What’s missing from the cloud? An exit strategy.
You can get into the cloud, but do you have an exit strategy to get out?
Ninety percent of federal IT managers recently surveyed either say their agencies don’t have or report being unaware of whether their agencies have a cloud computing exit strategy, according to a survey commissioned by Quest Software Public Sector.
Agencies need a cloud exit strategy if they want to move their data or change cloud providers, government and industry experts say. To avoid vendor lock-in, there should be mechanisms for data exchange that encourage portability across platforms, they add.
Will cloud computing make traditional vendor relationships obsolete?
Network World has conducted multiple tests of cloud-based services over the past year, and our overarching conclusion is that shifting compute processes to the cloud can help companies save money and become more flexible.
IBM: Nearly Two-Thirds Of Global CIOs Ready For Cloud
Sixty percent of global CIOs are ready to embrace cloud computing over the next five years, IBM (NYSE:IBM) found in a recent CIO study. That’s double the number of organizations that were planning to leverage the cloud in the same study two years ago.
How to prepare for cloud outages
When Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) came to a juddering halt this April, the outage was traced to a data rerouting error made in a storage network in the US state of Virginia. The company explained the problem succinctly, "As with any complicated operational issue, this one was caused by several root causes interacting with one another."
SAP offers HANA cloud platform for in-memory applications
SAP is opening up a cloud-based platform for its HANA (High Performance Analytic Appliance) in-memory computing technology, enabling partners to develop applications that take advantage of its capabilities, the company announced.
"We believe the future of the cloud is in fact an in-memory cloud," said CTO and executive board member Vishal Sikka. The HANA application cloud is now in "pre-beta," he added. Other details, including a general availability date, weren’t immediately available.
Microsoft and SAP team to ease cloud deployments
Microsoft and SAP are configuring some of their cloud software products so that they work more easily together.
SAP will expose some of the functionality in its software so it can be readily harnessed within the Microsoft .Net platform as well as from the Microsoft Azure cloud computing service. These tweaks should speed development of .Net applications that interact with SAP programs, as well as make it easier to connect Azure cloud applications to internal SAP systems, the two companies said.
Move To Cloud Means Closer Look At Encryption, Experts Say
Following massive breaches recently at Sony’s PlayStation Network and email marketing firm Epsilon, cloud services users need to look closer look at data protection and encryption, security experts warn.
Information stored on Internet accessible servers, especially customer data or critical corporate data, needs to be properly protected by encryption — not just to satisfy industry and government regulations, but to protect the business, says John Considine, founder and CTO of CloudSwitch, which provides an encrypted software infrastructure to lock down data in the cloud.
TurnKey Internet launches TurnKey Cloud – Managed Cloud Solutions for Businesses
Web solutions provider TurnKey Internet today announced the launch of their new cloud service infrastructure, TurnKey Cloud, which provides scalable, reliable and cost-effective access to information technology anytime from anywhere. TurnKey Cloud enables businesses to reduce the need for expensive in-house staff, reduces infrastructure costs and moves complex IT infrastructure out of the office and into a green-friendly secure data center.
Marketing Industry Migrating to the Cloud
IBM announced today that it is seeing a growing adoption of IBM cloud services with a variety of its clients venturing into its enterprise marketing management services. IBM’s Global CIO Survey showed that 60 percent of chief information officers are preparing for cloud computing, which is double the interest level of two years ago.
"Companies are migrating to the cloud," observes Michelle Eichner, product management leader for IBM’s enterprise marketing management group. "It really helps open up the opportunity for companies to take advantage of what they wouldn’t otherwise consider."
On demand cloud computing solutions to take off worldwide
Businesses around the world are ready to embrace the benefits brought by on demand cloud computing solutions, according to an international survey completed by IBM.
A study of more than 3,000 chief information officers (CIOs) in companies around the world showed that 60 per cent were preparing to move to cloud computing technology over the next five years.
The figures almost doubles that from the same survey in 2009, when only a third of CIOs said they were thinking of turning to cloud computing.