Category: News

Grazed from CIO. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

Workday is expanding its cloud-based human resources and financial applications’ footprint with a new employee time-tracking module, the company announced Tuesday.

The new capabilities come as part of the SaaS (software as a service) vendor’s 17th release. Dubbed Workday Time Tracking, the module gives enterprises the ability to use "a single application to collect, process, and manage time and labor for their global workforce," Workday said in a statement.

It incorporates a calendar-style interface through which employees can submit information about their hours, as well as a "real-time calculation engine" that targets "critical data," such as overtime hours, Workday said…

Grazed from ITWire. Author: Beverley Head.

Established in the 1960s, ISACA (formerly known as the Information Systems Audit and Control Association) has released a guide to help organisations work out what the true return on investment will be from investments in the cloud.

According to the organisation there are hidden costs associated with cloud computing which need to be considered when assessing the benefits of cloud.

The guide which is available as a free download details a 12-step process that attempts to tackle the complexity of cloud computing and provide better insights regarding long-term costs and payback. It also makes the point that return on investment is not the only financial measure of success (or failure) and recommends organisations also consider calculating total cost of ownership, net present value and internal rate of return data before committing to a cloud investment…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higgenbotham.

Amazon has added a new cloud offering dubbed Glacier, where for less than a penny per gigabyte per month users can store files that aren’t accessed very often. The new product could put the hurt on backup and recovery offerings from other vendors.
glacier

In its never-ending quest to deliver new features to the Amazon Web Services product portfolio, the online retailer has added a new storage service designed for archival and backup storage. AWS Glacier is cheap, slow and Amazon hopes startups find it the prefect place to put files that aren’t accessed very often. And if it takes off it could become a problem for the existing backup and recovery business (which is often the first offering many smaller telco cloud providers launch to customers)…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Seth Bernstein.

Cloud computing is revolutionizing the companies’ infrastructures. More and more companies are spending their outsourcing budget on purchasing cloud services. This helps them avoid hiring more people and save a fair amount of funds from their budgets. Research firms (including Gartner Inc.) have published figures that demonstrate the trend of cloud computing services in the IT outsourcing market.

On August 7th, 2012, Gartner Inc. said that out of $251.7 billion of total market of IT outsourcing, cloud computing services are the fastest-growing segment, having increased from $3.4 (2011) to $5 (2012). Currently, this is still insignificant when compared with the $251.7 billion market, but we can hope to see them as the leading area of IT outsourcing because of their high growth rate. Let’s take a look at some of the factors that have made cloud computing services so popular in the IT outsourcing sector…

Grazed from Virtualization Review. Author: Doug Barney.

The cloud is getting more and more worthy of your applications every day. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect and that doesn’t mean you should necessarily trust it. I guess the question is, which network is less perfect, the cloud provider’s or yours?

These are issues Margaret Dawson tackled in Cloud Computing: Panacea or Power Monger on Enterprise Systems Journal. Dawson is a vice president with cloud provider Symform.

You should already understand your network’s weaknesses. Now let’s look at your provider’s presumed shortcomings…

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Despite headwinds in its core business, Dell is trying hard to move into the new world of corporate computing.

On Tuesday, the company said that Marius Haas, a well-regarded executive with a noted history at Hewlett-Packard, would take over Dell’s Enterprise Solutions business, which sells the servers, network, and storage equipment for big corporate data centers and cloud computing systems.

It is a future that can’t come fast enough: Mr. Haas’s position was announced along with Dell’s second-fiscal-quarter earnings. Dell had net income of $732 million, or 42 cents a share, on revenue of $14.5 billion…

The BIM9 lab consisted of four of their private BIM cloud servers driving 21 rented MacBook Pros. Each BIM9 private BIM cloud server hosted five virtual machines with each virtual machine running its own session of Revit. The MacBooks were connected to these virtual machines with a standard RDP client. The result was a student experience of running Revit on high-powered workstations even though they were actually sitting at old, underpowered MAC laptops.

BIM9 has been developing and deploying private BIM clouds for clients throughout North America and Hawaii for a little over a year. “Although we had previously created private BIM clouds for classrooms this was the first time we did it for a conference lab,” said Lonnie Cumpton Business Development Manager and Co-founder of BIM9.

Grazed from Channelnomics. Author: Chris Gonsalves.

If it’s Tuesday, it must be time for another cloud computing survey telling us how cloud adoption rates continue to skyrocket.

Yes, businesses of all sizes and types covet the cloud for its ability to slash IT costs, introduce speedy services and make systems scalable and flexible. If researchers thought to ask, there would likely be data showing that the cloud can reduce wrinkles, trim ugly fat and raise the IQ level of the average CIO.

How hard could this really be? Cloud computing practically sells itself, right? Turns out, it’s tougher than it looks. For a technology that’s been dubbed the most important and disruptive of its generation, the cloud comes with more disclaimers than a frequent flyer program, and more caveats than the Irish Sweepstakes. Even the most optimistic surveys end with a “but” or “however” that takes some of the starch out of the whole happy affair. If cloud computing were a car, it would be a Toyota Celica with a rocket engine, handlebars, bicycle brakes – but no seat belts. Sure, it’s fast, but … Yeah, it’s cheap, but … Try selling that to one of your loyal customers…

Grazed from Government Health IT. Author: Kim Lee.

The “cloud” (in computing) is not a new concept. If you use web-based e-mail, then you probably are tapping into the “cloud,” because the remotely hosted application and information are pushed to you “on demand” based upon your needs. For a more expansive definition of cloud computing, please see the National Institute of Standards’ definition (NIST Special Publication No. 800-145).

Healthcare providers are also turning to the cloud to remotely host their applications and data. Their reasons for doing this are generally to save money and/or to help ensure data is secure and available…