5 ways to profit from your cloud
There’s more to cloud analytics than just saving costs. When companies really know how to take advantage of cloud computing to increase profit and margin, they have the opportunity to achieve real cloud “nirvana.” The cloud can become a natural extension of their data center. Here are five ways cloud usage analytics contribute to a company’s bottom line:
Scaling and meeting demand
If clouds are able to scale on the fly to meet unforeseen or variable demand, companies can capture additional revenue that otherwise would not have been achievable. When demand flattens, or – as we have witnessed over the last few years with the global recession – often fluctuates or declines, it is critical to immediately scale back infrastructure and reduce costs to ensure the highest possible profit margin from new levels of demand…
Cloud computing company Salesforce.com is joining the U.K. government’s G-cloud framework, the company has announced. As a result, U.K. public sector organizations can now purchase Salesforce cloud applications from the G-Cloud CloudStore. G-Cloud is a catalogued list of suppliers of approved cloud technologies which U.K. government agencies can access online.
AMD’s new design initiative addresses the growing demand to deliver better performance-per-watt for dense cloud computing solutions. Unless Intel shifts its strategy, it’s probable that AMD will be the only processor provider bridging the x86 and 64-bit ARM ecosystems in the data center and for cloud solutions.
Cisco this week made substantial updates to its Unified Computing System (UCS) and cloud automation portfolios, including a centralized management tool for large-scale UCS deployments and the extension of certain connectivity tools to support rack-mount server versions of UCS in addition to blade server versions.
Brian Patrick Donaghy, CEO of Appcore, reached out to me to discuss the five things he expected to see in the cloud computing market in 2013. Since his company is in the business of providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) tools, it appeared to be an excellent opportunity to discuss what Appcore has learned from its customers’ experiences using cloud computing. In the end, the conversation turned into a rambling discussion of the history of computing, how technology is adopted around the world, and was great fun. Thanks Brian!
Attunity is bringing its CloudBeam managed SaaS platform for Amazon Web Services (AWS) out of the private beta phase and into public beta. It’s not quite ready for official launch, but now that the company has launched the public beta, it is bringing out two high-performance data movement services — upload to cloud and replication between cloud regions. “Attunity CloudBeam helps users realize the promise of cloud computing by alleviating the Big Data bottleneck and infrastructure maintenance challenges,” said Matt Benati, vice president of Global Marketing, in a prepared statement.
Another busy week for Amazon Web Services which added new compute instance types, cut prices on others, and upped the limit on provisioned IOPS for EBS volumes. Amazon is getting busier as more public cloud options come on line.
As InfoWorld’s Ted Samson pointed out this week, Microsoft is intertwining Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Windows Azure to help developers build multiplatform, cloud-friendly apps. And it announced a batch of new services and functionality for its cloud platform, including the extension of Windows Azure Mobile Services to support for Windows Phone 8. The move should provide easy cloud-based mobile application development for those loyal to Microsoft platforms. Microsoft even provides a store to sell these Azure-built applications. But something’s still missing from Microsoft’s cloud picture.