A recent survey by IBM coincides with trends already experienced by leading enterprise scheduler Appointment-Plus: more and more enterprises are turning to cloud technology for improving the efficiency of their business processes and operations.

In the case of enterprises already utilizing Appointment-Plus, they’re automating, streamlining and simplifying the way their schedule and manage appointments and reservations for a variety of different tasks and services, such as scheduling job applicant interviews, inbound shipments and deliveries, and events, clinics and programs…

Hungry to expand the Office 365 customer base beyond small businesses, Microsoft has announced price cuts of up to 20 percent on subscriptions for enterprises. Whether a dip in prices is sufficient to lure large organizations to Office 365 remains to be seen — more likely, Microsoft will need to make good on its vision of bringing more sophisticated, enterprise-oriented tools to the service first.

To its credit, the company has gone six months now without a service outage to Office 365, according to Windows IT Pro, which could also bolster confidence among would-be customers to step into Microsoft’s cloud…

You hear a lot in enterprise computing circles these days about analytics. It basically means taking long streams of data about something important, usually something that gets repeated a lot, crunching through it with a lot of computing oomph and finding useful patterns that can make that repeatable process less costly, more efficient, faster or better in some way — and at the same time, helping to eliminate the bits that get in the way.

It’s something that IBM does a lot of, and does well, and it’s something that Hewlett-Packard is starting to talk about with increasing regularity, especially in the wake of its acquisition last year of Autonomy, while outfits like Splunk and open source efforts like Hadoop make it easier to do the crunching. And there are lots of start-ups working at finding ways to bring new levels of analysis to stale old business data that used to sit collecting virtual dust, unloved and unused on hard drives…

In my last installment on the benefits of cloud computing, Considerations for catalogs, controls, compliance in private clouds, I raised points about what needs to change to get to the private cloud, and I focused on three main areas: people, process and technology. Before we get started transforming each area, it’s important to understand where you are today so that you can plot the right trajectory, and as you progress toward your goal, you can make course corrections as needed.

One thing to keep in mind as we discuss this maturity model is that it is not a clean-cut exercise. In any organization, you will find areas that can be scored "more mature" and other areas that can be scored "less mature" on the same topic. This is normal. Depending on the focus, one or more areas will have improved significantly while other areas have not. Let’s take a look at them now…

The Cloud Identity Security Leader(TM), today announced that Cisco Principal Engineer Morteza Ansari and AOL Chief Architect for Identity Services George Fletcher will be among an elite group of experts facilitating this year’s Cloud Identity Summit. The 2012 Cloud Identity Summit explores the role of identity as the new perimeter and ways cloud computing, mobile device access and social networking are transforming business and IT.

Ansari and Fletcher will facilitate general conference sessions taking place July 16-20, at the 2012 Cloud Identity Summit at Vail, Colorado’s Cascade Resort…

Does your IT or devops team run a lot of do-it-yourself projects? DIY is tempting, isn’t it? You have smart engineers, easy access to storage and computing power, and a mandate this year to start moving some of (or more of) your applications to the cloud. Why not do it yourself?

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t try DIY cloud computing management, but if you’re going that route, you should know what you’re in for. In particular, you should keep a sharp lookout for the point of no (easy) return…

Whatever your view of Cloud computing, there’s no denying the fact that it’s a game changer for the IT industry, enabling companies to be more flexible, reduce costs and save time. Conservative estimates from IDC predict that the global market will reach about $55billion by 2014. However a recent survey by the Cloud Industry Forum spells out a different picture, and found that Cloud adoption rates in the UK is currently only around 53 per cent. With the clear advantages of using the Cloud, it’s difficult to understand why more UK companies have not joined the Cloud Computing revolution and sent adoption into the mainstream. 

Many people speak of cloud computing as if it’s been around for decades. In a way, it has. But today’s use of the phrase is more specific than simply a great big network in the sky. Understanding the cloud will determine whether it helps organizations realize the efficiencies and cost savings it promises or the opportunities that float on by.

In its simplest form, cloud computing enables organizations to purchase computing power and data storage services from third-party providers who offer these products via the Internet. Rather than investing in their own data centers or servers, businesses and agencies can pay as they go, which allows them to expand—or contract—as needed…