Author: David

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Joe Panettieri.

When a Hosted Exchange cloud service provider (CSP) suffers an outage, a lot of channel partners and customers can get left in the dark. It’s painful. And there’s nothing you can do until the cloud service is restored. Right? Absolutely wrong.

Rich Forsen, president of Network Depot and one of the minds behind Virtual Administrator, walked Talkin’ Cloud through one potential solution that could keep channel partners — and their customers — productive even if a cloud email service like Hosted Exchange suffers an extended email outage…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Cloud computing is being adopted at a faster rate among growing firms that need to do more with less. The cloud is an on-demand solution that offers the increased productivity they seek. Nonetheless, according to industry professionals, adoption of the cloud is not always voluntary.

Pushed to the Cloud

As reported in CRN, solution providers are finding that more midsize firms are indeed moving their applications and data to the cloud but that the switch is being prompted by pressure from industry as well as business partners and enterprise customers who prefer cloud technology to run their businesses. The cloud providers addressed the trend at a recent VAR Roundtable. According to one vendor, 75 percent of financial companies are focused on making cloud computing a foundational component of their business model. CRN’s report says this trend can be seen in other industries such as healthcare where smaller practices must be in the cloud to work with larger hospitals and clinics…

Grazed from Cloud Security Alliance.  Author: Event Announcement.

The CSA Congress, to be held on December 04-05, 2013, is the industry’s premier gathering for IT security professionals and executives who must further educate themselves on the rapidly evolving subject of cloud security. In addition to offering best practices and practical solutions for remaining secure in the cloud, CSA Congress will focus on emerging areas of growth and concern in cloud security, including standardization, transparency of controls, mobile computing, Big Data in the cloud and innovation.

Building on the success of the 2012 event, this year’s Congress is not to be missed! Six dynamic tracks, featuring some of the most distinguished experts in cloud security and privacy will offer attendees valuable and practical information on the most critical aspects of cloud computing:…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Hyoun Park.

The best way to look at the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a Software as a Service application is to consider the costs of the software, hardware, labor, consulting and training associated with the existing process compared to the SaaS application.

However, although SaaS applications typically have a lower TCO than on-premises applications due to the lack of hardware, maintenance and upgrade costs and to improved alignment between the application and the use case in question, chief financial officers (CFOs) should not use the TCO of a SaaS application as the key metric…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

As cloud computing continues to evolve, it’s becoming pretty clear that IT organizations need to start acting a lot more like service providers. Of course, what any service provider will tell you is that the quality of the service being provided is only as good as the network that supports it. Within the enterprise today, there is already a mix of wide area networking technologies in place that provide various levels of network bandwidth. Most of those networking transport options are being steadily replaced by Ethernet. But for the time being, IT organizations are still going to have to contend with multiple types of WANs to deliver services that in the era of the cloud are more distributed than ever.

At the recent ITEXPO West conference, Adtran announced the Total Access 900e Gen 3 series of Ethernet and Multi-T1 IP Business Gateways that, in addition to being able to support voice services, provide 100 Mbps along with a Gigabit Ethernet interface. In addition, Adtran followed up this week with a new NetVanta 6250 IP Business Gateway that makes it easier to transition from a T1 network to Ethernet…

CloudCow Contributed Article.  Author: Sergio Galindo, head of Global Product Management at GFI Software.

Stress is a feeling that IT administrators, especially at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), know all too well. In fact, an independent survey conducted by Opinion Matters on behalf of GFI Software earlier this year, which polled 207 IT administrators in U.S. organizations with more than 10 employees, found that 57 percent of respondents admit they’ve considered leaving their job due to workplace stress.

The reality is that IT admins are often challenged with supporting their company’s IT efforts with limited resources and budget. And they are forced to wear many different hats each day. They are tasked with keeping network infrastructure operational and secure, battling unauthorized access and intruders, and defining and enforcing corporate policies, among a laundry list of other critical tasks. On top of that, they shoulder the responsibility of supporting the needs of end users who sometimes seem to go out of their way to create the most bizarre IT issues imaginable…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

When it comes to cloud computing, the ultimate goal is to essentially erase the barriers between data centers in a way that allows workloads to dynamically run wherever they are best suited. We’re a long way from making that happen across heterogeneous environments. But Skytap is showing how cloud computing will evolve in a world where platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings provide a layer of abstraction that helps mask the underlying complexity of cloud computing.

At the recent VMworld 2013 conference, Skytap showed an instance of version 2 of the Cloud Foundry PaaS environment that provided a template that IT organizations could use to deploy an instance of Cloud Foundry in less than 30 seconds…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Lynn Haber.

While cloud computing has become a well-established option for IT operations, confusion persists and is hampering channel partners from fully transforming their business model, according to CompTIA’s fourth annual Trends in Cloud Computing study, which was published last month.

The CompTIA study — which polled IT and business professionals as well as IT channel companies, for about a total of 900 respondents — noted several cloud adoption trends. For starters, IT systems are increasingly cloud-based, with businesses showing a greater reliance on all three cloud models: Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

The cloud computing model of service-based IT delivery has been over-hyped, over-sold and (in many respects) over-talked. This space’s next big thing is the high-performance bare metal cloud solution. But what is bare metal cloud? Who uses it? What does it do? — and how should developers code for this environment?

Organisations’ collective demands for flexibility, scalability and efficiency have driven them flocking to public cloud infrastructure services, representing (as they do) an opportunity for cutting IT costs while capitalising on technology innovations. But, just a few short years into the cloud revolution, new options have appeared in response to the stress that high-performance workloads can put on traditional public clouds…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Cloudscaling has released its 2.5 version of its Open Cloud System, giving enterprise implementers of the private cloud an opportunity to test its network virtualization concepts, first announced last April. With Release 2.5, Cloudscaling has joined the competition between VMware and Cisco Systems to supply virtualized networking to the future software-defined data center and private-enterprise cloud. Cloudscaling is inside the OpenStack cloud software camp, but its alliance with Juniper Networks on software-defined networking puts it ahead of other participants on the SDN front.

Asked if that meant Cloudscaling was forking the OpenStack networking component, dubbed Neutron (formerly Quantum), CTO Randy Bias said no, Cloudscaling’s approach capitalized on Juniper Networks’ ability to plug SDN into the Neutron platform, using OpenStack APIs. "Neutron is an API interface to networking as a service…