Author: David

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…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Brandon Hoff.

IT networks have reached a juncture where they must transition from static, host-centric, vLAN centric infrastructures, to modern, efficient programmable network fabrics that allow enterprises to leverage capacity on demand. They must also have the ability to move virtual machine (VM) workloads within the data center, between data centers, and into the external cloud. However, this VM mobility places new requirements on data center networks to efficiently support multi-tenant environments.

As organizations make the shift from a virtualization-driven data center toward an infrastructure designed for cloud computing, they must shift their focus to application consolidation at scale for multiple customers in multi-tenant data centers. While virtualization has reduced the cost and time required to deploy a new application from weeks to minutes, driving costs down from thousands of dollars to a few hundred, reconfiguring the network for a new or migrated virtual workload still takes approximately a week and can cost thousands of dollars…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: George Crump.

Moving to the cloud? Don’t take chances with data availability. An onramping solution can help keep your customers–and your IT staff–happy.

Every time there is an outage at one of the major cloud providers, it raises new concerns about the cloud and cloud storage. If you’re planning to move some or all of your data to the cloud, how can you avoid losing access to that data when an outage occurs?

Understand Your Provider. There are hundreds of different cloud providers to choose from today. Each one has different skills and abilities. Some provide only the very basics of infrastructure and expect you to navigate their service and create your own redundancy to protect your data if part of their cloud suffers an outage. While these providers may be less expensive, they put the burden of managing data availability on you…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Editorial Staff.

The European Commission wants cloud computing firms to improve contracts they offer customers in a drive aimed at averting costly legal disputes, allaying privacy concerns and boosting an industry which can offer huge savings to users.

Buying computer hardware can be a drain for new and small companies, and huge savings can be made adopting ‘cloud’ storage — using networks to connect remotely to servers elsewhere, possibly in a different continent.

But security and data privacy is a major concern, the EC said in a policy paper intended to encourage the technology…

Grazed from ChannelBiz. Author: Andrea Marie-Petrou.

A new trend in the cloud space is emerging, Commensus has said.

According to the IT managed services company, which supplies to the financial and investment sector, businesses that have previously opted for the Hybrid Cloud have been slowly migrating their physical servers across to their own dedicated Private Cloud.

The third generation of Cloud Computing technology has been griping the UK technology market for the last 12 months. It has promised increased agility, flexibility, mobility, and performance by enabling the company to take control of their IT assets, linking them to the Public Cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Cindi Howson.

MicroStrategy announced a slew of improvements to its already-solid business intelligence and analytics earlier this month, and it’s also innovating in the area of cloud computing and analysis of Facebook data. Probing social networks is certainly compelling to many, but as I’ll explain, I have my doubts about the reliability of the data.

MicroStrategy’s 9.3 release, which was detailed at the company’s European conference in Amsterdam earlier this month, brings significant improvements to the company’s Visual Insight visual data discovery module, which was introduced last summer year. Visual data discovery is a hot segment, with products available from fast-growing vendors Tableau Software and QlikView as well as new options from BI platform vendors (IBM Cognos Insight, Microsoft Power View, SAS Visual Analytics Explorer, SAP Visual Intelligence)…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: David Canellos.

Despite widespread concerns about cloud data security and control, there’s been a lot of recent news on the healthcare industry’s steady, but cautious foray into cloud computing. In early July, research firm MarketsandMarkets issued a report stating that the healthcare cloud computing market will grow from $1.7 billion in 2011 to $5.4 billion by 2017, an encouraging 20.5% compounded annual growth rate. However, the report points to some key restraints, such as patient data security and cloud compliance that could slow down the market unless mitigated.

In a unique twist, a recent article identifies cloud data security as a primary driver, not an obstacle in the cloud adoption trend. In "Money in a mattress: Why patient records should move to a private cloud", the author expounds on the security weaknesses of traditional hospital client-server systems in which protected data can be easily compromised, and he points to private or hybrid clouds as better solutions…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Imogo was the first to say that virtual mobile offices, or what’s known as the "cloud", is the next frontier. We at Imogo, applaud Microsoft for finally recognizing what we have known for seven years, that the cloud is the future of computing. Microsoft’s recently launched Office 365 on the Cloud validates everything we at Imogo have been doing and saying for years. We at Imogo are the clear leaders in this new exciting and extremely powerful way of computing.

Imogo was the first company to integrate Email like Gmail, digital telephone like Skype, cloud data storage like Dropbox, and MS Office applications all in one package that can be accessed from any tablet or computer at anytime with above military standard encryption. It is the most convenient way to work from your tablet yet still have the utmost in security for your files…

Grazed from ARN. Author: Spandas Lui.

 For some time, telcos have been warned to branch out from simply offering traditional telecommunications services and many of them have invested more into building out their business ICT services. But with global IT budgets expected to shrink, telcos will have to work extra hard to compete with specialist IT providers that have been in the game for a long time.

With the global financial climate unpredictable at best (and tipped to get worse courtesy of the fiscal fiascos in Europe), companies are tightening their belts on IT spending.

Research firm, Ovum, expects new IT spending to be hard to come by in the public and private sectors…