Author: David

SuperValu Inc. operates more than 2,500 retail locations nationwide. A vast amount of personal customer information flows through its systems, and high on its list of IT priorities is securing identity and access management. For now, a private cloud, or internal cloud, appears to be the safest bet for managing personal data. Identity management in the public cloud isn’t out of the question, Phillip Black, senior manager of identity services at the Minneapolis-based retail grocery chain, told SearchCIO.com. It also would be cheaper than building a private cloud; but given regulatory concerns, he is leaning toward a hybrid cloud as the optimal approach…

Here’s a new one: When you think of cloud computing and virtualization and contemplating whether you should jump in or not, do you ever think about real estate?

Forrester (News – Alert) Research has published a report titled, “Build or Buy? The Economics of Data Center Facilities,” that looks at “current trends including power and cooling considerations, the consolidation/virtualization movement, and modular data center design,” according to this Carousel Connect blog…

Virtual Bridges, Inc. and Savvis, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, today announced a partnership to deliver Virtual Bridges VERDE™ virtual desktop management and provisioning capabilities as an on-demand solution to organizations worldwide. Featuring online, offline and branch VDI, VERDE is proven to help organizations reduce the cost and complexity of managing desktops, while minimizing security concerns and business risk…

Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term "cloud computing" was coined. That same year, the first Cloud Expo took place in New York City with 450 delegates. This coming November 7-10, 2011, Cloud Expo is returning to Santa Clara with more than 5,000 delegates and over 100 sponsors and exhibitors.

"Cloud" has become synonymous with "computing" and "software" in two short years. Cloud Expo is the new PC Expo, Comdex, and InternetWorld of our decade. By 2012, more than 50,000 delegates per year will participate in Cloud Expo worldwide…

Logicalis, an international provider of integrated information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and services, announced today that it has opened two Cloud Centers of Excellence based on the HP CloudSystem Matrix – one in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and the other in Irvine, California…

Very few enterprises that are adopting cloud applications and infrastructure are giving enough thought to governance. The result is a mish-mash of SaaS silos and cloud islands, with very little attention paid to data consistency and integration, and even less to policy management and oversight. This is bad enough in organisations that run all their operations in the cloud, but most enterprises are not in that happy space. The vast majority have to manage a hybrid infrastructure that encompasses large swathes of existing on-premise IT assets along with a swelling population of SaaS applications and a handful of cloud infrastructure initiatives…

I’ve been advising enterprises to put a strategy in place that looks something like the schematic above, which comes from a webinar I presented on Focus.com back in April (unfortunately the webinar is now offline). Developing a strategy along these lines at least forces you to start thinking about the issues — such as how to extend access policies from the existing enterprise infrastructure out to cloud applications; how to automate other aspects of policy management; and how to manage connections between applications, data and other resources…

If you believe some vendors, a cloud computing strategy is as simple as turning on a service remotely — a cloud in 30 days. It’s more likely, however, to be three to five years before all the underlying governance, infrastructure and new service delivery models are put into place for a cloud computing strategy, said enterprise IT executives at the recent Gartner Catalyst Conference in San Diego…

CumuLogic is releasing a beta version of software that lets enterprises build a private platform-as-a-service cloud for running Java applications.

The software, which CumuLogic says will help companies reduce costs associated with managing the underlying infrastructure of their private clouds, works on clouds running Cloud.com, Eucalyptus and VMware. CumuLogic is working on compatibility with OpenStack…