Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Xath Cruz.

In the 1948 play Death of a Salesman, the character Willy Loman, who is a salesman, experiences a downward spiral caused by his inability to adapt to the industry after it has been changed by the war. Nowadays, we are seeing something similar in the real world, as a large number of traditional IT guys are finding that the advent of cloud computing has affected traditional IT landscape.

One of the major changes in the IT landscape is that what was once the job of an IT guy is now outsourced to a different company. According to Gartner research director John Rivard, traditional IT guys now find their positions in danger of being bypassed by the business unless they can adapt and grasp corporate demands. Gartner’s 2011 CIO Agenda Survey backs Rivard’s statement, as it shows that majority of companies and government agencies will start to rely on cloud services for majority of their IT needs by 2020, which meant that the changes in IT is already underway and people who fail to adapt to it risk being left behind…

Cloud computing and colocation provider FiberCloud announces today that they now support Ubuntu operating systems on both their cloud and dedicated servers. Customers now have the option to choose pre-installed Ubuntu cloud servers, offering more operating system options for open-source servers. Ubuntu comes installed on cloud servers at no additional charge.

The most popular commercially-supported operating system on the web, Ubuntu is considered by many to be at the leading edge in its addition of new features. Ubuntu is also known for its performance and efficient use of system resources.

How to Communicate the Office 365 Transition to Your Organization

Zerto today announced that 33 leading Cloud Service Providers (CSP) from around the globe have joined the Zerto Cloud Disaster Recovery Ecosystem (ZCE). Providers in the ecosystem are now able to offer cloud disaster recovery (DR) services in a way that was not possible before, enabling businesses of all sizes to cost-effectively protect production applications both to the cloud and in the cloud.

Businesses are looking to the cloud to provide cost-effective data protection for their production applications. With cloud DR, companies can now replace their primary or secondary data centers and benefit from cloud automation and flexibility while having a solid DR assurance. Until now, cloud-based DR for production applications had been ineffective, complex and cost-prohibitive. Due to limitations with legacy array-based replication, CSPs were required to have exactly the same storage type as their customers, increasing their overall costs. Further driving up costs was the complexity of managing these cloud-based DR offerings, which were inflexible, labor-intensive and difficult to scale. By resolving these problems for CSPs, Zerto makes the cloud itself more resilient, so CSPs can provide enterprise customers with tight SLAs and assurance when placing their most critical business applications in the cloud.

Grazed from TechWorld. Author: Stephanie Overby.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recent storm-related outage, which left Web sites including Netflix, Pinterest, and Instagram inaccessible, is just the latest in a string of costly cloud failures. Since 2007, a total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 major cloud services providers had an economic impact of $71.7 million dollars, according to the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR). Average down time has been 7.5 hours per year, according to IWGCR, an availability rate of 99.9 percent well below the required reliability for mission critical systems. "Cheap cloud services can be expensive," says Kevin C. Taylor, partner in the business services department of law firm Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis.

While the typical cloud contract contains uptime clauses and credits for missed service levels, it often fails to adequately protect the enterprise customer. Service-level agreement (SLA) credits, typically capped at a proportion of monthly service fees "do not compensate for business losses associated with the downtime of a production application," explains Taylor. "Even in an extreme case of sustained and severe outages the credit amounts will be derisory–[say,] $20,000–in comparison to the business impact to the customer, which could potentially be in the millions."…

Grazed from GovWin. Author: Deniece Peterson.

As the federal information technology market transitions, contractors are finding that some of the key opportunities available now could mean less work in the future.

Initiatives to share services and move more computing to the cloud will likely mean that spending will contract or flatten over the next five years. Deltek anticipates that nearly every agency will experience a decline and total federal IT spending could fall from $121 billion in 2012 to $113 billion by 2017.

Spending on technology equipment and professional services is particularly expected to decline as the government makes fundamental changes to the way it purchases and manages its technology. Reductions in the number of federal workers and a transition to cheaper mobile devices will drive down equipment spending while shared services, consolidation and cloud computing will reduce services spending…

Grazed from BusinessCloud9. Author: Stuart Lauchlan.

China has long been regarded as a potentially major growth market for US technology firms – unfortunate human rights and freedom of speech considerations set aside for the moment – and it’s the same story for Cloud vendors now.

At the moment, China probably accounts for less than 3% of total global Cloud Computing market share, but research firm Gartner confidently predicts a 40% annual growth rate coming up. Rival research firm IDC backs up this claim with an estimate that the size of China’s ICT sector will nearly double between 2010 and 2015, going from $221 billion to $389 billion.

According to the country’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15), Cloud Computing will be a chief driver of the IT industry and the development of e-government in China. To that end China already has five pilot Cloud Computing cities – Beijing,Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Wuxi, China has also approved the National Financial Support Programme for Cloud Computing Demonstration Project to fund 12 key projects from those first five Cloud Computing cities…