing allows a user to access software and information through the Internet. Servers are no longer maintained and operated by a single company but are outsourced to third-party vendors who have a pool of more experienced and qualified IT personnel to deal with server problems. Because of this setup, a business can concentrate on growing the business rather than being tied down by server maintenance. Any device that can connect to the Internet can be used by a user to access software and information. This kind of setup can also bring down internal expenditure and IT costs…

SAP has announced a series of initiatives to become a major supplier of cloud computing, a move that incorporates a large set of cloud-based human capital management (HCM) solutions into SAP products, Cloud Times reports.

The company announced four lines of cloud-based business solutions to manage personnel, money, customers and suppliers, together seamlessly integrated into enterprise resource planning (ERP) business software…

IBM has announced new software designed to improve data sharing and automate marketing and supply chain processes in the cloud, part of an ongoing effort to build on its cloud computing strategy.

At its Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Madrid, IBM announced new cloud software to help marketers improve customer service, increase marketing effectiveness and reduce operational costs. The new offerings leverage IBM’s cloud expertise and cloud collaboration networks to accelerate the flow of business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions by automating and synchronising supply and demand engines…

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…