Should the Cloud Go Public?
The evidence is beginning to slowly seep through: the public sector is finally starting to “get” cloud computing.
Almost every day we hear of corporations, local authorities and other public bodies dabbling with software as a service.
Small and medium-sized businesses have been “getting it” for a while but what is causing the public sector to join the cloud revolution?
Is it the simple fact that organizations are simply catching on to the benefits or maybe our age of austerity is forcing public bodies to be more creative in the way they seek to cut their costs…
Flex Discovery Extends Managed Service Offerings with the Addition of Cloud-Based Managed Hosting Service
Flex Discovery, a leading provider of managed e-discovery and attorney review services today announced the availability of its new Managed Hosting Service. The innovative offering provides law firms and corporations all the benefits of cloud computing for managing e-discovery without the security challenges of sharing the organization’s environment in a public cloud.
Utilizing dedicated computing equipment residing in a state-of-the-art data center, this service provides clients with a Private Cloud to manage e-discovery. Clients can license industry leading e-discovery software from Flex Discovery or can transfer applications currently held in-house to the Private Cloud environment, or both. This enables clients to transfer the IT infrastructure acquisition and maintenance responsibilities to Flex Discovery…
Cloud Computing Storage: Big Data Drives the Cloud Storage Increases
Enterprise IT strategies are under pressure to change, and increasingly the cloud is becoming an important component in revised strategies. Analysts at IDC expect that Enterprise IT shops will increasingly implement private-cloud solutions. And often the central component of these cloud solutions is storage.
Spending on private-cloud storage is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 28.9 percent from 2010 to 2015. At that rate, private-cloud storage will triple by 2015. That’s huge compared to the growth of on-premise storage which is growing currently at about 4 percent annually. The report notes that while revenues for cloud services will see huge growth over the next four years, the amount of money that public and private cloud providers will be required to spend is equally huge. Private and Public cloud providers are expected to be two of the biggest spenders on IT products over the next four years…
Cloud Computing company Apprenda Upgrades Its .NET Private PaaS
Remember .NET, the other application software platform besides J2EE, which always seems to dominate cloud conversations?
Well, Apprenda, which has got a rare if not unique "deploy anywhere" private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) stack for .NET, has just released Apprenda Platform 3.0, hoping to set the standard for enterprise-ready PaaS offerings.
For one thing, it’ll work with any .NET or SQL Server application now, making it appealing to service providers as well as enterprises interested in a private Azure-like set-up…
Microsoft Cloud Exec Is New Washington State CIO
Former state CIO Tony Tortorice left the role in October 2010 after only 15 months on the job, and there has not been a full-time CIO since. Tortorice had been working to push through a shared services initiative, and the state is working to consolidate several data centers into a $255 million office building and data center complex that will also double as the state information services division’s headquarters.
After the data center build was announced, state legislatures questioned its expense, pointing out that cloud computing services from tech vendors, including in-state companies such as Microsoft and Amazon, could potentially be cheaper than consolidating everything into a brand new data center…
Big Data Bug Bites GE
General Electric must have gotten the memo from McKinsey’s research arm calling Big Data the "next frontier" and promising untold riches to those who unlock its secrets.
The company is going to pour a reported billion dollars over the next three years into a new global software headquarters that it’s moving into San Ramone in San Francisco’s East Bay where it will build the "Industrial Internet," a sub-category of the Internet of Things and create intelligent connect systems to harness Big Data.
It means to hire 400 more software architects, engineers, biz dev and user experience people, presumably folks who don’t want to cross the bridge to Silicon Valley proper…
Cloud, mobility to drive security market
Cloud and mobility are upcoming trends that will drive the business environment and, hence, influence the security landscape, note Symantec execs, who also advise organizations to step up measures to protect their employees and infrastructure from emerging threats.
At the Symantec Vision 2011 conference here Friday, Enrique Salem, the security vendor’s president and CEO, reiterated that the significance of cloud computing, mobility and virtualization in driving IT transformation.
"IT trends in mobile and cloud computing are driving increased connectivity on an unprecedented scale.
"These connections are creating greater opportunities and greater points of risk to our intellectual property, financial integrity, corporate reputation, control of our individual and corporate identities, privacy and even national infrastructures," Salem explained…
Alcatel Promises Better Clouds for Carriers
Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Stephen Lawson.
Alcatel-Lucent is developing a cloud computing platform for carriers that aims to take full advantage of their networks to deliver guaranteed performance.
Carriers can use the platform, called CloudBand, both to run their own software and to offer cloud computing services to enterprises. For internal purposes, the cloud can make it faster and cheaper to launch and operate services, and for subscribers it will offer more predictable performance than current clouds, according to Alcatel. Carriers will be able to sell cloud computing services with guaranteed availability and response times, the company says.
Service providers already can build their own cloud data centers and link them to their infrastructure, which can provide an edge in performance over using the open Internet, said Dor Skuler, vice president of cloud solutions at Alcatel. But CloudBand goes beyond this with software that examines a wide range of conditions and user requirements to find the best settings for a given application at a certain time…
Morphlabs Appoints New Chief Technology Officer
Morphlabs, the leader in converged Dynamic Infrastructure Services for the Enterprise, today announced the appointment of Lee Thompson as Chief Technology Officer. Mr. Thompson will work to advance Morphlabs’ technical vision of mCloud technologies, which support enterprise clients in overcoming the complexities of implementing the most price performant cloud solution on the market.
"Morphlabs has developed strategic cloud computing solutions for enterprise infrastructure which extend far beyond server consolidation and virtualization," said Winston Damarillo, founder and CEO at Morphlabs. "Lee has a proven track record of taking disruptive open source innovations and implementing them successfully in mission-critical environments. With more than 25 years of experience in balancing open initiatives and proprietary technologies in large-scale deployments, Lee is the right CTO to help Morphlabs to execute on driving the adoption of Dynamic Infrastructure Services in the enterprise."…
Ensuring cloud computing performance on data communications networks
Cloud computing promises to reduce IT expenditures, increase network flexibility, and streamline communication infrastructure. This is the first in a series of three articles in which we will examine communications technologies as key enablers that can make cloud computing a reality. Specifically, we will look at protocols, traffic management, and the control of wide-area communications and how the application of industry-standard techniques can assure network designers robust performance in their cloud offerings.
In this article, we’ll define specific communications reference points (RPs) within cloud computing networks so that software designers and network architects can better understand and address specific problems. Each RP presents unique requirements and challenges for creating, maintaining, and managing connectivity. Creating proper communication paths on the network and configuring them correctly at these RPs, or interfaces, will maximize cloud performance. The communication RPs will be defined individually; for each RP we will analyze the type and characteristics of the data communicated, describe the expected traffic patterns at the RP, and discuss the reliability requirements, the need (or lack thereof) for real-time traffic delivery, quality of service (QoS), and other characteristics of communication technologies, such as security…