Author: David

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Jean-Marc Seguin.

Last time we met in this space, we talked about the importance of management and resource optimization planning in the path toward private cloud computing (see my last blog on Moving forward towards the private cloud). Today, I want to examine two other important areas for consideration as you plan for more mature processes and technology: service catalogs and controls, compliance and governance functionality.

Service catalog/request fulfillment: Request for services in the private cloud should be treated like all others – as service requests. Service requests are provisioned based on the defined internal approval processes of the enterprise. Requests should be based on a pre-defined catalog of services built upon a set of golden templates to ensure standards are met in a repeatable manner and that the turn-around time between request and release of service to your client are minimal…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Cloud Ventures.

Our next upcoming best practices white paper is going to be called ‘Cloud Computing and the Drummond Report‘ – A special feature on how Cloud might be employed to help realize many of the cost-saving goals recommended.

One of the headline topics is how to build “Government Hubs”, referring to internal service providers – A Government IT unit that sells IT services to other departments and agencies, implementing what’s known as shared services…

Grazed from NextGov.  Author:  Bob Brewin.

The Veterans Affairs Department plans to test email and other office software in a cloud computing environment and to try out potentially lower cost alternatives to Microsoft Office products — such as Google Apps — in two pilot projects set to kick off this year.

VA announced both projects in notices to industry posted Friday to the FedBizOpps website. The department asked vendors to detail their approaches in white papers submitted by March 15…

Grazed from PC World.  Author: Brandon Butler.

When online marketing firm Hubspot started in 2006, the company’s IT needs were not very taxing, but they expanded quickly as the company realized success.

Hubspot – which provides software for businesses to coordinate their online marketing efforts – started with a private cloud for its front-end web hosting. Soon though, CIO Jim O’Neill realized he would need additional computing power for the company’s web analytics programs and "big data" storage needs.

The public cloud was a natural fit. "We really wanted the flexibility to scale up into a larger capacity when we needed it," he said…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Clare Computer Solutions, a San Francisco Bay Area IT service provider, headquartered in San Ramon, California is announcing a series of seminars for businesses on the subject of Cloud Computing.

The 90-minute seminars are free and will provide information on how cloud computing can improve efficiency and help businesses to reach their goals and objectives. Attendees will discover how the cloud affects a company’s technology choices and the pros and cons of moving to the cloud…

 

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Some European and fast-growing developing countries such as Brazil and China fear the U.S. will run away with the emerging cloud computing market. As a result, they have erected barriers to data moving across their boundaries and impeded the development of a global cloud market, said a large software business group on Wednesday.

European countries frequently object to the U.S. Patriot Act and use it as an excuse for more barriers. In fact, the powers of the act granting permission to inspect data when hunting for evidence of terrorist activity are often found in their own laws, said Business Software Alliance CEO Robert Holleyman as his group issued a report on cloud computing Wednesday…

Grazed from EON.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The growing shift to cloud computing can deliver significant value—but most enterprises have little knowledge of the perils of transferring IT decision making away from technology specialists to business unit leaders. Eliminating oversight and governance from cloud computing decisions can create significant risk to organizations, effectively undermining any benefits of moving to the cloud and, at the same time, potentially creating serious issues for organizations.

“Cloud computing presents a unique opportunity for enterprises—and is particularly a game-changer for small and medium enterprises because its availability means that technology infrastructure is not the market differentiator it has been in the past”

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Onit, a leading provider of business productivity and process management apps, today announced it has joined the Legal Cloud Computing Association (LCCA), a consortium of leading cloud computing providers.

The LCCA was created to facilitate the adoption of cloud computing among legal professionals and provide a unified and consistent voice for vendors in the legal cloud computing market. Additionally, the organization is responsible for collaborating and cooperating with Bar Associations and other policy-forming bodies in efforts to form policies and guidelines relating to the use of cloud computing in law practices; defining standards and best practices; and providing educational resources to attorneys and the broader legal community on cloud computing…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Furthering its commitment to running high performance session border control (SBC) on commercial off-the-shelf platforms, Metaswitch Networks today announced that its industry-leading Perimeta SBC software is being made available for deployment on generic enterprise servers as well as virtual machine environments to support elastic cloud computing networks.

Introduced in September 2011 and already selected by more than 60 service providers worldwide, Perimeta’s flexible architecture supports independent scaling of an SBC’s signaling and media functions — allowing service providers to cost-effectively address the signaling-heavy, changing mix of network traffic. With Perimeta now available to run on various hypervisors, large operators can take advantage of private elastic cloud environments to scale SBC functions completely independently of dedicated hardware…