Google Drive, the company’s solution to storing files online, has been rumoured for so long that Google itself compared it to the Loch Ness monster when announcing its release. But if, after years of waiting, we expected grand things, what we got felt underwhelming, with little to differentiate it from market leader Dropbox.

However, users of Drive quickly discovered a significant quirk. In addition to the functionality you’d expect—having, say, a spreadsheet you save to your Drive folder at work automatically appear on your laptop at home—any file you create in Google Docs, the company’s online office suite, is also saved to Drive. Though these files appear to exist on your own computer, you can actually only access them through a web browser. And that seemingly tiny detail suggests that Drive isn’t so much a competitor to Dropbox but a preparatory step in Google’s plan to move all our computing online…

Computing is undergoing a seismic shift from client/server to the cloud, a shift similar in importance and impact to the transition from mainframe to client/server. Speculation abounds on how this new era will evolve in the coming years, and IT leaders have a critical need for a clear vision of where the industry is heading. What are the economics driving the long-term trend?

Triniti Business Solutions, a PPPM (portfolio, programme, and project management) and software solutions provider, recently underwent the transition as an organisation, providing cloud optimised platforms (platform as a service) and aligned its solutions as a SaaS (software as a service) offering…

The amount of data created and held by companies is increasing exponentially, and keeping it safe continues to be a major cause for concern. At the same time, cloud computing, rather than remaining a theoretical concept, is now a reality for many organizations. Data loss continues to be a huge problem for companies across North America that are looking to cloud–based platforms for a solution, according to a survey commissioned by CA Technologies, “Insights: Data Protection and the Cloud.”

The study of 300 companies across North America (200 in the U.S., 100 in Canada), which was conducted by Coleman Parkes Research, found that 55 percent of U.S. organizations expect their use of the cloud to increase as part of their business-continuity strategy over the next year. The study is a follow-up to a previous CA Technologies survey, “The Avoidable Cost of Downtime,” which found that the cost of outages to a company over a year is in the range of $160,000…

Veeva Systems introduced Veeva Network today to over 700 industry leaders at the Veeva Global Customer Summit, being held this week in Philadelphia, PA. Veeva Network is a cloud-based customer interaction repository (CIR) that spans all sales and marketing channels, standard data formats supported by the leading multichannel marketing companies and complete service offerings from the life sciences industry’s leading business consultants.

Powered by the very latest in cloud computing and big data technology, Veeva Network provides the customer interaction data required to better analyze the return from multichannel investments. It’s already being characterized by pharmaceutical leaders as ‘revolutionary’ for its promise to easily capture, store and disseminate consistent data across life sciences companies and their outsourced partners and agencies…

Red Hat celebrated the 10th anniversary of its flagship Enterprise Linux product, but reaffirmed the decision to shift focus to cloud computing, pledging that open-source roots would be key to success in the new business venture.

The company plans to release Enterprise Linux 7 in in late 2013, but offered little during a Tuesday press conference on what to expect. What may play a large part in the new release is a focus on the cloud. For all intents and purposes, Red Hat believes Linux is in the past and the cloud is the future…

The UK is the number one market for the future growth of cloud computing services having lagged behind the US for many years, according to leading executives at Netsuite.

Speaking at the firm’s SuiteWorld event on Tuesday, Netsuite European managing director Paul Auffermann said the UK market had taken longer to reach mass adoption because most major vendors were reluctant to talk about cloud computing before they had systems in place to sell.

"If you look at the incumbents – Sage, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle – it was not a message they wanted to propagate because they didn’t have a solution they could put behind the message."

However, chief executive Zach Nelson added that because all vendors had become cloud enthusiasts over the past few years, UK businesses were now ready to move fast…

Amazon Web Services, or AWS, a cloud computing service that allows companies to borrow servers from Amazon.com instead of buying such expensive network equipment, has entered the Korean market.

Companies can save on computer facility investment through the service. For instance, an online game developer had to purchase high-priced equipment to service its games. Unable to forecast how many users it will have, the company just bought servers to accommodate hundreds of gamers.

AWS comes in handy for such companies. The service charges a company for usage by users who have played games. This is beneficial to companies because they need not make an excessive investment…

In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of leveraging cloud to greatly simplify and standardize your enterprise IT service offerings, and why it’s important to design from the beginning with this goal in mind.

When describing cloud computing benefits, we often talk about improved business agility and cost savings. One of the most profound and impactful ways to achieve these benefits across the enterprise comes from the pursuit of IT standardization and simplification, which is an important cloud computing objective that deserves more attention.

Think about the hundreds or thousands of different IT technologies and processes that exist within an enterprise IT organization today. If you inventory just one enterprise data center, you’ll see scores of hardware vendors, platforms, and operating systems assembled in unique combinations to support a sprawling assortment of heterogeneous apps.

The time and cost to manage this complexity is tremendous, and the chaos it creates places a significant burden on those charged with keeping IT running smoothly. In addition to support, there are redundant costs and waste associated with building solutions on top of this complex ecosystem including different overlapping tools, platforms, and processes. That’s one reason why enterprise IT budgets tend to follow an "80/20 rule", where 80% is consumed in maintaining the status quo, and just 20% goes to new projects that directly add business value.

UK-based IT services provider, Kelway has rolled out its cloud services portfolio, Kelway ServiceWorks, offering customers a compute platform, email and backup services.

An increasingly popular buzzword among business owners in Chicago, cloud computing is essentially describing a service, not a product. Similar to other professional service vendors, cloud computing companies are trusted partners who can be relied upon to manage the most sensitive and critical of your business operations.

“When we talk with Chicago business owners about cloud computing,” says Daniel Wang, Owner of Jexet Technologies a Chicago based cloud service provider, “There is this idea that you just set it up and it runs all by itself. But in reality, our cloud clients depend on our service department all the time for a wide variety of assistance, from simple email issues to complex software deployments.”…