Category: News

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Riverbed Technology (RVBD) has released the results of a survey conducted at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference earlier this month. In surveying 122 people responsible for IT management and application development management at large enterprises, the company turned up some interesting data that shows the top four concerns related to public cloud platforms.

The top concern, as indicated by 90 percent of survey respondents, is reliability. But the other top three concerns aren’t all that far off in terms of percentage. Of the respondents, 88 percent indicated performance as a top concern, followed by security at 86 percent and cost at 84 percent…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Amy Bishop.

Cloud this and cloud that are on the lips of every IT professional. Beyond being an overhyped buzzword, cloud computing is a technology that’s innovating the way that many businesses, from startups to enterprises, handle their IT needs. Whether it’s specific applications or a complete infrastructure, cloud technology continues to transform the IT landscape.

What is the public cloud?

Businesses have a few different cloud options to choose from: Public cloud services are run through third-party providers, whereas the private cloud is controlled directly by the business itself and distributes computing resources within the company. It’s also possible to use a combination of both. The public cloud provides a cost advantage and an overhead advantage to businesses, since you don’t have to pay for equipment cost or maintenance. However, the disadvantage is that you don’t have direct access to the hardware or software. It’s hosted offsite at the cloud service’s facility, which can raise some security concerns…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

When it comes to raking in the money on cloud computing Amazon still "dwarfs all competition," writes John Dinsdale, an analyst at market researcher Synergy in a new report. The total cloud computing market hit $2.5 billion in revenue in Q3, up 46% the same quarter of 2012, Synergy found.

Not only did Amazon grab most of that, it grew its own cloud revenues by 55% and increased its overall market share. As for exactly how much money that is, Amazon doesn’t directly report the revenue it makes on its cloud. It lumps it into the "other revenue" category. Some analysts estimate Amazon will generate at least $3 billion from its cloud this year, and that could be low. In 2013 so far, Amazon reported $2.7 billion in "other" revenue…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Jason Hannula.

Mobile commerce has exploded in the last year. It is outpacing the growth of e-commerce by 200 percent, and 63 percent of people expect to shop via their smartphone in the next year, according to an infographic on NEXTlevel. Additionally, for users accessing e-commerce sites, mobile devices account for 48 percent of the time spent on the site by consumers. Constant connection to potential customers via their mobile device of choice offers significant opportunities for consumer marketing.

Cloud Containment

In a review conducted one year after the 2012 Forrester Research forecast for cloud computing, James Staten reported in ZDNet that the cloud had been predicted to be a natural partner to mobile commerce, but this has yet to play out as expected. Success has been found in utilizing or providing mobile back-end service layers, and these services handle both the elastic response required by mobile clients and the insulation of back office and data centers from traffic explosions associated with mobile engagement. Bypassing the mobile back-end service model has lead to poor performance for mobile end-user devices and the corporate back end…

Grazed from Virtual Bridges. Author: Editorial Staff.

New research from Virtual Bridges, Inc. reveals that the number of devices in the workplace is skyrocketing, changing the way people work and creating significant management and security challenges for IT professionals. Today, 80 percent of companies permit BYOD, with a majority employing VDI to manage the devices, including laptops, thin clients, iPads, tablets and more.

Conducted by Virtual Bridges, the study examines the growing use of personal devices in the workplace, including how they are used and what challenges IT professionals face in providing access to key applications while keeping the corporate perimeter secure. Findings from respondents point to a number of issues including:…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Cloud marketing has hit mainstream publications like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Open up your morning New York Times or Wall Street Journal and you may see the latest ad from a cloud computing company praising the virtues of their services. It’s the latest push by some vendors, including VMware, IBM and Pivotal, and it’s coming with some snarky fallout too.

Technology companies have long taken to traditional media outlets to pitch their products, but in recent weeks the back and forth between competitors seems to have ramped up. On the day that VMware and EMC launched Cloud Foundry, an open source platform as a service product, the company took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal announcing the move, which you can see here:..

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Almost half of all cloud computing projects are rated as being at least partially unsuccessful by internal or external auditors after launch. In two-thirds of all cases, benefits promised by the cloud migration were deemed real but not realized by the cloud project. To secure your own cloud benefits, establish explicit target benefits and link each target benefit to a specific step in the process, then audit benefit realization status at each project milestone and take prompt steps to record what you’ve promised. There will, however, be hurdles along the way.

Establishing target benefits

The biggest problem with benefit loss is lack of any organized benefit set. You can’t chase benefits you never really had under control, and control starts in the cloud project planning phase. A cloud computing project audit showed that projects that expended less than about 20% of their time in the planning phase were twice as likely to have benefit problems as those that spent 25% to 30% planning. Even though extensive planning and review seems to waste project time and opportunity, it pays off in accurate identification of costs and the creation of sound project controls to monitor critical assumptions…

Grazed from CivSource. Author: Editorial Staff.

Earlier this year, CivSource reported on a new Big Data research project at the University of Virgina. Now, the University of Texas San Antonio is getting into the mix with their own Big Data and Cloud lab. The lab will support the Open Compute Project (OCP) through cloud computing and big data research and development.

The laboratory will help the international business community improve their computing platforms through open-source hardware and cloud and big data technologies. The university laboratory will also train a pipeline of students for the workforce. The OCP is focused on making hardware cheaper and developing standards…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

ScaleXtreme is combining server management with enterprise cloud management in its new Advanced Cloud Management product, which is now in general availability but has been tested over the last few months in Fortune 500 companies. The new product was designed to be fully integrated with ScaleXtreme’s existing server management capabilities, which include server and application monitoring, patch management and job automation. It also includes a new workflow and orchestration system, autoscaling, multi-cloud management capabilities and cloud access control features.

Early customers have used the new product to deploy complex cloud-based applications and secure central IT control over public cloud deployments on the likes of Amazon (AMZN) Web Services (AWS), Terremark Enterprise Cloud and Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Azure…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

HP came out on top because of its breadth and depth of services for private clouds, while Cisco and Microsoft were also named leaders. Enterprises are expected to significantly ramp up their pursuit of internal private clouds within the next year and HP, Cisco and Microsoft have the strongest product offerings for those deployments, according to a new Wave report by research firm Forrester. According to a Forrester survey of more than 2,300 IT hardware buyers, about 55% of them said they plan to build an internal private cloud within the next 12 months; another 33% have already started.

The momentum represents the "next step along (the) virtualization journey," says Lauren Nelson, author of the report. "Over the past two years private cloud has shifted from concept to reality," she says. As organizations realize the benefits of private clouds, the market for products serving these deployments has intensified. Forrester evaluated almost 30 providers offering private cloud platforms, but took a deep dive into 10 of them. HP came out on top because of its breadth and depth of services for private clouds, while Cisco and Microsoft were also named leaders.