Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Craig Neill.

Cloud computing has been around almost since the dawn of the Internet, albeit in different guises. Today, SaaS (software as a service), IaaS (infrastructure as a service), CaaS (computing as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) have come about as the Internet has evolved from a content and e-commerce platform into a rich and abundant high-speed network, capable of high-volume, multi-tenant, high-bandwidth, distributed applications.

This works very well for the countries at the top of the bandwidth availability curve, but with South Africa at number 40, according to 2010 statistics, it is not surprising that the country has not been able to ride the wave of cloud computing efficiency in the application space, like the rest of the world…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jamie Yap.

Cloud computing has placed additional emphasis on communication and cooperation between enterprise developers and IT operations in order for the DevOps model to work and for business needs to be met effectively, analysts say.

Michael Azoff, principal analyst at Ovum, noted that broadly speaking, DevOps refers to the collaboration, communication, and coordination between developers and IT operations. The DevOps movement first emerged around 2009 and while many companies have already adopted the methodology, there are as many organizations which still find it a new concept, he added.

The importance of DevOps also has grown over time, particularly to catch up with today’s commercial landscape which is more competitive, fast-paced, and digitized, added Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research…

Grazed from eChannelline. Author: Mark Cox.

As the use of the Cloud grows, so do its complications. The increasingly integral role of cloud computing in IT operations is accompanied by significant change and disruption for cloud users, their IT staffs and their technology providers, according to new research from IT trade association Dell CompTIA.

Few of the data in the study — CompTIA’s Third Annual Trends in Cloud Computing report — will surprise. For instance, the general perception of cloud computing remains on an upward trend. 85% of respondents feel "more positive" or "significantly more positive about cloud computing than they did last year, compared to 72% in the 2011 study with the same sentiment. The main reason for the increase was the Cloud’s enabling of other business processes, something that both IT staff and business staff ranked highly.

The study also found that more than eight in 10 companies currently use some form of cloud solution, and more than half plan to increase cloud investments by 10% or more in 2012. This popularity is driving both IT and business staff to experiment with cloud options and to re-examine the role and functions of IT…

Grazed from CSO. Author: Puneet Kukreja.

As the world of cloud computing grows and becomes part of organisational growth strategies, procurement of cloud computing services has also reached front of mind.

Information security is a key pain-point for organisations looking to take up and rapidly consume cloud services, and with good reason. Leading cloud services providers—namely Rackspace, Google Apps and Microsoft Azure have had their fair share of outages in the past 18 months with Amazon EC2 being the latest, an outage that lasted over 45 hours.

Now traditionally, contracts have been the realm of procurement, accounting, legal or sourcing functions. Technologists and, more specifically, information security professionals kept a safe distance from them primarily because they are boring and mind numbing. But with cloud services consumption on the rise and organisations’ data assets and computing capability being rapidly cloud sourced, concern for service levels—data security, data leakage, data access, scalability, and security compliance to policies and standards—have been magnified…

Reversing CoIT: A Private Cloud for the Small Business & Home User

Look through the pages of a tech magazine, and you can’t miss the new buzz-word; The Consumerization of IT (CoIT). It refers to the fact that users are now exposed to new, cool technology at an individual level before their employer has had an opportunity to adopt the same. In a nutshell, the information worker’s raised expectations of corporate IT result from his own experiences as a consumer. And IT departments have to keep up! This phenomenon was particularly pronounced with the adoption of mobile devices like the iPhone, which were initially not thought of as "enterprise capable". It turned out that whatever IT departments thought about the product, consumers loved it. They brought it to work with them. They liked the experience so much that they started clamouring for the ability to check their work email on it. And before you could say "Blackberry Enterprise Server", IT departments figured out ways in which to integrate iPhones, iPads and Android devices into the overall corporate infrastructure. How, is a story for another day, but in this article, I want to look at the flip side of the CoIT phenomenon.